News from Jaap.....

I spoke to Stefano and he said I could go talk about the progress in order to inform you guys here in the community, so here we go

In the past weeks, a lot of things happened and big progress was made. As probably known Stefano and his team focused on fixing the multiplayer engine. GPChampionship.com was asked by the nKP team to support the nKP team on its way to the release of the new 1.0.2 version of nKPro by testing the fixed bugs properly, under different conditions and with full field testing. Real proper testing for nKPro.

So, that happened. In the past weeks version after version were released to the test team. Every time small multiplayer bugs were fixed. New possible fixes were distributed to GPC and tested. In the beginning, things didn't seem to progress that much. Especially the syncing bug was a bastard. It took several versions, but it kept returning. Then, Stefano found it and it was fixed. No more 'cars still in qualifying while the race was already started'. No more people getting no 'go to grid button'. Always fast syncing for all clients

Especially in the past 5 days, things were going forward like crazy. The beta test team was stunned by Stefano working pace. He was really flying - fixing bugs as soon as we reported them. We worked all weekend long on getting it right before Stefano left for a well-deserved time off. Stefano himself worked almost 24*7 and the beta test team was testing every day to verify if the fixes really worked. It's obvious that the nKP team is dedicated to make nKP better for its clients.

v1.0.02 Testing was finished last night. Even yesterday, the infamous 'jumpstart bug' and various replay bugs were fixed. Replays can be viewed properly now.

Really - v1.0.2 will be a huge step forwards for nKP in terms of multiplayer racing. The main voices from the test team were: "this is what I paid for", "this is how multiplayer is supposed to work".

All in all, it were very productive weeks. The objective of v1.0.2 for the nKP devteam always was to fix the multiplayer experience and it's great to say that the multiplayer system really is working well now.

We as test team verified it and the main and frustrating multiplayer bugs are gone now which should allow both league and public pick-up racing to really kick off and get going

Of course, there always remain things that we'd like to see changed and/or improved, but that's the case in any software package. Don't expect to see a "perfect" nKPro with v1.0.2, but instead expect a decent multiplayer experience with v1.0.2 compared to v1.0.1. Time is always a restriction.

An example of something that still needs attention is the FPS issue. FPS drops still occur, but at least the nKP team managed to increase FPS a bit. However, on low-end machines, FPS drops still cause issues. Any recent machine won't get in FPS trouble though.

The great thing is that v1.0.2 will provide a solid multiplayer experience that allows focusing on adding new content now.

The new version is ready now (in terms of fixes). It will be a full new installation. The test team is testing the Release Candidate of nKP v1.0.2 this week and it is scheduled to be released by the nKP team next week (precise date not known yet).

Hope this give you all some idea of what has happened and what can be expected from v1.0.2 If you have questions, just let me know.
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Jaap Wagenvoort