Papyrus engineer Randy Cassidy has found a fix for the disconnects frequently encountered in GPL when racing online. You can download a small program here or from Papyrus which will apply the fix to your GPL 1.2.0.1, even if you've already applied other patches such as Nigel Pattensen's sound patch.
Testing suggests that this fix significantly reduces disconnects when used on either the GPL server or GPL client, and even more when used on both. Involuntary disconnection was the one remaining major headache when racing GPL online, and this fix addresses this problem very effectively.
It's best to have the fix on the server and all clients. All clients will benefit if the fix is on the server.
Each client who has the fix installed will also benefit, even if the fix is not present on the server. The most benefit for a given client occurs when both the server and that client have the fix.
Clients who do not have the fix will not affect clients who do; clients with the fix will benefit from improved connections even if other clients do not have the fix.
In testing, some clients who connected to servers with which they had very poor connections (lots of L/Q/S meter activity and many remote car wink-outs) found that the server stopped scoring them after a few laps, or did not score them at all.
Also, some people found that they disconnected once shortly after joining practice but after rejoining, the connection was stable.
It appears that the fix will not resolve all problems with truly atrocious connections, but it seems to make a very noticeable improvement when there are occasional or intermittent connection problems.
From the Papyrus GPL download page:
This is an unsupported beta patch that should significantly reduce disconnects when running multiplayer races in GPL. To use the patch...
1) Download the gpldiscofix.exe program (~32Kbytes) and save it in your GPL folder (for example, c:\sierra\gpl). This program can be used to patch all versions of GPL 1.2.0.1.
2) Open a Windows Explorer and navigate to your GPL folder.
3) Make sure your gpl.exe program is writable (right click on in the GPL program icon in your GPL folder, select "Properties", and make sure the "Read-only" box is _not_ checked).
4) Drag your GPL program (gpl.exe) onto the gpldiscofix program's icon. Make sure you drag the GPL program itself, and not a shortcut to the GPL program (a shortcut generally has a crooked arrow in the lower left).
That's it! You will notice that gpldiscofix has created a backup copy of your GPL program (gpl.exe_save).
You can download gpldiscofix in two forms, either as an executable program which you can place directly in your GPL folder, or as a zip archive containing the program. If you download the latter, you'll need WinZip or some similar utility to extract the program from the zip archive.
- gpldiscofix.exe - 32 kb (32,768 bytes)
- gpldiscofix.zip - 15 kb (zipped archive with the same file)