Hello everyone,

I encountered today the problem that I could not join a server as a skin was queued for download but that skin was not downloading. It started during a racing session, when a skin of a fellow competitor was queued up and shown to be the next one to download, but the process never seems to stop. As a consequence other skins in the session are not downloaded. Eventually after leaving the server, the download still seemed to be "active", I was not able to join a different one.
After closing and restarting the LFS.exe I could join other servers again.

I failed to recreate the bug, but heard on the LFS Discord, that others were experiencing the same or similar issues.

PS: I'm not sure if it is the right subsection to post it in

For the last 3-4 weeks I also noticed skin downloading errors, both on my client and also heard from others on servers that there are skin download issues. I also got stuck on joining servers, while LFS was attempting to download a skin.

I thought it's just temporary but after the last month, it's getting frustrating There might be a problem with the skin delivery server?

Has been a problem for a little while. Most recently, today during the LRL stream, I couldn't load all of the skins I needed from those that joined without skins uploaded to the forum or my skins folder in advance. Bit of a shame.

I faced this problem twice last friday. I had a skin stuck in donwload, i tried rejoining the server but the same skin would stop the loading of the server. I could only rejoin after closing and reopening LFS, the other time i just had a skin downloading for 2 hours..

Same experience here, and for quite a few people at our event yesterday (we were switching cars every few races, so it probably occurred for us more than usual use). Nothing resolves it except restarting LFS, someone said they had to restart more than once.

It seemed to be occasional last week, but this week it seems more frequent. I have all the replays of the event if they're any help.

Quote from KevinRacer :

I faced this problem twice last friday. I had a skin stuck in donwload, i tried rejoining the server but the same skin would stop the loading of the server. I could only rejoin after closing and reopening LFS, the other time i just had a skin downloading for 2 hours..

Same problem here fix pls

I've been getting it too! Happened before LRL and today before TBOC. I'm on the most recent test patch

Same here, for the last few days i think. Downloading one skin forever.

same

you dont need to close lfs actually. save the replay.

go watch it. skins download in that.
then you log back in and you got the skins in folder.

however it can start all over again whenever the next car leaves pits.

i didnt see this thread at first.
so accidently posted this in technical assistance.

*sorry*

https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1960026#post1960026

@Ayoub2016 please correct side mirrors to correct view position, lol.
theres a video about how to somewhere in forums actually.

The weird thing is that when connecting to a server (for the first time) the skins download just fine, but once in-game the downloads get stuck trying to do so, and after a while it just throws error messages like:

SKIN : Receive error 2 - ABC_<skiname>
———————————————————————————————————————
Can't download skin - queue is full : ABC_<skiname> (followed by the one below)
Can't download skin : ABC_<skiname>
———————————————————————————————————————
And then sometimes after some time it just throws SKIN : Not Found - ABC_<skiname> so it "tries" to "restart" queueing downloads while still trying to download the same skin it has been stuck on.

If I disconnect from the server and try to join another one or watch a replay I get queueing errors so I need to restart/close the game as a temporary fix.

Have the same error. Skin stuck downloading in server, leaving to rejoin leaves the client stuck on queue. Need to restart lfs app for the skin(s) to continue downloading.

Occurs at random points with random skins.

same problem ... we manage races and it's very annoying to see drivers quit and reconnect .. i do not know what about consequence for the grid position for next race for example .
to avoid that, is there a command line ingame (admin) to kill the dld process ?

when i type /help, i saw "debug" command but need instruction complement ...

Same for me, it has never happened before.

Quote from pajkul :

Same for me, it has never happened before.

Did this happen minutes before you posted it?
Did the download succeed in the end or later after a retry?
I'm seeing a download from you in the logs at 27/Oct/2020:19:45:12 +0100 - it indicates you've at least downloaded it once.
Were there any other skins that failed to download in that way?

I'm looking into what can have happened to you guys, but atm I've no idea really. Looking at the web server logs I see the usual skin downloads - most succeed, some don't exist, but that's normal. So I'm still looking for clues on my end.

I just realised skins were downloaded through cloud flare. I've disabled this, so you will download from our server directly now.

Please let me know if this has any effect!

I just had this when loading a replay (-12/8 screenshot attached).

The skins don't download over several hours; it gets stuck permanently until you close LFS from what I can tell.
It seems to be a random skin every time, restarting LFS will usually successfully download the one that was stuck, but may or may not get stuck with another.

So far it did not have an effect for me. this screen has stuck like it is now for 5 minutes, after wich I ALT+F4

EDIT: Degats and I came from the same server

Still happening here, too. Regardless of the cause of the download not working, I think we need a tweak to LFS so that a stuck download will timeout instead of hanging. Network issues are never that far away.

It's very mysterious so far.

k_badam says he is using the latest test patch. I guess it's not related to the test patch, because it has been going fine since April without any problem. But to confirm that, are any of you getting the same fault with the official version?

Of course the code is designed so that there is a timeout if packets stop arriving.

The screenshot posted by Degats might be a clue. The negative number might indicate corruption (perhaps by a buffer overrun) or an unexpected way through the code.

Degats, would it be possible to share that replay? (Or anyone else who got that problem when starting a replay). If the same thing happens when I try to start the replay then I should be able to catch it. If this is reproducible by any means then I'm sure I'll be able to catch it.

To my mind, something has changed on the server. Otherwise how could copies of LFS develop a bug, several months after release? But of course LFS should not hang or become corrupted, whatever packets the server sends.

I enabled logging with the /log command. There's an http header line I don't remember: ETag: "4a6318a5-a5ac"
I don't know what that means but I'll have a look at how LFS deals with those header lines. At first sight it looks as if it simply ignores lines it doesn't recognise.

One last question, do you think it would be worth disabling skin downloads while we figure this out? If the bug often prevents people joining servers, that is worse than not seeing skins. I can temporarily stop skin downloads with a setting on the master server.

The Etag header is there for (browser) caching purposes, automatically added by the web server. It's fine if you ignore it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ETag

Quote from Scawen :

Racon says he is using the latest test patch. I guess it's not related to the test patch, because it has been going fine since April without any problem. But to confirm that, are any of you getting the same fault with the official version?

I confirm the same problem on the latest official version of LFS.
But it might be difficult to recreate, it seems to happen randomly.

Quote from Scawen :

One last question, do you think it would be worth disabling skin downloads while we figure this out? If the bug often prevents people joining servers, that is worse than not seeing skins.

It is an option, however some way of skipping the download of affected skin would be the best if it is doable in some way

Quote from Scawen :

k_badam says he is using the latest test patch. I guess it's not related to the test patch, because it has been going fine since April without any problem. But to confirm that, are any of you getting the same fault with the official version?

FWIW, I'm also using the test patch, though looking at my downloads I only changed from U7 to U11 on October 3rd. I've only noticed this issue over the last few weeks, so that *may* be related, though could be a red herring. I'd previously been using U7 since ~July last year with no issues.

Quote from Scawen :

The screenshot posted by Degats might be a clue. The negative number might indicate corruption (perhaps by a buffer overrun) or an unexpected way through the code.

Degats, would it be possible to share that replay? (Or anyone else who got that problem when starting a replay). If the same thing happens when I try to start the replay then I should be able to catch it. If this is reproducible by any means then I'm sure I'll be able to catch it.

When I reopened it after restarting LFS, it downloaded all the skins fine, so it seems to be somewhat random.

Here are some replays with a lot of skins, all of which at least one person had trouble with when on the server. It's possible you might be able to hit the issue purely based on the number of skins.

http://replays.newdimensionracing.com/mpr/LRL/2020/LRL2020_Round12_Race.mpr
http://replays.newdimensionracing.com/mpr/TBOC/2020/TBOC2020_Round2_SprintRace.mpr
https://tc-racing.co.uk/downloads/trr/BL2R_TRR2020_R40_R1b.mpr

FWIW on my end, yesterday I also downloaded a bunch of league replays and had no issues downloading any skin. Tested on plain LFS version U.

(ps I upped the max upload size for MPR to 32MB - could be handy for you)

Quote from Scawen :

But to confirm that, are any of you getting the same fault with the official version?

I've had these problems while using the official version 0.6U.

Something to add, might help: during the races of last days, I've had server joining hang on skin downloads couple of times (I press Alt+F4 so on the next try it joins fine), but when joined, most of the cars are just plain white (like if I turned skin downloads off in-client, but I didn't: I was using the 512 option all the time).