ha, yeah, weird stuff.

I made an XRT setup with ABS on in Z13.
Saved the setup.
Imported that setup to Z version
Drove at AS3 in version Z with that setup.
Made sure I slammed the brakes and ripped on the wheel
Saved that replay, (In version Z)
Played that replay back in Z13.
At the point I slammed the brakes the ABS kicks in 'cause the tyres go orange.
Then boom - replay OOS error.

I think this means patch is backwards compatible, but not forwards compatible. hehe, so lol. Personally I don't think this needs exact case needs to be fixed. It's a pretty convoluted way to crash the replay, not very common practice. But shows that version Z can transmit some sort of ABS related data to Z13.

edit:
Maybe not. Maybe the replay just dies because the Z13 version makes the car do something (physics wise) that didn't happed in actual Z version replay. I don't think version Z applies the ABS in practice. In Todshooter's case, I think his game instance on his end expects ABS to kick in for "havoc" so shows it on his (Todd's) screen. The guy who he is spectating - "Havoc" doesn't actually get ABS, and his tyres are probably locking up. Havoc's car does what it's supposed to do in his version Z, which is NOT get ABS function.

Here is a replay made in version Z with a setup made in Z13 with ABS on (brake assist is off). Play this back in Z13 you will get ABS kick in and then a replay OOS error at 30secs.

Quote from avih :

Perliminary update:
After more than an hour of online racing, no issues with Z. Now that I think of it, Z exhibits sort of start of this issue momentarily, like -0.1s-0.2s "hangs" (happened twice or so, but barely noticable), and it feels to me as if on z10/13 it would have developed to this slideshow/HD-noise thing, but it just recovers immidiatly and everything continues as normal. As much as I think of it, I can not assosiate it with a specific event (like user joining/disconnecting/lagging/etc). To me it just seems to happen rather randomly.

I'll try to race some more during the weekend and update further, but taking all info into account, I'd say that Z doesn't have this issue, or at least not in a disturbing way.

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

I also get this problem. I checked in Z, and it does'nt happen.

Im driving along on a server, and it then suddenly slow's down to 3FPS or so, and my hard drive starts going berserk. Another interesting point, is it sometimes seems to do this on a certain part of the track. Lets say i come to T1, and it does it. If i manage to get out of this area, it speeds up again but sometimes when i get back to T1, it slows down again.

Its a very odd fault, and something i have never experienced in this game before.

Spec:
Q6600, Seagate Barricuda 500gb HD, nvidia 7600GS 256mb, 6GB ram (Corsair DDR3). Windows XP MCE

Thanks for these reports. I have now seen this come up a few times in one run of LFS. Frame rate dropped so badly for a few seconds it was impossible to stay on the road. That was in multiplayer and single player.

At first I was quite pleased because I thought, now I can reproduce this... but when I watched the replays, the bug did not come up.

So my questions are :

1) Do you know of any way to reproduce this reliably?

2) Can you see this in a replay? And if so, what happens if you exit LFS and watch the replay again, does the bug still come up?

[ Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you on this - I am still working on other things that cannot be announced yet as they may or may not make it into a released version of LFS. I have also made notes of all the other bug reports in this thread and I intend to release another test patch with most things fixed. If you have made a report, please check if it is fixed in the next test patch - thanks. ]

should be noted that when i was told my tires were showing ABS being applied, i checked F9 and saw no orange activity on my tires(patch Z)

hope this info can help you scawen.

any other ?'s shoot a PM over

thanks for your feedback Scawen.

As far as I know the only thing LFS does on the HD during a race is periodically (every time 4096 bytes of replay data have accumulated) write the temp_spr.spr, respectively its mpr counterpart.

Now, what would happen if somehow those 4KB are piling up quicker than the HD can write? My guess is that LFS would grind to a halt until the writing can catch up again, since I doubt LFS has any checks in regard to how long writing this data takes. If the file is somehow blocked or LFS' file handle forcefully removed, then as I've seen LFS just stops writing the file and later claims that "Replay was not being recorded," which is fine behaviour in that regard, so an outright file block doesn't seem to be the problem.

The question now is, what causes the HD to be slower than LFS requires? I can see two possibilities:

1. External influence. The HD is fragmented / broken / used by another program / whatever and needs to do other stuff to fix the situation and become fast enough again.
   .
   
2. Something in LFS causes massive amounts of replay data to be generated. Maybe the steer jittering resulting from an engaged ABS somehow plays into this? It happening as mentioned for example in Blackwood T1 could be caused by lots of people braking at that point. Or maybe it's simply a bug (in the ABS code?) that causes the data flood.
   
   
3. A combination of the above.
   

This would explain why watching the replay doesn't reproduce the behaviour, since obviously there's no replay being written while watching one. Maybe the people who are affected by this could turn off the automatic replay storing (Options > Game > ...replay save) to see if it has any effect - it should at least help narrowing down the source of the problem.

Never saw before any of the messages realted to the skin downloading and dont know if its realted to this patch or not.
Dunno if its realted to the main LFS webiste being down.

Quote from DEVIL 007 :

Never saw before any of the messages realted to the skin downloading and dont know if its realted to this patch or not.
Dunno if its realted to the main LFS webiste being down.

Related to LFSW going down I'd say

Quote from Scawen :

[ Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you on this - I am still working on other things that cannot be announced yet as they may or may not make it into a released version of LFS. I have also made notes of all the other bug reports in this thread and I intend to release another test patch with most things fixed. If you have made a report, please check if it is fixed in the next test patch - thanks. ]

please stop telling us EVERTYHING, surprises are better, because there is less to argue about...btw SUPERB work, i thought lfs was a small game in demo, but now i have s2 and i am SOOOO lost!

Quote from logitekg25 :

please stop telling us EVERTYHING, surprises are better, because there is less to argue about...btw SUPERB work, i thought lfs was a small game in demo, but now i have s2 and i am SOOOO lost!

He is not telling us anything ....

Edit: To logitekg25 - of course ... but let's leave that topic to the thread in general discussion .

Quote from Byku :

He is not telling us anything ....

wat i meant, is if he never told us about the scirocco a lot of arguements would have never happened, he could have just told us he was working on something special

Quote from Scawen :

1) Do you know of any way to reproduce this reliably?

2) Can you see this in a replay? And if so, what happens if you exit LFS and watch the replay again, does the bug still come up?

I know of no way to reproduce this, although android seems to have a better idea of why this is happening, so maybe you could take pointers from what he has said, and see if you can reproduce this yourself.

As for it happening in a replay, funnily enough, i actually saved the replay the first time it happened to see if i could experience it again, but nothing happened. The only difference was that my car was hopping around at the same time i experience the problem in-game (my guess due to the low FPS when it happened, so maybe the game struggled to keep upto date with my cars location) and then it all went smooth again at the same time it went smooth ingame but according to the ingame FPS meter, it was still running at a smooth 60FPS instead of the 5FPS or so when it actually happened.

Unfortunately, i have since removed the replay (stupid me, i know :doh but next time it happens to me, i shall save the replay and send it your way incase there is anything you can get from it.

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

I know of no way to reproduce this...

I don't know in your case how often this frame drop occurs or for how long, but i noticed some severe frame drops when my anti-virus updates, happens with bitdefender and nod32 for sure, don't know about others.
Juts a thought.

Quote from Scawen :

Thanks for these reports. I have now seen this come up a few times in one run of LFS. Frame rate dropped so badly for a few seconds it was impossible to stay on the road. That was in multiplayer and single player.

At first I was quite pleased because I thought, now I can reproduce this... but when I watched the replays, the bug did not come up.

So my questions are :

1) Do you know of any way to reproduce this reliably?

2) Can you see this in a replay? And if so, what happens if you exit LFS and watch the replay again, does the bug still come up?

[ Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you on this - I am still working on other things that cannot be announced yet as they may or may not make it into a released version of LFS. I have also made notes of all the other bug reports in this thread and I intend to release another test patch with most things fixed. If you have made a report, please check if it is fixed in the next test patch - thanks. ]

i had the problems too and i solved it:
instant messengers with advertising is a problem since Z10... everytime a IM replaces its advert, it causes a minilag of 1 second here (cpu load explodes to 100% everytime at a dual core).
since i deactivated them while i play i have no problems
i use xfire, icq and msn ...dont know if its a specific one of them

hope that it helps

Quote from Trekkerfahrer :

i had the problems too and i solved it:
instant messengers with advertising is a problem since Z10... everytime a IM replaces its advert, it causes a minilag of 1 second here (cpu load explodes to 100% everytime at a dual core).
since i deactivated them while i play i have no problems
i use xfire, icq and msn ...dont know if its a specific one of them

hope that it helps

good thing i dont IM when playing, or even type....because it would be to myself

Quote from AndroidXP :

The question now is, what causes the HD to be slower than LFS requires? I can see two possibilities:

1. External influence. The HD is fragmented / broken / used by another program / whatever and needs to do other stuff to fix the situation and become fast enough again.
   .
   
2. Something in LFS causes massive amounts of replay data to be generated. Maybe the steer jittering resulting from an engaged ABS somehow plays into this? It happening as mentioned for example in Blackwood T1 could be caused by lots of people braking at that point. Or maybe it's simply a bug (in the ABS code?) that causes the data flood.
   
   
3. A combination of the above.
   

This would explain why watching the replay doesn't reproduce the behaviour, since obviously there's no replay being written while watching one. Maybe the people who are affected by this could turn off the automatic replay storing (Options > Game > ...replay save) to see if it has any effect - it should at least help narrowing down the source of the problem.

This is good thinking but...

1) Only Firefox (with LFS forum) and a local folder window were open. I don't think it was a Firefox update because the slowdowns happened a couple of times on a multiplayer server and later in single player, so I would not expect that to go on for so long.

2) It can't be related to ABS, because the multiplayer session was in a FOX. The single player was in an XF GTI so ABS could be involved but this should not affect the SPR anyway because the SPR only records user inputs, not ABS action.

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

I know of no way to reproduce this, although android seems to have a better idea of why this is happening, so maybe you could take pointers from what he has said, and see if you can reproduce this yourself.

As for it happening in a replay, funnily enough, i actually saved the replay the first time it happened to see if i could experience it again, but nothing happened. The only difference was that my car was hopping around at the same time i experience the problem in-game (my guess due to the low FPS when it happened, so maybe the game struggled to keep upto date with my cars location) and then it all went smooth again at the same time it went smooth ingame but according to the ingame FPS meter, it was still running at a smooth 60FPS instead of the 5FPS or so when it actually happened.

Unfortunately, i have since removed the replay (stupid me, i know :doh but next time it happens to me, i shall save the replay and send it your way incase there is anything you can get from it.

I have got a feeling we will not get any info from a replay. Though you have confirmed that it does not seem to be reproducible from a replay. That could mean it only happens when driving, or it could be random.

Quote from Trekkerfahrer :

i had the problems too and i solved it:
instant messengers with advertising is a problem since Z10... everytime a IM replaces its advert, it causes a minilag of 1 second here (cpu load explodes to 100% everytime at a dual core).
since i deactivated them while i play i have no problems
i use xfire, icq and msn ...dont know if its a specific one of them

hope that it helps

I don't run any messaging systems, so it's not that (although for sure they could cause slowdowns that would not be the fault of LFS). The slowdowns I saw lasted for more like 5 seconds and a frame was drawn once or twice per second during that time.

At this point we aren't very close to narrowing it down.

The biggest change in LFS was the shadows, so it would be interesting to know if running without shadows stops the problem. In the single player game there were two AI cars so the shadow system is a possibility.

I don't think we can rule out background processes in Windows taking up CPU or hard drive time either. But as Android suggests, it would be interesting to know if switching off replay saving stops the problem as well.

EDIT : avih originally reported the bug with shadows switched off, so apparently it's not the shadows.
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=1047217#post1047217

Actually I don't have any problem in LFS but I remember GTA IV had nearly the same problem...
Isn't it related to the graphic memory being badly used by LFS?
As Shadows and Lags are both related to Graphic Card this could be the problem?

I'm not a pro at all and maybe that what I'm saying is stupid but at least I tried

PS: Sorry for my English

I had the mini-lags/stuttering in Win7, but put it down to beta OS/bad drivers etc.
I recently noticed that it still happens in XP.

My LFS install is years old, so are most of the converted .dds skins etc.
Could it be possible that they are interfereing somehow, would it be worth deleting them and letting LFS re-convert ?

i had similar thing happening in window 7 few months ago, usualy i have about 60-70 fps but at some places it droped to few fps for 1-2 seconds. i found info on forum that it may be connected to usb port that my wheel was plugged in (voltage, miliamps issue i think) so i switched wheel to different usb port but also i installed xp so i couldn't be sure if it was really usb issue however about 10 days ago we had league race at kyoto national and i had throttle problem it was sort of flickering between 90-100% so after race i uplugged g25 reinstall drivers and changed usb port (by accident i guess) but yeah problem with throttle dissapeared but in our second race at south city long this weird slow downs came back.. funny thing is we had like 15min quali session before race and it was ok but when race started i was getting this fps dropps few times per lap. i will attach map where it was happening: at location 1,2,3 i think it was nearly every lap but at location 4 it happened only few times. after the face i remembered issue with win7 so i switched port usb again so far it didn't happen again... yeah probably bug is not connected to usb but this info may help few drivers but maybe this map with places when it was heppening would help you somehow..

@Aid, when you look at the map, it always happened at braking points, so i assume you have a bad connection somwhere in your wheel, maybe a technical problem...

This stuttering bug is so annoying, you can loose, you can ram other players. Happened with me many times. Then I reinstalled windows (lfs was not the reason), but lag was not gone. Normally I have 70 FPS and all graphic options set to best.
Once I remember how FPS dropped to 2 FPS for 4 to 5 seconds.

CPU: Pentium 4, 3Ghz
VGA: Radeon X1950GT
Ram: 1280Mb
HDD: Samsung 120Gb

Computer is totally okay.

Quote from Fischfix :

@Aid, when you look at the map, it always happened at braking points, so i assume you have a bad connection somwhere in your wheel, maybe a technical problem...

probably not.. notice there is few other places where u brake at this track and like i say it happens rarely...

Hi everyone.

Above the bug reported above, I had a similar problem and in the end the problem was hard drive the got some bad sectors, and although they were marked not to be used the all performance itself decreased.

Try to run a scandisk to check the heath of your disk

Quote from PioneerLv :

This stuttering bug is so annoying, you can loose, you can ram other players. Happened with me many times. Then I reinstalled windows (lfs was not the reason), but lag was not gone. Normally I have 70 FPS and all graphic options set to best.
Once I remember how FPS dropped to 2 FPS for 4 to 5 seconds.

CPU: Pentium 4, 3Ghz
VGA: Radeon X1950GT
Ram: 1280Mb
HDD: Samsung 120Gb

Computer is totally okay.

Quote from quatrolhos :

Hi everyone.

Above the bug reported above, I had a similar problem and in the end the problem was hard drive the got some bad sectors, and although they were marked not to be used the all performance itself decreased.

Try to run a scandisk to check the heath of your disk

Qualtrolhos seems to have provided a good reason to why you were having problems, Pioneer. If he had troubles with bad sectors on his hard drive, a reformat on your part would have gotten rid of those bad sectors, and fixed the issue.

Maybe its a hardware issue, not a software one?

That is also possible.

In my case LFS was running on my old computer with a quite full hard drive, and I've only ever seen this in that one run of LFS.

I got this twice.
In CAD server.
Many people there have same problem.