SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: GTR: FIA GT Racing

They've fixed it. No they haven't. Now they've fixed it. Or have they? A question mark still hangs over the multiplayer aspect of GTR. Leagues are still debating if the multiplayer code is sufficient and contains the amount of ruggedness required to run large fields over the Internet. I've seen one national league that clearly states that a minimum upload speed of 128 kbps is preferred.

Certainly the hosting of lag-free races with large fields in GTR, up to 56 cars as has been claimed as the maximum number, will require a huge amount of bandwidth in the connection. Apparently aiming for about 10 - 15 cars is more realistic on connections between 384 and 512MB/s. These figures are according to estimates on some forums, and seem to be verified by SimHQ's guod, who has successfully hosted races for 9 drivers on his cable broadband and AMD 2700+ / 9700 PRO / 512MB RAM machine.

With my 64 kbps I had no issues in connecting to one of the 10Tacle servers that are up in the multiplayer lobby. In reality, I feel it is not feasible for me to enter a league with only 64 kbps at my disposal. On basis of our testing we find that there are indications that the mulitplayer code may well be superior to that of NASCAR Sim Racing, but still not nearly as good as the Papyrus multiplayer code found in NASCAR Racing 2003 Season.

The RaceMore web site has been launched in a beta version as a place for racers to meet and to participate in or host races, and it acts as an organized infrastructure in supplement to the more traditional ways of organizing leagues. RaceMore offers the promise of providing a common web-space for sim racers along the lines of FILSCA; sanctioning and organizing championships. At the time of writing it looks as if RaceMore will bypass the multiplayer lobby. If this has any consequences in terms of improving the multiplayer aspect of GTR remains to be seen. The lobby has been reported by some to be troublesome at times, during testing and post patch 1.4.00, SimHQ did not experience any trouble. The read-me for GTR version 1.4.0.0 does mention the fact that RaceMore will have high-end, low-ping servers. It is worth noting that once RaceMore is out of beta and declared fully operational, using some of the features provided is going to cost a subscription fee. It is also worth noting that basic access to RacMore and a limited set of features is going to remain free of cost. It will still be possible to meet and race via RaceMore for no fee.

A dedicated server has also been released so it will be possible to set up your server on one machine and race on the other. One nice thing with the dedicated server software is that it will run on a non-DirectX machine.

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