I think the lag last night might have been just unlucky more than anything, the last race I ran in (was driving the black Silvia with blue wheels) had 15 people cars running in it and didn't seem too laggy to me. Was a very close race too with a couple of groups of 3-5 cars all jostling for positions for most of the race.
Maybe we can get some practice runs during the week on an off night or something to test out stability.
I don't think so. If you think about what a peer-to-peer networked game like that has to do ... the more players, the more packets that have to be sent simultaneously and received simultaneously. Your experience and mine out there were quite different. I would only see 6 cars on the track ... when there were 16. I saw cars mysteriously parked in the middle of the raceway, facing backwards that would then just disappear. I saw several drivers get disconnected. I saw cars floating in the air. And then, once I got disconnected myself, I was never able to reconnect. LOL. So on a scale of 1 to 10, I give 16 drivers with audio a 1.
Here's where I have to give credit to those guys at the TPRA. They do a lot of testing so that when they have a race, they don't have these issues. They have known hosts that, through experimentation, know how many concurrent drivers they can handle. They don't use the in-game audio communications. They instead have everyone connect via TeamSpeak, thus allowing the maximum number of drivers without incident. Just food for thought.
Swerve's a member here now. Maybe he can speak about their process in more detail.
MS