These stutters really begining to drive me crazy, so i wanted to make a poll to see how many people find multiplayer after Patch V worse than before.
Yesterday i cause a big wreck racing at the STCC new & bronze (sorry again everyone for that). It happened at the BL rev chicane..
I noticed that new player was connecting and that his Helmet skin start to auto download, and that caused a MAJOR stutter to me, like 1, 2 FPS and lasted for a second or two, enough to loose control over your car, especially if you have two cars beside you going into the chicane..
This really is a big problem for me now, i mean, i don't want to turn off the Auto download function, but it seems that that is the only solution..

Most frequently, these stutters happens when someone leaves the garage, or someones skin/helmet is being downloaded, but they happened also for no apparent reason a couple of times.
Either it's stutters or a HUGE lag that lasts very long..
So let's see how is your experience so far..

i notice more stuttering than usual as well. and also, warping. it is very frightening to look into your mirror and see a car barreling towards you @100mph as you approach a hairpin... then all of the sudden the car is going 40mph and behind you at a safe distance again. most of the time its better than u. i feel like i can pressure people more and people try to pressure me more than usual as well without bumping.

I was there with Boris and I commented that I was having some similar issues. After a while I decided to sit out a race (before I wrecked someone else) and see if I could remedy it.

As is I leave my web browser open so I can download new sets if need be, so I left that be. I closed my AntiVirus completely (just had it dissabled before) and also shut down my firewall along with mIRC (IRC program). That's all I closed, then went back into the game and raced at least 6 more races with no serious stutter while driving.

I did vote this as worse than U, because with U I never had to close any background apps and just raced fine, online or offline. But, on a whole, asside from the stutter, it would appear that everything seems more fluid, especially in larger races with more cars, so it's hard for me to say I'm totally unhappy with patch V

Agree with you two, that it is more fluid now, and i can have closer racing now, much more confident going in the batlle and driving bumper to bumper, so in that area, a deffinite improvement, but when those stutters do happen than it all goes in the water..
Funny, i to have Mirc opened in the background, so that may be the issue.

this may or may not be related to the latest patch, but I had a background process that made my LFS stutter out of control all the time, even though I would get 100fps. It was due to a cd burning application package called Nero Home (v7). When installed, it will run a process called NMBigMonitor.exe that simply runs all the time, even if you haven't opened Nero for days. It seems to cause your HDD to go crazy when playing LFS, and at one point I was even convinced that my new HDD was faulty and went into multiple support channels to try and remedy it.

As soon as I would "end task" on this process LFS would be good again. So of course I uninstalled the application... good thing it was only a trial.. I'll never use it again.

Other people may have this problem too... infact I recommend everyone who's having issues to look in their task manager and check each and every process on a process search website. Make sur eyou know what they are, and test LFS with and without them running (oen by one) to pinpoint the problem.

Noticed no difference in the new patch but then again I've been downloading the test patches so if anything had happened to me it would have happened a while ago.

Quote from Slopi :

As is I leave my web browser open so I can download new sets if need be, so I left that be. I closed my AntiVirus completely (just had it dissabled before) and also shut down my firewall along with mIRC (IRC program). That's all I closed, then went back into the game and raced at least 6 more races with no serious stutter while driving.

Firefox may be the culprit I get terrible lags (as in frame freezes not warp) when I leave firefox doing anything, downloading or a live updating page (like LFS World).

I can second having join lags and some stuttering whilst downloading skins.
The skin downloading doesn´t really bother that muhch, but to me the join lag is worse than ever that I can recall.

Yeah same here...pit lag is really bad for me and also the stutter...get very low fps when it happens but it doesnt happen on a regular basis...but when it does happen,its the absolut worst...

I have not had this yet, and hopefully never will. I have raced mostly on the STCC servers since patch V, I don't use firefox but i do often have IE open and MSN running, also i have my firewall and anti-virus on the go.

Yep, I started experiencing this a month or two ago. Everything will be running smoothly and then I'll get up to several seconds of stuttering, where my fps will drop to around 5 and I have to do my best to keep the car on the road. It doesn't happen very often, but it does seem to occur mostly around the pit area, although I've experienced it elsewhere.

I've also noticed some crazy warping as well. The lights will go green and the car in front of me stays completely stationary, making me swerve as though I need to avoid him, but a second or so later he's right where he should be. I also question every single incident in front of me, such as someone losing control and spinning, because often they'll warp back onto the track driving normally. It's annoying, yes, but luckily doesn't happen often enough to ruin the online experience, at least IMO.

as a 56ker, my connection drops out less..but i do notice more stutter on pit and starts, but overall improvement

Quote from DrDNA :

Yep, I started experiencing this a month or two ago. Everything will be running smoothly and then I'll get up to several seconds of stuttering, where my fps will drop to around 5 and I have to do my best to keep the car on the road. It doesn't happen very often, but it does seem to occur mostly around the pit area, although I've experienced it elsewhere.

I've also noticed some crazy warping as well. The lights will go green and the car in front of me stays completely stationary, making me swerve as though I need to avoid him, but a second or so later he's right where he should be. I also question every single incident in front of me, such as someone losing control and spinning, because often they'll warp back onto the track driving normally. It's annoying, yes, but luckily doesn't happen often enough to ruin the online experience, at least IMO.

It sounds like you have a process running that is hogging the HDD, like explained above. The reason I'm sure of this is because you say it happens aorund the pit area. Places like blackwood have moer objects around the pit area that require the HDD to be accessed, so if the HDD is already struggling with something else you will get stutters.

It is NOT a graphics issue, if you use a program like fraps like I do, you will notice your FPS is still high... the stutters are merely LFS waiting on the hard drive to catch up. To confirm this, next time you get stutters watch your HDD light on your case and I bet it goes crazy every time LFS starts pausing.

The only time the HD is accessed for something track related is while you see "Loading" at the bottom left of the screen. After that it resides in the memory (RAM) and is only loaded and accessed from there. HDs are way way WAY too slow to load a track all the time during runtime. It might work for games with huge areas like in some role playing games, where you can slowly load the surroundings in the background, but not for such tiny racetracks with quickly moving cars we have in LFS.

LFS world does some update every now and then if left open, this shows in lfs as split second pauses every 30 sec or so, but other than that nothing problems, except my car missing 50hp or so, lol.

My rubbish wireless connection lags a bit now and again, but it's been commented on less since patch V than it was before. Maybe because it's not as bad at my end, maybe because I've raced against people who can cope, or maybe patch V is better. To be honest I think there are too many variables to put the blame (or otherwise) on LFS's patch.

I've never had stuttering before even using test patches and a few days ago I experienced it with patch V. And since then a few more times. Thought it might be winamp playing in the background or something else but after closing everythign down it continued. Hasn't happened again so it might've been the actual server but the other person didn't experince any stutering.

Not sure what's going on, but all this talk can't just be hype, something must've been changed to be causing this. The thing that has me stumped is why show up now and not in the test patches. My best guess is that it has something to do with the new sounds.

I usually put lfs.exe on abovenormal priority in the task manager which seems to reduce the stuttering, but it's not completely gone. It might be a placebo thing though, as I did not count the stutters and compared it

I haven't had any problems with patch V. No stuttering, no freezing whatsoever. LFS does seem to run more fluently (less of this slight warping of other cars), but I'm not 100% sure about it, so I voted "same as before" when I should have voted "definitely not worse, maybe even better" - which is not an option, of course

Ive had it once where i had new player connecting, lfs lagged, froze then got the blue screen of death, restarted and then had perfect racing bumper to bumper and didnt notice any lag at all.
Even with the crash the online play seems smoother so ive voted better.

didnt race very much online yet - but those few times i did - there wasnt any differnece.

But for those who didnt apply the testpatches there should be an imrovment since the startlag is gone.

To be honest, I've had those pitting/joining stutters from the beginning... Granted, my PC is old and slow (and in desperate need to replacing), but I really can't say if it's gotten worse... And even if it got worse, it's so marginally I couldn't tell...

One thing I can think of: Is skin compression now off by default? The change from compressed skins and uncompressed could be just the problem everybody is complaining about...

I voted as 'the same' but!; connection and join and download pausing are the no 1 issue for me (have always been), im not sure if the devs want to address this as part of s2, their probably just looking at finishing s2 features.

Summary of connection issues:

1. Connect pause
2. Join Pause
3. Skin download pause
4. Chat spam stutter
5. Connecting clients holding up connected clients (cant pit/exit pit/vote)
6. Timing out clients holding up connected clients (cant pit/exit pit)
7. Connecting clients canceling starts/votes

All of the above are ultimately unnecessary and get my goat up.

To help 1,2,4 (a bit) i disable my antivirus network protect, 3 disable autoskin download - but i would like another option in there of download skins when in pit.

Simon

It may be a bit strange, but since but V I noticed a little bit smoother connecting to servers. I usually use BrowseForSpeed, so maybe that's why...

But back to the topic. Altough patch V is a great improvement, I noticed well known short stutter when player leaves garage and so. No matter how common this issue is, I have never had it, just since patch V. Downloading skins produced a little (I say little because that's how I have them) slowdowns everytimes AFAIK. I can remember it even on patch P.

Ok, so 90 % of the people here are having that same problem as i am... but you seem to neglect it, like it's no big deal...
I mean, yes, close racing is improved, and yes, it really is "smoother online play", BUT, those stutters ruined dozens of races so far, and they always seem to happen when there are cars around me going in some difficult corner..
Before Patch V, when someone joins the server/leaves the garage/skin being downloaded, there were very very little stutters, totaly unnoticable, they couldn't ruin your race, but now, they really do..
Before, while someone's skin was being downloaded, the cars around me lagged a bit, but not much, but now it is lag AND stutter..

I know that we all respect Scawen's work, but it seems that people are denying this BIG problem, because they don't want to upset him, or something... i don't know..

I can't really vote for any of those. I can race closer to people without the worry of lag, but as soon as someone joins and downloads a skin i get very bad stutters. I think it is quite a big problem, as I've had close races ruined by this stuttering because it distracts me and I either hit the person involved in the battle with me because of the sudden FPS drop and lag, or i loose concentration and fall off the track.