30.12.2023   Category: Site news

Much to my disappointment and regret I had to cancel the Race of Champions multi-player events due to totally unforseen issues with our multi-player setup in the VRC office. Multi-player has never been an issue but apparently some recent changes to the firewall configuration has caused the multiplayer connection to fail completely, both inbound as outbound. The firewall expert unfortunately was not available on Friday and together with another developer we have tried all Friday afternoon to locate the issue and solve the problem, but without success. The firewall is a proprietary piece of software built in 2010 and regularly maintained and updated and has never failed me since.

What I learned from this is to test the fundamentals before you organize anything. It was without a doubt that multi-player would work as usual and I therefore never even considered testing it. It would have saved me a lot of time and hassle. Another thing I learned from it is that easy and fast communication with multi-player participants is absolutely essential to organize such events. We had started around 2014 to develop a structure for such multi-player events but it never turned into a serious development project and was abandoned.

The only good thing of this Race of Champions effort is that I came to realize that multi-player surely is a great feature and unfortunately greatly undervalued in VRC, but it surely needs a well thought-out structure that can be used by VRC club owners to organize their own multi-player events so they can be hosted simply and locally to avoid time zone issues. To do a project like the Race of Champions, time zone differences make it almost impossible for racers from all over the world to participate unless you are willing to race either very late at night or very early in the morning. And this also applies to the organizer to host these sessions!

I have committed myself to give this idea another chance in 2024 and will start with re-thinking the whole structure and discuss this with my developers. It will be a major development job and probably requires us to implement the latest Raknet communication libraries. Easy and fast communication between the multi-player race organizer and the participants is essential in order to successfully organize a multi-player event. The in-game chat needs to be redesigned to support such communications. I envisage all participants of a multi-player event to be present in a closed 'event chat group' with automatic sub-chat groups for each multi-player session. The session to be manually started from the session chat group by the organizer, only the racers in that group will then have access to that multi-player session avoiding the need to exchange session passwords.

Yes, we will still need multi-player organizers and sessions will have to be started manually by the organizer as our multi-player is based on a so called 'peer-to-peer' structure. We don't have and will never have this fully automated, that's totally beyond the limits of the VRC platform. If the multi-player structure is right it should be possible to organize a multi-player event in 2 or 3 hours or so, making it very feasible for VRC club owners to frequently organize multi-player events.


I wish you and your dear ones a happy and prosperous 2024!

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