Race fans had a real treat this weekend , as 7 racers ran the Deneb run . and what a race it was ......

On the starting grid 7 pilots:
Toshiro
Drazed
Shanis Tolis
Katrina Le -Fier
Dinatious
Geshard Thawn
Mick
The ancient Miner had a serious problem typing fast enough to keep up with a really close race , but all 7 racers entertained the universe and all 7 finished .
Kat flew a superb race winning by a short lead , with only 15% hull after an encounter with a pirate in the Bractus corridor .
Mick flew in second , and Toshiro docked for third about a 100m ahead of drazed . Shanis , Gesard and Dinatius a little behind , but finishing the Run deserves much praise .

Congrats to Kat , who scooped the 2 million Cr prize

ecka

Lemme get my machine up to 2 gigs in RAM so I can take advantage of precaching, like Katrina does.

I only have 756MB of ram and use Pre-Caching with no problems... Didn't help for the race though, I hit 2 storms early on (even though I was trying to jump around roids), the first was a 11000m exit point storm, the second a 7000m one. That pretty much put me out of the race, though I managed to catchup to Toshiro near the end of Itani space...

System Spec,

AMD64 3700+ (San Diego Core, the one with 1MB of cache)
756MB ram
NVidia Geforce 6500, 256MB
gentoo64, with enlightenment DR-17

VO uses about 20% of my ram without the pre-caching, 40% with

EDIT: the rest of my system uses less than 10-15% unless I have lots of stuff open ;)

Yeah, I hit a few storms in the end... I should plot more conservatively.

I think Katrina did not profit so much from pre-caching as she did from plotting wisely.
You can decrease the distances you have to travel within a sector by making 'U-turns' and such before wormholes, it will put you at different jump-in locations. At least that's what I have observed, but I did not scrutinize it scientifically.

So... congratulations to Katrina for a great race.

Thanks everybody.

I just applied methodically the lessons of my master, Mick.

In particular, I think it was critical to scout the entire greyspace ahead of the race. I dodged the first infinite Sedina F7 storm by knowing it was there, and there I probably won my race. Going around storms in Itani space made the difference later on, but any racer should learn about the most stormy systems as early as possible.

Having the lead, I knew I had to dodge the pirates, and scout for the rest of the group (I hope my reports were useful), and approach WH's in infested sectors from weird angles, to avoid flares and rails, while keeping high speeds at jump animations.

Precaching is wonderful - I love it. But what about restricting it, if not everybody can take advantage of it? I mean, next run, either everyone can use precaching, or we should all turn it off, to provide an honorable, levelled play field.

Thanks EE for hosting, and congrats to all the runners for finishing the lap in one piece.

The problem is that whether or not someone pre-caches can not be verified except upon action. And even then, it's difficult to prove, much like aimbots in Halo: CE. We had a similar problem when the instant jump-bug was present with some of the beta-UI releases.

Read the thread from Run #78 or #77, when last she raced. She IS benefiting from pre-caching, she said so herself.

I know Vendetta crashes my entire computer (requiring a restart) when I use precaching.

Precaching helps with the run immensely. Considering, in particular, that you'd be visiting 23 systems, and you have most of the data (think backgrounds!) already in memory, not having to load it from disk.

That's the reason for my proposal to "kindly ask" every honorable racer to turn it off, if some runners can't use it. I know I would, even if it means never winning again, against more skilled/experienced competitors. And even if I'd be the only one disabling precaching, who cares. I'm here to have fun (and I had), not to win.

/me shakes his fist

I'll be back soon! There must be order in the race com munity, with me on top :P