Does a racer lose the connection after X seconds of having no reply to the server ? Or there are other rules telling the system who's out ?

I have seen some racers driving normally, not lagging or anything, but suddenly "time out". I have also seen a guy not appearing on the server for 60s+ but later got back to server again without losing connection. ( That huge lag saved me an overtake. ) It's really weird if time of no reply is what determines which player is out.

It probably depends on a certain packet, not traffic in general. The server sends a ping and kicks the player if no pong arrives within a certain time, regardless of other packets that may have been exchanged in the meantime.

As far as I've been able to tell, it depends on the specific packet(s) and type(s).

A car can disappear for a long time and not lose connection - this is some or all position (UDP protocol) packets getting lost.

Regarding timeouts and lost connections, I think it depends on how the TCP connection fails (there are different TCP fail states as far as I know).
'Lost connection' sounds like a TCP/socket error where the connection is broken and the server gets a fail message somewhere.
'Timeout' is presumably where no traffic at all has happened on the TCP connection for a while (10 seconds in the case of LFS, I believe) and it gets closed.


It's been a while since I've delved into UDP/TCP and, of course, I don't know for sure how LFS' connections work, so it's largely speculation. I'm sure someone will correct me on some of it