I'm not going to turn this into a fight. sorry.

thx for your support guys
Just to sum it up, I was leading him, i DID break on the main straight with the intention that he passes (just didn't like racing too close to him, from prior experience, he's too bad tempered for my taste), Appearantly I wasn't carefull enough on my breaking and he hit me from behind. I didn't mean to cause him to crash me, but I misscalculated his position (or lag, whatever). I didn't blame him, but he just went mental. The rest is history...

The guy just does bad rep for [400] guys. The rest of the [400] guys are very friendly imho. You can still change mate, you're a great racer, but your temper does bad for everyone.

Solved partially (for me only, rest of the users on that ISP still suffer). Follow on this thread.

Problem/Solution summary: the ISP let normal accounts deteriorate in connection quality when they launched a "Gamers" service (pay more -> get better connectivity). They changed my routing to that of the "Gamers" service. Works for me but still sucks otherwise.

Last edited by avih, Thu 2 Mar 2006, 07:18.

@the_angry_angel: I know, as I've written few posts above, it works for positioning but still some data goes UDP, and it still disconnects.

Anyway. It's now solved for me.

The ISP 1st changed my routing to the master server, and it had some effect, where the connection to the master server would happen quickly, but still skippy connection to the race servers, which still caused disconnections and lags.

Next, they've moved me completely to a different pool of users as far as the routing goes. That is, I'm now on the "Gamers" routing but with dynamic IP. "Gamers" is a new service they launched few months ago, which is supposed to have lower pings and better connectivity. Users that applied for a "Gamers" account pay more and get better routing and static IP address. My suspicion is that my normal connection's quality dropped in correletion with them launching this new service. Needless to say, I refused to apply for the Gamers account type.

So, anyway, it seems that my connection is now fast (read: back to what it used to be). Tried it with different LFS servers, even some with quite low ping (300ms) and it worked well. However, all other "normal" users still have these issues if they don't apply for the Gamers account. That kinda sucks if they use to play online games, And it's very annoying that the ISP let the normal service deteriorate when they launched "Gamers".

Oh well, If I can't change the world, at least I can help myself :/

cheers for the help guys.
avih

Last edited by avih, Thu 2 Mar 2006, 07:01.

Quote from KiDCoDEa :

www.metacritic.com ownz them all! (for obvious reasons)

wasn't it said already?

metacritic.com

most ppl are just clueless and are usually unable to see the distortion of 16:9 vs 4:3. sad, but true.

hmm.. i finally "got it" about the reason that other web data flows smoothly and LFS doesn't. All the other web apps that I've mentioned use TCP, while LFS uses UDP. UDP packets are not acknoledged when they go through the net and if a packet gets lost, it IS lost forever, while TCP packets are retransmitted if they havan't arrived on the destination machine.

Now, if there are congestions due to many users (peak hours) between 2 machines inside the ISP, then UDP packets jusr get lost, while TCP packets are instantly (?) retransmitted and the overall routing is flawless.

Quote from B2B@300 :

Complain loudly with much volume untill they relent and improve there hardware/software equipment to cope properly

working on it... i'll keep this thread updated.
Currently they suggested to check if they can change the routing for this specific server. Let's see how it goes...

@seahorse:
I don't live in the UK, I live in Israel, but it's not very different I think. BT is replaced with BEZEQ in Israel for ADSL/Telephony infrastructure, and the ISP is the same one I've been using for just less than 2 years IIRC (specifically: BARAK).

But the latency as shown in tracert is not a good enough indication. I tried another util called pathping (probably already installed on your system) which is like tracert but also shows packet loss on every hop (it pings every hop 100 times by default).

pathping turned out to show quite interesting results, machine 212.150.235.81 (one of the hops only through the ADSL routing and probably the outside gateway of the ISP to Eurpoe) lost about 20%-25% of the packets (!!), consistantly through several pathping runs. This machine is well within the ISP and already past the ADSL infrastructure. However, acording to the pathping result, it passes packets 100% and only loses 25% of packets intended directly for it. So I'm not quite sure if it's relevant info.

Still, it's quite fraustrating to be able to sun smoothly through dialup but suffer so many issues during peak hours on ADSL.

One of the reasons probably is the compulsury usage of UDP in LFS. These packets are easily lost forever when net congestions increase. and if you loose them frequently enough then LFS just freaks out and the otherwise beautiful netcode just collapses.

I seriously think that LFS should have TCP only fallback for such cases (the current TCP fallback - CTRL-T iirc is only for some of the packets). Especially when such ISP issues will only get more severe over time as they always try to reduce costs by utilizing their infrastructure beyont it's natural capabilities.

Last edited by avih, Wed 22 Feb 2006, 12:00.

Thanks for the help guys

Here's some more info:

- The ADSL modem is not USB
- I haven't tried other online games, but download/web/bittorrent work flawlessly.
- It has worked perfectly well on ADSL for about a year before the problems started.
- Short while before the issues started I moved to another town, and stayed with the same telephony provider and ISP.
- It's most probably not virus/spyware because a. I keep my comp very clean and monitored and b. It runs super smooth on dialup modem from the same PC.


so far the ideas that made most sense to me are:

1. Network congestions during peek hours between my modem and external routing of the ISP. Could be due to different ADSL infrastructure in the new town or due to ISP/Telephony provider bandwidth throttling or just plain congensions there (solution probably to switch ISP?)

2. Different external routing for the ISP between ADSL/Dialup. sounds a bit weird to me that the external routing of an ISP changes according to the user connection, but I think the_angry_angle has more experience than me here. (again, switch ISP?)



usage = From LFS: getting empty servers list from master server (no server that match the filter), therefore, only cíntact master servers (monitored using AnalogX packerMon, it shows only successfull attempts)

Dialup usage: each time 4 packets were sent (48, 157, 40, 40 bytes) to port 29339, completed in about 0.6s every timeõ

ADSL usage: each time between 2 and 4/5 packets were sent to port 29339, completed in about 0.5s to 10s (!).


here's a tracert for the master server (note that the last hop always times out prob because it doesn't accept ICMP? what do the asterix mean on the different columns? can anyone interpret the results?

It's started with this about 3 months ago. It hasn't gone better since. Lately I finally decided to switch ISP because the disconnections are just unbearable anymore.

All other network activity works fine, bittorrents, browsing, downloads etc. Super smooth and no bandwidth "glitches" (I have a network monitor that shows the activity in real time).

Only LFS suffers extreme issues. Mainly: takes VERY long untill I connect to the master server for the list of games, many times with failure, when I try to connect to a server about 80% it just fails (on various errors during the connection), and when I'm able to connect it often disconnects. Network debug (SHIFT-F8) shows nothing interesting.

As a last measure, I tried connecting to the same ISP, with same telephony provider, but with my 56K dialup modem instead of my ADSL connection (1.5M/96K, Alcatel Speedtouch 510E firmware 4.2.7).

Amazingly, it worked beautifully. List of games comming very fast (with a bit higher pings: about 300ms with dialup vs 100-200 with ADSL), but other than the pings, it all worked flawlessly 100% of the times. I managed to connect to every server I tried, The connection monitor (bottom left when connected to a server) "pulsed" very regularly (vs WAY too many glitches and "stucks" through the ADSL), etc. Tried again with ADSL --> crap. Dialup again --> silky smooth.

So, 2 things:

1. Congrats to Scawen for absolutely amazing network code that works just perfect even with a dialup modem

2. WTF is going on with my ADSL connection? and why does it only affect LFS?

Some more data I have gathered:
- ping to liveforspeed.net is constant 115ms +/-5
- During the night GMT (now) it works MUCH better with ADSL. It nearly never disconnects, and works quite well in general, ALTHOUGH, the connection monitor still don't pulse regularly. Better than during evening time, but not as smooth as it used to be before november (or as smooth as with the dialup). As far as I've noticed, it's unrelated to the number of users on the server, i.e. it also mostely disconnects or unable to connect even if the server is empty.
- just before november I upgraded my ADSL modem's firmware to 4.2.7 to add support for 1.5Mbps (upgraded my adsl account), but it seemed to work well afterwards.
- The ADSL modem isn't configured in any special way. It doesn't act as NAT and/or firewall (as far as i know).

could it somehow be related to UPnP (I don't know much about it though, but I think it only matters if the modem is configured to block ports etc)?


- The same telephony provider and same ISP more or less eliminate all routing issues outside of the ISP.
- The fact that it runs smooth on dialup eliminate OS issues (spyware, firewalls, etc)
- The fact that it DOES work better (note: not perfect) during the night reduces the possibility for ADSL modem issues.


If anyone has some tools (or procedures) to try and pinpoint the difference between the 2 types of connection and gather "LFS net quality" I'll gladly use them. If anyone has any kind of Idea what might be going on, I'd appreciate the help.

thanks,
avih

Last edited by avih, Thu 2 Mar 2006, 07:39. Reason : problem solved

and this too:
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=2082

Quote from Richard Torp :

@Bruce.
I read AUTOSIMSPORT every month and i think its a great online magazine..keep up your good work..

More LFS in it..great idea..

i second that. ASS is a very nice initiative indeed. keep up the good work

haven't been using ghostcar since i nearly never drive offline, nevertheless, this sounds very usefull, grats and thanks

Quote from Niels Heusinkveld :

aah top stuff, I actually had media player classic, but didn't expect it to have this option!

Thanks!

N

don't let the simple took deceive you it's one of the best around, with great options and customizability...

there are tons of players that can change the aspect ratio.
Media player classic (windows)
zoom player (windows)
ffdshow (multi-codec/postprocessor "driver" for any windows-media based player like WMP etc)
mplayer (linux/windows)
TCMP (windows)
And I'm sure BSplayer can do that too, and many other players around.

put it simply, only windows media player can't (without the help of ffdshow)

I usually use either MPC(+ffdshow) or mplayer which supports any known file format in the world.

Last edited by avih, Tue 14 Feb 2006, 11:34.

could be faulty ram or not enough current for the board or overheating in general. also, in my 5600u there's a direct cable from the psu to the card itself. did u plug it in?

you're too fast man. slow down , get a clue

seriously though it sounds very strange and annoying, did u try to mess with graphics settings etc (both driver and lfs)? i can't see how it's related, but worth a go imho.

i have fx5600 ultra too. i use drivers 81.87 but it worked well with any previous driver too. try to open the driver settings (desktop -> right-click -> settings -> advanced ->gforce 5600 ultra -> performance and quality ) and disable anti aniasing ans anisotropic filters. then turn off all optimizations and set the image settings to "performance". see if it helps.

generally speaking it's a very good card for lfs imho. i get 40-70 fps in 1600x1200. enough for good experience.

good luck.

Quote from dUmAsS :

if the temp rise is not a glitch in the bios then it may be because the usb device is beeing constantly polled, causing a higher then normal cpu load (ie, the cpu is never idle)

iirc, usb decives ARE constantly polled, i just don't know how much cpu is involved (vs the usb controller)...

cheers for the effort mate

I think i'll try it on qemu just for the fun of it. but do u get 3d acceleration on a vm? (qemu/vmware)?

1600x1200, 2xAF, no AA

Quote from the_angry_angel :

I'm afraid I think in debian terms, as thats what I've primarily run over the years. And by default its usually installed with the X window system and OpenGL.

I assume you're doing this from a terminal/console (if pclinux lets you do that?)? If so are you trying it all in lowercase? Does "glxinfo" throw anything back at you either?

@Jakg and others - I'm doing a little howto on installing LFS and Wine under ubuntu tonight (as soon as qemu starts playing).

are you going to run lfs on wine on ubuntu on [k]qemu?? will u get more than 1 fps? great combo though i've been running various live cds on kqemu (win32) and it's pretty fast, for a vm, nowhere near playable for 3d games though i'd say... and last time i've checked vmware was still quite faster. i know it's not oss, but it's fast

Quote from Funnybear :

... I mean a car that held the 0-60 production car record for so long (Maybe it still does, but I would be surprised. It must have been supassed by now. 3.something seconds to get to 60mph. Thats enough to make your eyeballs ooze out your ears and your intenstines wrap around the exhaut pipe.) ...

I've done 0-60 MPH in less than 4s on a bike. It's nice but very managable, not like you're falling apart or something

and on topic, yeh, the LX cars are cool, wish there were more servers with them online. They go nicely with the raceabout btw.