The online racing simulator
I noticed with B10 that when you are in hotlap mode, if you pit in, when out of setup screen you do not restart the lap as it was the case before, you are in the pit and recording is no more active (normal behaviour).
Thank you for the testing and comments. I'll be back on the case tomorrow.
Quote from matrxs :In connection to working with InSim features, is there any chance to see client's IP via InSim in near future (official patch of this test patch)? In IN_NCN, for example. This would be very useful.

That's one of the most asked questions for the last years.
We already got incompatible changes in LFS, so that's likely the best chance for years to finally see this implemented.
Unsure if it is just me that has noticed this, but contact with a high latency user is a lot more dangerous now than it used to be.

My latency was 0.06-0.07 and his was close to 0.5.

He now jutters around the track a lot more than he used to, and contact with him now is just awful! Even the slightest of brushes sends me flying (quite literally)
Quote from Krammeh :Unsure if it is just me that has noticed this, but contact with a high latency user is a lot more dangerous now than it used to be.

My latency was 0.06-0.07 and his was close to 0.5.

He now jutters around the track a lot more than he used to, and contact with him now is just awful! Even the slightest of brushes sends me flying (quite literally)

True, we suffered this on a league race yesterday. A brush and suddelnly 3 people are flying.

During the whole week we've been seeing how the cars don't have a fluid movement, they are constantly jumping and sometimes cars appears to go on the gravel/walls and then recover they real position.


Plus some bugs I'll report later.
Quote from Whiskey :

During the whole week we've been seeing how the cars don't have a fluid movement, they are constantly jumping and sometimes cars appears to go on the gravel/walls and then recover they real position.

And this is annoying. For example, I was trying to overtake a car, which turned right, directly into me. I did brake to avoid contact, and then I see him teleporting some meters in front, so he actually never turned into me. Just a braking can make you a loss of few seconds, or in many drivers race like cargame - you can loose some positions and even cause accident.
About the last 3 posts, I really have serious doubts about this. I think you are seeing a problem that has always been there, and supposing that it is because of the new patch.

You see a player with a high latency, e.g. one from Australia playing on a European server, and you are noticing the symptom that the car can be left and right or all over the place.

So what is the surprise? Nothing, you are just describing the symptoms of a high ping, typically seen when someone connects to a server that is too far away.
Quote from Scawen :So what is the surprise? Nothing, you are just describing the symptoms of a high ping, typically seen when someone connects to a server that is too far away.

Sorry, but that's not the case.

0.6B, 4 servers, 40 players (every one of them in Spain), no issues.
0.6B9 & 10, 4 servers, 40 players, good ping reported by LFS (less than 0.1 all the time for everyone), stuttering everywhere.

I can send you replays of our race yesterday so you can see the problem.
Do you have any figures for the numbers over the cars, as seen on a computer where you are seeing a lot of left to right glitching? That is the number that should describe how much glitching you see on your computer.

Obviously I am completely wrong sometimes, but I'll need some scientific convincing on this one, as I can't see any reason why glitching would be worse if the overhead car numbers are the same, unless I changed the physics, but all hotlaps still work so that means I didn't change the physics.

Remember that sometimes you can install a new patch, and the same day there are internet problems. So the person who installed the patch and has internet problems is then convinced that the problem is the patch. We do often get this at patch times.
I know, we had problems for 2 days on B9, then updated to B10 and the problem persisted. As many mates complained the problem is either at our hosting or in LFS itself, either way I hope to find the cause & solution.

I'll do some tests with network debug enabled to be able to tell you the exact ping figures.
Scawen, yesterday I sent you mail can you please check it
This is someone that I drive very regular with! Although it could be just that his connection is worse than normal as of late.

I will do a close race with him on B and a close race with him on B10 right after each other and we'll see what happens. I will upload both replays if that helps at all?
Quote from Whiskey :I know, we had problems for 2 days on B9, then updated to B10 and the problem persisted. As many mates complained the problem is either at our hosting or in LFS itself, either way I hope to find the cause & solution.

I'll do some tests with network debug enabled to be able to tell you the exact ping figures.

Quote from Krammeh :This is someone that I drive very regular with! Although it could be just that his connection is worse than normal as of late.

I will do a close race with him on B and a close race with him on B10 right after each other and we'll see what happens. I will upload both replays if that helps at all?

Thank you Whiskey and Krammeh, for trying to examine this closely. I'm interested to hear what you find when you do the comparative tests. I'm not sure that a replay would help, because you might not see the jumping in the replay, as there is no latency in an MPR. The glitching in an MPR is only due to the time interval between position packets, without the transmission delay added to that. However, if a B10 MPR looked significantly worse than a pre-B9 MPR, that could indicate missing position packets, which is the only other thing I can think of that would cause cars to glitch worse than usual.

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :Scawen, yesterday I sent you mail can you please check it

Hi Daniel. Don't worry, I check my mail several times a day. I have added your comment to some notes. It is a good find - thank you for for that. I'm going to see what I can do.

But I don't really want to reply to forum posts or emails just to say that I have read them. I just want to reply if I need more information or after investigating, when I have something more interesting to say.

I understand it may seem rude that I don't reply to posts that people have made, it may look like I'm ignoring them. But I'm reading and noting every post. If I did reply to every post then there would be loads of posts from me through the test patch thread saying "thanks, I've added it to my notes" and that would be a form of spam by me that would make the thread harder to read.
Packet Loss
Just a thought, if you are running Airio on the servers you are testing this on.

If you type !pl after you have been on track for a minute or so it gives you a value for packet loss in % for each player on track.

I have no idea how accurate this is but whenever I see a very glitchy player they usually have 0.5% Pacekt loss or more, as displayed by the !pl command.
Quote from Krammeh :This is someone that I drive very regular with!

Shannon (failure) from NZ? He was just on our S2 server, used him as a test object and for me its really hard to tell the difference. Lag hits/crashes are just as bad as before I would say (0.5).

Also madcow was on, he is from AUS.. Went a little bit better, his line is a bit more stable (0.3) but hmm a <B9 versus B10 test would be ultimate I guess.

* Btw: those "TCP AV : InitTime += 1" messages spamming the chat, is that really necessary during shift-F8 mode? Its a bit distracting during driving and I wonder if somebody knows what its trying to say anyway. I have no idea.

.
On the server (my the dedi server) there is no one, but shows this message.
Nov 06 18:43:06 New guest timed out (1)
Quote from cargame.nl :
* Btw: those "TCP AV : InitTime += 1" messages spamming the chat, is that really necessary during shift-F8 mode? Its a bit distracting during driving and I wonder if somebody knows what its trying to say anyway. I have no idea.
.

AFAIK this is LFS telling you that it had to compensate for a clock speed difference on your computer.
B11 (compatible) this evening
I've made a small change which could possibly improve the apparent car lagging.

Although we don't have scientific results for it, and without thinking too hard about it, I just thought I'd try this small change, which is to send the cached multiplayer packets after the packet receive but before the physics loop and graphics draw. The idea is to send most packets, including the timing packets, more promptly.

It seems to result in lower apparent ping times, so it may keep the guests more accurately in time with the host. Though I have no real reason to think that car lagging will be improved by this, it is possible.

To implement some better cheat protection, we'll need to test an incompatible patch, but this version is still compatible so I think it would be a good idea to release a compatible B11 this evening.

EDIT :

Other changes :

Ping / lag time now shown in ms when less than 1 second
Ping / lag time is now also shown in game setup screen

Fixes :

In B10 hotlapping did not restart after leaving the pits
Quote from chucknorris :Other thing: The new lag numbers beside he names are really nice.They certainly require a range of button-ids, but could these cause any interferences with Insim apps? I noticed (on <=B versions), if a certain button-id is used by the insim-app, the shift+u interface from lfs suddenly disappears.

InSim button ids are not used for the internal LFS buttons, so there is no conflict. The lag numbers are only taking up space previous used by wider user name buttons so there is no conflict problem.

I don't think the shift+u interface should disappear when a certain id is used. I guess it disappears when an InSim button is placed outside the "recommended area".

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :when I connect to server localy (host running on same PC), I get ping on that new lag bar about 0.05-0.1, shouldn't it be almost all time 0.00 ?

Please try again with this evening's version.

Quote from edge3147 :When is this object bug going to be fixed, I reported it a while back.

I would guess its a collision detection problem.

I don't know when that will be changed, but definitely not in this round of patches. It is due to current limitations of the collision detection system. Not really a bug, just something that is not covered by the system.
What is the best way to debug each build you give us Scawen as far as the networking flow? Do you have special developer tools that are built into the game's exe that would allow us to see more information while we are on each server so that we can give you better feedback? As you've said yourself that MPRs are not really useful as they contain engine events from the server side, it does not give an exact representation of what each client was feeling during the online session. If we could get more information during our online sessions maybe we could give you better feedback if the packet / buffer system is working better then the previous versions.

Do you have any command line switches, or keyboard shortcuts that have not been disclosed that would give us more information then a normal client would normally set when playing?

Also, if you could please report ping time's in Milliseconds only, as this is standard notation I think that would generally help quite a lot with people's understanding of what is going on.
Quote from Dygear :Do you have any command line switches, or keyboard shortcuts that have not been disclosed that would give us more information then a normal client would normally set when playing?

Also, if you could please report ping time's in Milliseconds only, as this is standard notation I think that would generally help quite a lot with people's understanding of what is going on.

No, I don't have any more info, just the ping / lag info and the latency (over car).

The ping is displayed in milliseconds in B11, up to 1 second.

Then we are in the range of "lag" (time since the host last heard from the guest) rather than "ping" (round trip time). And it is displayed in red, in seconds that are steadily increasing. I think that "23" is more informative than 23000 and it fits on a small button. I think you'll find it ok, I think it looks quite good now.
Quote from Scawen :
To implement some better cheat protection, we'll need to test an incompatible patch, but this version is still compatible so I think it would be a good idea to release a compatible B11 this evening.

OK, so if I understand this correctly;

B11 -> compatible with B10 and B9, contains network related fixes/improvements and hotlap fix
B12 -> going to be incompatible with everything else, containing more cheat protection.

Roger that
Correct, B11 is now released and it is compatible with B9 and B10.

But everyone should update - the improvements are on guest and host side.
Quote from cargame.nl :Its not showing in LFSW ... Servers with version B11

I see them


about ping while connected localy, maybe its a bit lower ( minimal 10 ms ) but still maximal of 110 ms seems a bit too high

and whats the point of showing ping in miliseconds, when the actuall resolution is in centiseconds?
Quote from DANIEL-CRO :and whats the point of showing ping in miliseconds, when the actuall resolution is in centiseconds?

I guess it’s because ping is usually displayed in milliseconds in most games and people are used to it. And so it is in the LFS server list, so why have it in two different formats.
This thread is closed

TEST PATCH 0.6B9 (NOW B11 - multiplayer improvements - no change to physics)
(165 posts, closed, started )
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