Quote from cargame.nl :

If that tyre psychics saga is not going to be completed / shutdown / put behind then there is no LFS future to begin with. How many times I now have heard the last years; "after the tyre psychics have been updated", it's becoming uncountable.

Thanks Dave - big smile on my face reading "psychics" instead of "physics"
(Now, was that accidental or am I missing the joke?)

But, hell yes, agreed. We can fantasise about a lovely multi-platform future for LFS, but tyre physics first please. This recent venture into DX tweaks is great to give the poor guy a short break from the tyre model but let's not extend it too far

Edit: ...OR, I'd also be OK with Scavier saying "tyre model is postponed indefinitely, but here are some new tracks"...

Update: I can't understand this at all, but today in the actual race, I had 70-90 fps ALL the time. I then went back to single-player mode just now to see if that was still going down to 30ish fps and it was also 70-90 fps, with the same layout as before on AS6X. I don't think any options were changed in between (I tweaked a few here and there but put 'em all back, and in any case I really think it was the CPU which was pegged anyway, not the GPU).

I'm totally bewildered now...

Quote from molocco :

looking forward to the dx9 test patch, so there is finally something new for me after the new 3d functions, which i do not use at this time.

I'm curious - what does DX9 offer you?

Quote from sti228 :

I don't understand why in this forum so many people think that i am from Mars and i can't use google ? It's because i am for Georgia ? Really ? I asked 2 questions. I don't need systems explain... And before ask here i read all topics about ban with ip address and don't find answer how to do this with windows firewall. Also as i said firewall block my server when it's turn on and can't find any way to start server when it's turn on (not off).

I confess I'm intrigued - a ban by IP address will fail as soon as the problem person gets a new IP number, which is trivially easy for many people.
Did you reject the idea of simply using a password on your server?

Quote from Eclipsed :

Just wondering,which part of track is it? The AWS layout has quite big amount of objects,wondering if they are causing fps drops. Or is it when your car turns in direction where the most of the track is in front of you?

It's a chunk which starts about half-way through sector 3, roughly the 5 or 6 corners before the hairpin, most noticeable on the fast left handers.

I did wonder about objects and view direction being important, which might conceivably change from lap to lap if the angle the car points is subtly different, but it's so hard to repeat...

Edit: clearing the layout boosts the FPS by about 30%; without a long test I don't know if it would prevent the jerkiness. I also know why you added so many objects - anti-cut )

(And yup, CodeLyoko1, it's ancient. If money was no object, I'd replace it tomorrow!)

Quote from DANIEL-CRO :

OS BL1 BL1X
Win7 106 89
WinXP 134 95

Bizarre that Win7 is so much slower than WinXP. My drops are MUCH bigger than yours. The FPS in AS6 is 93, while in AS6X it's 34 (fine until the jerks occur). The CPU usage goes from 15% to 50% (i.e. one core is flat out) when I switch to open layout (which suggests that GPU tweaks may not help...)

PS: thanks for the help guys

Last edited by Neilser, Sat 18 Jan 2014, 18:13. Reason : reply to Daniel

Howdy.

When open tracks first came out I noticed lots of people had problems but I was unaffected - my fps dropped quite a bit but LFS was always driveable even with a full grid on open layouts. (My PC is old - E4300/1.8GHz, Radeon X1650.)

I recently upgraded to 0.6E (from C), which may or may not be relevant, but in the last week or two while practicing for a race on AS6X/A61 I've found that even when alone on the race server, I am intermittently getting jerkiness and low fps which is bad enough to cause me to crash - frame rate drops to 15 fps and below, but the main issue is probably the jerks.

Nothing else on the PC seems to be consuming cycles (I've closed more or less everything else.)

Searching this forum didn't show up too many hits (surprisingly), so I'm wondering if anyone can help:

Firstly, is this mainly a GPU or CPU thing?
Secondly, any recommendations to mitigate it?

I haven't tried changing much yet, partly because it's so intermittent that I'm not sure how to conduct sensible tests. (I can drive 10 laps and only one of the laps hits a problem, which is normally at a particular part of the track. And the laps are LOOOOONG! )

Help gratefully received!

Quote from Bose321 :

Why did we need a DX9 version again?

Possibly to cope with chromatic aberration in the Rift?
See https://www.lfsforum.net/showt ... php?p=1830424#post1830424

Major shock indeed.
Back when he was in Sonicrealms, I remember him teaching me how to take that obnoxious fast chicane at WE1 flat, in some car or other. Amazingly fast driver...
RIP

Aha...

Someone called elsocom just joined the AWS server (and hit restart while I was on a lap, ffs :-/), but isn't signed up. Guess somebody has been sharing the password or poss there's a hack? (The racer in question has v v low online mileage on the stats.)

Quote from ArnoldSchwarzenegger :

My first S2 race!
I think for my first race I did pretty good.

Yes, well done

I was seriously lucky that I was running Aonio (little brother of Airio) as otherwise I would have run out of fuel
Dunno how, but 46% wasn't enough for my race (and it's not as if I was lapping at WR pace ). I noticed at the end of lap 21ish (Aonio told me I had 5.8 laps of fuel left, not 6.0, uhoh!), drove laps 23/24 rather slowly, and dropped around 4 seconds, so Falcon probably thought he was gonna catch me
Had saved about enough by then so was able to floor it for the last 3 laps and finally ran dry about 2 seconds before the finish line
Nice clean racing!

Quote from Specht77 :

On older patches it had the animation to looking behind, since it was 0º - 90º - 180º, not 0º - 45º - 90º like it's today, but since it didn't had the 45º, it was also only 5 stages:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9meSjjwNFM
(the first is patch X, the second is patch E)

Nice vid
However, it looks to me that the first one shows 0, +/-45, +/-90º, and the second shows roughly 0, +/-30, +/-60º.
I'm old enough for 90º to hurt so the second is more realistic for me
Neither video goes anywhere near 180º (looking backwards) so I'm possibly confused about what you mean.

In any case, 8 bits is indeed waaayyy more than we need for horizontal movement - I agree that 4 would be enough (that allows 16 positions, e.g. 7 left, 7 right, centre), and indeed the rendering could easily smooth the transitions between them at display-time. Vertical motion might be worth adding, not sure about that.

I doubt that Scawen will see this as a priority though

Sharing head movements - interesting idea.
I was initially thinking that doing it with enough time resolution to be smooth would be pretty difficult and that we'd basically have NO chance of getting it any time soon.

But... then I realised that this is very different from the car position & control updates (which often have very poor resolution - e.g. 3 times per second).

Head movements don't affect the car position, so latency isn't such an issue. I suspect it would work just fine if (say) a second's worth of updates got stuffed into one packet... And I *think* this would make it somewhat less demanding. So we could achieve something like 10 head position updates per second without much network traffic (IIRC, the short packets are dominated by packet header), as long as we're prepared to tolerate a short delay...

Scawen said he wasn't sure how many LFS users were still on XP.
I guess this means that the connection to the master server doesn't transfer any useful info of this kind - but perhaps it should?

I think most users play online at least sometimes - the AIs are too awful to be fun, and even hotlappers probably upload laps now and then, which could also (maybe already do?) have a field inside to record the OS version.

The master server and hotlap scans could then record data for a few months and we'd know which users are on which OS versions (some will use multiple no doubt).

This is not a tweak I'd want to see holding up the tyre physics, obviously!, but would help to guide the decision about moving on from XP.
(Btw, I still use XP myself )

Quote from sicotange :

Suppose 8 players are online and racing. If 3 players vote to restart and at some point 1 racer spectates then an auto restart could be triggered. That is if 50% (or more) of votes are required.

If you meant "7 players are online and racing" then yeah, I think that's what would happen (3/7 is less than half...)

I've personally seen races restart on a spectate event (caught me by surprise first time!). Indeed I interpreted it to mean that the vote threshold must reduce by 1...
And wth, it's always good to get bug reports so don't feel bad

Quote from Dandy Dust :

I am driving project CARS right now, it´s far from perfect, but there you get new cars and tracks and physics and stuff week by week.

How sick are we, to discuss the stupid scirocco any more at all?

It won´t save LFS even if it came out with Rockingham and new tyre-physics tomorrow... sorry.

Mmmm.
Almost sounds like you're saying that getting new stuff is more important than the quality of the new (and existing) stuff...?? It was before my time, but I think LFS went through a similar phase of rapid development in the early days, when it was basic/ropey but had enough promise to generate interest.

Personally I don't really give a toss about the Scirocco itself. I agree that this wouldn't "save" LFS.

A new, real, track would be cool though, and updates/fixes to the other tracks are also long overdue. (I have no idea why anyone cares about the car interiors, mind you.) They might revitalise LFS.

But I reckon new tyre physics could make a huge difference and get lots of old blood back in, as well as plenty of new blood...

To be brutally honest, I am pleasantly surprised that LFS hasn't already imploded. Not wishing to slag off the devs here, but progress has been stunningly slow.

Are there enough LA racers to try for your own multiclass server? (See earlier suggestion - I doubt Dave would be too keen to manage it, but you might twist his arm into helping you to set it up...)

I can see why someone wouldn't be keen to face an angry mob - in person.

But posting a message to say "sorry guys, business went tits up, money's all gone, my apologies but I can't refund you; you better look elsewhere for hosting" would have been so much better than silence.

So yeah, maybe his body and/or head are not in a good place...

Quote from Squelch :

There is another possible reason for ISP's dropping/blocking UDP, and that's for comercial reasons. VoIP is in direct competition with telephony, RTP video streaming etc. are now becoming "premium" services, and Torrents are a grey area, so certainly count as don't time critical. Perhaps gaming is considered low priority for mainstream internet access, and falls into the premium category alongside video? Overall you make some fair points, and hosters need to pay particular attention to their UDP service.

I've been reading that the standard speed and ping tests are not a good indicator of UDP throughput as they rely mainly on TCP. I'm not quite sure how this can be tested for properly, but RTP (real time protocol) jitter is probably a more worthwhile metric.

Well, I came up against "traffic management" when I was with Plusnet. Their service started out excellent, but (popularity?) went downhill after they tweaked their traffic management settings.
However, all recognised gaming packets were given high priority - the bandwidth used is generally tiny and gamers who can't play their favourite games are highly prone to leaving for another ISP (as I did).
They struggled for several weeks to find a way to recognise the LFS packets sequences but ultimately failed to find a reliably recognisable signature. Some times the game would work OK, sometimes stupid lag + disconnects. Thus I ceased to be a Plusnet customer...

But in any case, UDP packets are definitely the only way to go for ephemeral data like position updates. (I can't now recall whether TCP or UDP was more troublesome in my case.)

Missing skins: my vote would be with Scawen - spectate 'em

Agreed. Basically, everybody hopes he's OK, while at the same time wishing for their servers to be back up or at least to know what's going on and when they will be back up.

It's precisely the "one man band" thing that's the problem. (Occasionally he has had one or two others step in, tho IIRC they've been silent this time.)

But... I reckon most of the people who get their servers from him - or at least the ones who are posting here - have been aware for some time that he is a one man band, so it's not like this can have taken them by surprise...

Quote from MrSam :

I understand better thank you, I had not noticed.
but the current is really bad, a little change for the next update would be nice
example reduce the size numbers so it does not overlap

Woo, you mean you actually use the speedo while driving hotlaps? If so, then either I'm unusual (cos I never do that) or you are... How does the speedo help you?

Quote from capris :

3 days now and counting without a server and as to what the problem is were is the support when franky is not around to sort things out,we need some feedback and information [...]

Well, what it's really about for me is simply giving customers the service level they have paid for. If you tell 'em up front: "this is a dirt-cheap service, so you can't expect quick responses and sometimes it's gonna take a week", then cool... Or if you make any promises about prompt support (but does Franky do so?) then clearly it's bad form not to keep those promises. Franky does provide a rather cheap service folks...

Quote from proteus :

And whats 500Servers gift to all its customers this year their lives back for the festive season lol

Nice

Quote from E.Reiljans :

If you knew who creators of Kebrum.com are, and what/whom it was made for, you'd know that this statement in their terms is there just to scare away script kiddies.

Ah.
(And em, it could be argued that we're veering off topic now so I think I should end this strand of the thread )