I am wondering if I am missing something. I built a new computer 2 weeks ago and since then I am having horrible connection problems in LFS. I have played some Nascar 2003 online and have had no issues (mind you there are fewer players and the server is closer to home). But in my case, I am actually lagging on my own screen. What I mean is that my car will warp to a new location as I drive down the road. I can be approaching a corner, be at the 200m braking marker than instantly tele-port to being at the 100M marker...causing me to miss my braking point and gravel...sky...road...sky...road...wall (if you know what I mean). I have also had issues with timing out after generally ~10minutes of being connected to a server. It will have the tele-port issue constantly but times out after roughly 10 minutes. I will re-connect and have a decent connection until I time out again after 10 minutes.

I am perplexed and think because other games play well online that is is a LFS specific thing (the tele-porting does not occur in single player, almost suggests its a connection thing). I really do not know. Windows firewall and antivirus is disabled when on LFS, and I run FSAutoStart before playing to kill various processes and programs like messeger.

The computer:
Intel i7 2600K 3.4GHz
8GB Ram
Radeon HD 6870 1GB

SpeedTest results
Halifax (~250km from home)
DL=20.17Mb/s
Ul=8.22Mb/s

Berlin (far away from Eastern Canada :P )
DL=20.08
UL=4.03

everything ran great on the old computer (at a lower frame-rate), going to the new computer, everything looks pretty but i can no longer stay connected to a server, it should be mentioned that the tele-porting was horrible when running at ~175FPS, I capped the game to 60FPS and it made it better, if that means anything

Could this be a RTC issue? I imagine something like this would happen if your PC's clock ran at a different speed, there are some cases of this reported on the forum.

I will need to research more into RTC. I searched RTC on this forum and found a server admin who was having similar issues that I was having (car re-appearing in a new location) but his was solved after finding a CPU Spike. I ran task manager beside LFS and there are no spikes associated with my lags/warps/teleports (whatever you want to call them). My CPU never went beyond 4% usage, GPU never went beyond 15% usage. CPU temp is 35deg, GPU team is 47deg.

It really really feels like there is a disagreement between my computer and the server as to where my car really is in the world. My game thinks it is in one place, the the server steps in and says my car is really *here* and it get jumped to that location.

Its horrible, I do not know what are acceptable connection speeds for LFS, are the speed tests I posted in my OP reasonable? I do not think it is a software issue or background program hogging resources. When I tele-port, my FPS does not drop at all. I have it capped at 60FPS (it seems to help a bit) and it stays pinned at 59.9-60 the whole time. It does not change the fact that I time out from the server after a few minutes of playing, it just seems strange that the connection deteriorates over time, I re-connect and it is good then deteriorates again.

Here is recent speed test results...its really mixed

To confirm, it's only during multi player in LFS? Not single player, or when you host your own server and connect to it, or even when you join an empty server? What happens when you enable network debug with shift + F8? Are you able to make a video of what happens to you with fraps or something? Oh and the first rule of task manager is to use Process Explorer instead.

I'm almost certain that the problem you're having has nothing to do with your Internet connection. Your computer sends position updates to the server, not the other way around so you car can't suddenly jump to a different place on the track just because the server thinks that's where it's supposed to be. If you indeed were lagging, you wouldn't notice that yourself, only other players would see your car jerking around or disappearing altogether.

You would probably see the FPS dropping if this was the problem, but is there any heavy HDD activity when you get this jump?

welp...more confused...here's where I stand.

Ran LFS in single player for 15-20 minutes and everything ran beautifully. Went online and joined a server with one other person connected (he was spectating) I ran a handful of laps and had the teleporting issue as always. I left that server and joined a completely empty server and LFS ran great for 20 minutes with no issues. I left that server, minimized LFS and opened Fraps and joined a busy server (expecting to get a great example of the problems I am having to record it). I raced on the server for 15 minutes and everything ran great (so i have no video of the problem). I then decided to join the GT2WS server. I go "join specific Host, I get half way through typing in the server name and LFS crashes. I restart LFS start to type in NDR.GT2WS...crashes again...after 2-3 more crashes I get in. I run a few laps (with other people connected) and have the same old teleporting issue.

So I stop, tab out of LFS and start Fraps again. Basically I do not teleport while recording. I drove out and the car was teleporting so i started to record and everything ran fine, i stopped the recording and the issue started again, so i started to record again and the problem stopped. This was all in one drive (no shift+p/s in there). Fraps is set to record at 60FPS, the game is capped at 60FPS. I am shocked that it runs better while capturing video and writing it to disc.

In Summary
Single player = good
Empty Server = good
Occupied server = bad
Occupied server while recording to fraps = good
...to bad my hard drive is not large enough to just ran fraps in the background as I race

Problem solved, I'm back in

I do not know what caused it, but I did a fresh, clean, virgin install of LFS onto a different drive and i just ran 20 Minutes on a server with zero issues. I do not know what bugged the other install, the only thing I did was some of Lynce's reflections and a different steering wheel texture...not saying those caused the problem, it may just have been an incomplete or corrupted install from the beginning.

I have a race today so I am not touching this fresh install, just putting 1 skin and 1 setup in and leaving it alone for now.

wait...what...

nevermind, it worked great after the first install. I closed LFS, told everyone that everything worked great, added the skin and the setup, went back online to have all the same old issues.

What I get sometimes is that I wont actually time-out. But everyone will disappear off of the track, I will disappear to everyone else, but I can drive indefinitely in this state (until people start to complain that they think the server is bugging out because they cant shift+p ) and people realize it is me and start to yell :P

Press shift+f8 in LFS, record some video on your phone and upload it to youtube, don't use FSAutoStart, run process explorer and have a look at the disk/cpu/network usage and also add those as columns so you can see which processes are using up what - especially with/without fraps.

Ok, thanks for the help, the rush is off, I found another driver for the Gt2 race today. But i have made 2 videos (uploading now).

I am running dual monitors so i have Process Explorer running on the 2nd screen and LFS on the main monitor. In the videos I show some basic gameplay of what I see as I drive with the network debug running. I then show process explorer as I race experiencing the glitching issue. I then start fraps and show gameplay and process explorer as thing seem to run smoothly. I then turn fraps off and show gameplay and process explorer again with the issues continuing.

I then stopped recording and kept driving and after 10-12 minutes of being connected to the server i started to lag out so I started to record again showing both LFS and process explorer, I did not get a chance to try fraps again as people on the server started to get mad at me.

Youtube says 15 minutes left in the upload, will post links ASAP

Ok both videos are ready

Video 1 (first join of server and 8 minutes of what happens there after).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPcTCfsnJ0

Video 2 (12 or so minutes after i joined and connection really went downhill)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJSR3AA5n1w
at the very end of this video you can see someone chat to me that I am breaking the server so i thought i better get off

I do not have a very good camera, it had a cannon digital camera held in 1 hand as i drove, forgive the somewhat shakyness and crappy driving :P . I wish the text is process explorer came out better but I think you can get a jist of what is going on.

Its worth noting that this is on Windows XP SP3, i downloaded the latest MoBo drivers (including the network driver) when built the computer 2 weeks ago

It's not really apparent from the video, but the debug messages in LFS say "TCP ER : InitTime (-/+)= *", it looks like this problem. I believe that LFS is trying to tell you that the game runs "faster" on your computer than it does on the server. LFS updates physics at a fixed rate of 100 Hz (each 10 msecs). When your computer's clock run a bit faster, the physics gets updated at say 110 Hz. This is obviously a problem in multiplayer and if the clock variance is high enough, LFS can't compensate for that and you completely drop out of sync eventually. It's rather puzzling that FRAPS causes the delay to be positive. Anyway, here's what you can do.

- Check the RTC clock. Run the application with no other programs running, then with just LFS and with LFS+FRAPS. Each test takes 10 minutes to complete and it will fully load one CPU core. Another good test is to drive like 10-15 laps in SP, save the replay and then watch it with a stopwatch if your hand. If there is a timing problem, you should see the replay time in LFS deviate from the time on the stopwatch.
- Check your motherboard. If there is a BIOS or driver update available, make sure it's installed.

ok, I could not get the clockwatch program to work. Basically, I ran the configuration batch first, then tried to run the clockwatch. It say press any key to continue, i would press a key and the window just disappears. I tried a few different things: starting LFS, them starting clock watch...run configuration batch, then open LFS, then clockwatch...lost of different combinations and pressed different keys to start the program, the window just closes. I'm young, I never dealt with DOS...anyway, I do not think we need it. I ran a stopwatch beside LFS

And with the stop watch, I think i have a clock issue

Without Fraps:
LFS Time 7:54.31
Stopwatch time: 7:58.38
Difference: 4 seconds

While recording with fraps
LFS Time: 7:53.84
Stopwatch time: 7:54.72
Difference: 1 second

It is worth noting that these 2 tests were conducted in 2 different races. What I did was ran a race, started the stop watch as soon as the lights went green...raced and stopped the watch as soon as I crossed the finish line and compared my stopwatch to my total race time according to LFS...I then started fraps and ran a new race, so you cant compare the times between the 2 tests, but with fraps off my CPU is cleary off by a fairly large margin (4 seconds) and is a lot better with fraps recording (1 second). I am quite confident in the stopwatch, it is my karting stopwatch, and I have never noticed that it disagrees with other people watches.

All you have to do is run the batch and wait for the results, the command prompt window should not close automatically. It takes 10 minutes to complete. The EXE itself is not meant to be run directly.

Anyway, this really looks like there is a serious timing issue. On the other hand, if it was just a faulty RTC clock, its pace shouldn't be affected by CPU load or running applications. Does any other CPU intensive app have the same effect on LFS as FRAPS? Could you post your full hardware specs?

32bit OS?
Did you use a new hard drive?

CPU: Intel i7 2600k 3.4GHz Quad Core
MoBo: Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H-MVP
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB sticks) 1600MHz DDR3
Vid Card: Sapphire Radeon HD6870 1GB PCI-E 2.1x16
Game install Drive: Plexor M3 Series PV-128M3 SATA3 SSD (128Gig - partitioned: 20GB for windows only, 108GB for game installs)
Other Disc: Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue SATA 6GB/s HDD
Power Supply: Rosewell RP600V2-s-sl 600W

OS: Windows XP 32bit SP3 (basically threw this on for now, waiting for Win 8 to be released this fall)

All componants are new, purchased July 15th. I only re-used the case from my old computer. Latest drivers for everything were downloaded and installed on July 22nd

I do not have much software on this computer right now...will try to find something CPU intensive to test with.

Ok, got clockwatch working (well I figured out how to use it)

I'm just going to compile the results of several tests

Desktop Alone: Average RTC difference = 0
LFS + Fraps: Average RTC difference = -101
LFs + Fraps: Average RTC difference = -161
LFS Alone: Average RTC Difference = -1
LFS Alone: Average RTC difference = -98
LFS ALone: Average RTC difference = -73
LFS + NR2003: Average RTC Difference = -18

I also repeated the stop watch test:
LFS+Fraps
LFS Time: 5:02.56
Stopwatch: 5:04.25
Diff: ~1.75sec

LDS ALone
LFS Time: 5:01.45
Stopwatch: 5:01.45
Diff: 0.0

kinda seems all over the map and counter intutitive, it now seems better without fraps

Why did you partition the SSD?

:shrugs: I donno, just seemed like a nice tidy way to have a space dedicated only to Windows and a space only for program installs.

Is that not a smart thing to do?

Have you tried setting the affinity to just one core for LFS?

HDD partitioning and process affinity shouldn't have any effect on this. ATM there are two things I can think of. HW manufacturers can be quite sloppy, perhaps the Win XP drivers for your MB are a bit dodgy. If you have a Win 7 install disk, it might be worth a shot. The other possibility is - obviously - a faulty MB.

It's interesting that I reproduced the clock slowdown under heavy load on another machine. I guess there are some things I don't know about how Windows gets the hardware time.

I do not have a win 7 disc.

I ran some stop watch tests this morning and it is gross. I did this all off the same replay.

LFS Race Time
6:31.83

Stopwatch with Fraps Running: 6:32.25 (a hair off, but almost within error of me clicking the stopwatch)
Stopwatch without Fraps: 6:47.12


personally did not believe these results, i repeated the test with two different stopwatches running side by side without fraps
LFS time is still 6:31.83
Original Stopwatch: 6:51.28
New Stopwatch: 6:51.31 (within my personal error of clicking the watches)

I then started to time individual laps and found a 5 second discrepancy between my watches and the lap time recorded by LFS

---

So is this something that can be dealt with in the BIOS or drivers or is it a mechanical (I know the RTS is not mechanical, but a actual flawed component on the board). If it is a BIOS setting or driver, fine, I can continue to work on this, but this is a brand new MoBo and I do not want to get into repairing the board. If settings and drivers won't fix it, I will get on the phone and get after the manufacturer for a replacement.

I will also add that it seems to be most prevalent in LFS. I ran some stop-watch tests in Nascar 2003 Season and found 0.1-0.2seconds discrepancy on a ~1:30 lap, I immediately closed NR2003, opened LFs and did the same thing and there is a 5 second discrepancy on a ~1;30 lap

Quote from jmeade :

:shrugs: I donno, just seemed like a nice tidy way to have a space dedicated only to Windows and a space only for program installs.

Is that not a smart thing to do?

It could be without TRIM.
Windows XP does not support the TRIM command so after a short while your SSD will be very slow. It seems an extra small partition would just exacerbate things.
Not saying that is the problem you are having because you are using memory during your driving. But it is just one thing I noticed and I would get a trash collection program as soon as possible before that is another problem you would have to deal with.
http://www.maximumpc.com/artic ... /white_paper_trim_command

I can count out faulty hardware (I think) I ran went into the bios and ran the clock against the stopwatch and the bios clock is bang on.

I went into windows and just sitting on the desktop, it does not count seconds off evenly
it counts like 1...2...3...4...5...6.......7.8..9...10...11...12...13...14...15......16..17...18...19...20
The thing is that 1 minute in Windows still equals 1 minute on my watch just sitting on my desktop

I have run process explorer while watching the clock and see no spikes aligning with the clock getting snagged

So I ran LFS and widows clock and a stopwatch together
Windows Clock: 1:00 (as accurately as I could gauge it with it stuttering every few seconds)
LFS Clock: 59.74 ( am willing to say this is equal to windows)
Stopwatch: 1.01:85

So the windows clock slows down when LFS is running, is there any way to view the bios clock while running LFS...is that a logical diagnostic step to take?