Hello... i have a question that i've been meaning to ask for a while now.

i have a local LAN server wich i use to host our local races (we race only via lan).

What kind of network device should i have? i mean... there is a gigabit adapter on the motherboard, but i think it won't do the job, since last time we attempted a 8 client race with 2 (player and ai) racers per client, some of the clients were jumping from side o side just like in an internet host.

take account that it's very slight... we are just too used to have very very very smooth gameplay unless the car is damaged... and i don't like to play on internet much for this reason, i can't stand not being able to take 1 or two turns at cms of my opponent in a single seater... it makes overtaking, a thing of luck sometimes. we are also used to tight 1st turns with 4 or 5 cars touching between each others without causing a major lag accident (being shot at high speed out of the track due to latency car relocation), thing that i've seen it's quite common on internet servers.

i just want to have the smoothest gameplay that i could get out of LFS... i've seen some gaming ethernet boards with packet administration and stuff... would LFS benefit of having advanced server and client ethernet hardware?

Quote from vf1-xj220 :

i just want to have the smoothest gameplay that i could get out of LFS... i've seen some gaming ethernet boards with packet administration and stuff... would LFS benefit of having advanced server and client ethernet hardware?

No. The LFS dedicated server will run on any old machine (seriously, anything from 400MHz up), and will easily run on a 100Mb/s LAN (don't forget that if you only connect at 10Mbit/s having a Gb card will make no difference).

I'd check all your cabling to see if theres any trouble with it, such as damaged, interferance, etc. being run with power cabling, whether you've exceeded the distance for your category of cabling, etc. I'd also check for packet loss, etc. incase theres nothing obvious.

I'd also try hosting without AI. Running AI is very demanding, and if you were using a low power host to run the AI you would get choppy behaviour.

yea it works fine, i just don't want the cars to move off their line when i get 10 clients at the end of the year.

our host is a spectator also where we can review races live while the racers are on the track... it's an 3700+ AMD64 with 2gb's of ram using Nforce4 SLI... we are using the Marvell Gigabit adaper that comes onboard, the switch is a 24 port gigabit (Basic non administrable D-link tho), ethernet cables are shielded cat6, the worst part would be that they run at 4cms along 6 shielded VGA cords that are used to control the clients.

i'm telling you, we are VERY VERY VERY used to extreme smooth gameplay... i just want to know what do i need to keep that even till 20 clients. (BTW... clients are even bigger rigs than the server)

Try turning the PPS (Packets Per Second / Smoothness) on the host upto 6. Thats as high as it goes and makes the server send packets out every 1/6th of a second. As for the rest of what you've got, it should be fine (obviously) for over the maximum number of players that LFS can support right now.