MULTIPLAYER The multiplayer doors (start to) open today!

Uh maybe you guys calm down a bit.. You made your points clear and it doesn't look like you are going to convinces somebody else by repeating yourselves.

In general: As Panky said, this is a whole system rebuilt from scratch exposed to the public usage for the very first time. It doesn't matter what you do during your testing efforts before, you will always face different situations, combinations and so on, resulting in new information (and sadly issues on your side). Often it is a small detail that is easily changed, but has huge impact on the experience. Some things are tough to discover or even reproduce.
We are on our toes to understand, sort out and fix one by one.

Although we chose to keep working instead of browing the forums and keep replying to all the posts: Thank you for all the feeback, both the good and the bad are very helpful and highly appreciated.
Fightings about opinion obviously are just adding more text to read, making the useful posts less visible. If you want to contribute, please also focus on details, examples and precise description; just a "XY sucks", but also "XY feels great" is a very rough indication of subjective perception without much value for the progess and improvements.

What I don't really get is the quite hostile way some users report missing features. Just to be very clear: At the moment, the priority is on getting the core MP running as good as possible; the whole infrastructure, lobby, server, stability, netcode and so on - everything that is required for a good driving experience. Without those "basics", we could have the most fancy selection boxes in the UI, and it wouldn't improve anything.
So if there is something not there yet, it is not because we decided it's a good idea not to have a search box for example. It is because we are early in the process, and try to build a good MP system before we add such features. This is a natural process and would be similar even if we didn't have two MP releases on the roadmap.

We are evaluating different strategies how the server works in terms of CPU usage and the corresponding quality of the netcode. Can't promise how this is eventually ending up, but at the moment it looks like we have the best combination result with a very low CPU occupancy in idle mode. We will need to see how this turns in the wild and on many different hardware configrations though.
Still expect the next server version (whenever it is going live) to be a lot more graceful to the CPU .

While technically most probably possible, we focus on windows servers only for the moment. No promise for the future, but when the time comes we will look into this.
Atm it looks like one guy is running the accServer.exe via WINE quite successfully, maybe this is a intermediate solution for you.

This is not the requirement, but the indication for SA and RC (well "competitive" will always mean more, but for the moment we can use RC as figure) on this server looking at the last minutes.
The idea is that you can see how a server is like by just clicking it; does it have comparably high numbers of accidents? Or the opposite, few accidents but extreme numbers of Trust generated (which is probably the perfect situation for public pickup racing?
Competition looks at the other drivers on that server and tells you how their competitive ratings compare to you (RC, PC, CP, some other data). If the number is high, you will find more than one worthy opponent. If the number is low, many or all drivers are considerably quicker or slower than you. And yes, the competition indicator is something personal, everyone will see different numbers.

I'm placing the binaries in one folder, configurations in others and just use a shortcut pointing to the binaries, with working direction to each cfg folder (actually the root, like servers/01 - where we have servers/01/cfg and /log).
So you can run many servers with only one binary.

 

Ah and I also forgot to add why you probably always see 0 and -1: There is a tiny bug that was solved quite early, but already in a version of the backend systems that isn't compatible to the current accServers out there.
So I have to wait until we can bring the next set of current client, server and backend systems in the corresponding version.