VARO News Week of 041904

I would give a race recap but I was so miffed at myself for having for running out of gas in the third heat race after smoking he competition. I have forgotten what else happened the rest of the evening. If you are looking for race results please visit the webpage all results are posted and are up to date.

Important News
Teamspeak is out! Yea we finally tracked down the lag and its in my prized Teamspeak, I know I defended Teamspeak and it is a superior product to most but when used with FlightSIm to race online it shows its tendency to hog bandwidth and as close and fast as we fly our aircraft it becomes an issues and Flightsim runs out of bandwidth. So what now, well last week we experimented with logging out of TS while a race was going on and then loggin back in after we had all landed. This seemed to work well with a couple exceptions. Maple One has also pointed me to a shareware product that may meet out needs be we need to test it. The last option which I dread is going back to Roger Wilco, I know its tried and true it works but the lack of options and the quality is suspect. I will keep everyone posted on what happens.

Other News
KDVT Files our out. I have an updated course out there along with the transponder file. If anyone has problems with the file please let me KNOW ASAP. So that means test the program before you come to race on saturday. We have been using the transponder a lot lately to verify close finishes or finishes where lag may have been an issue.

Development News
Transponder release version is rolling along, I do regret to say without some major coding I am NOT going to be able to put the file into the kneeboard at least in fs2002, Fs2004 uses an .html base so I may be able to get something working there but no luck in 2002 even after we played with the aircraft.cfg files. SO what does this mean well I am going to be building a pop up window that will have all the important info preformated to copy and past right into the flight sim chat window. As soon as I get this feature coded I will be releasing an OPTIONAL beta of the new interface. It works just like the old one when it comes to lap timing and counting the main difference is a slimmed down interface and hopefully it will be more memory efficent.

VARO Racer Vol 2 "Legends"
Well work as been slow since the season started but now that we are up and running and I know what the work load is going to be(I can put together a course in about a week now) I can get back to work on VOL 2 which will be release this summer for the Fall racing season. I currently have the Pond Racer pretty much ready to have its flight model built and then off to the paint shop. Tsunami has been settin gon my harddrive for a while all I have to do is add the gear and send it off to get painted and its flight model build. Red Barron is going to be a bit more difficult, since I don't have anything started on it it will probably take me a few weeks to get it around. So good news for the VARO Racer.

Courses
I am currently looking into building a couple more courses and add them to the schedule for our Fall season. I have the option to either extending the season or replacing a couple of existing courses. I will post a poll in the forum to get everyones decision.

Polls
I have started a new poll in the forum about online practices. Polls are kinda new to VARO but what I and the Race Committee are going to make decisions for VARO based on these polls. VARO is going to be run by the pilots as much as possible however be warned these polls are not official they are just a guide to help the Committee make decisions. For those of you in the committee I am going to be posting polls in the committee board that will be official rulings for the next racing season. Only committee members will have access to these polls and they will lead to definent changes in VARO. Expect those polls to start showing up soon. and VARO committee members if you do not know the access password to the forum please let me know and I will get that to you.

Well thats about it, hope to see everyone at KDVT this saturday for Round 2 of VARO Air Racing.