Quote from Boris Lozac :

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...

90% percent of people here is what, like 15? (considering multiple posts). how many people race lfs on a daily basis? like 1000? I wouldn't call this thread representative

also most of the posts were telling about several applications running in the background, even downloading stg in the background, which I find ridiculous. If you want to play online, close everything except your firewall, everything takes up a little cpu time, a little bandwidth, whatever. you are also messing up other people's races, who cared enough to shut down unnecessary applications.

the only things running besides lfs for me are a firewall and the antivirus software, which has autoscan turned off of course

the only thing bothering me is like mentioned above, when someone is connecting you cannot enter/exit pits, which is annoying as it is usually associated with a lag as well and takes like 5-10 seconds. otherwise LFS's online play is flawless for me.

also, turn on compressed skins, might help reduce stutters.

Quote from csurdongulos :

90% percent of people here is what, like 15? (considering multiple posts). how many people race lfs on a daily basis? like 1000? I wouldn't call this thread representative

also most of the posts were telling about several applications running in the background, even downloading stg in the background, which I find ridiculous. If you want to play online, close everything except your firewall, everything takes up a little cpu time, a little bandwidth, whatever. you are also messing up other people's races, who cared enough to shut down unnecessary applications.

the only things running besides lfs for me are a firewall and the antivirus software, which has autoscan turned off of course

the only thing bothering me is like mentioned above, when someone is connecting you cannot enter/exit pits, which is annoying as it is usually associated with a lag as well and takes like 5-10 seconds. otherwise LFS's online play is flawless for me.

also, turn on compressed skins, might help reduce stutters.

Good point, but you should consider following...

Your're right that there are lots of everyday racers, so this relatively low amount of complains says nothing. But only some part of these guys visits the forum and even less part of them reports a problem(personally, I know a bunch of "amateur" LFS'ers who don't even know about any forum). So it would be good to do some investigation of this problem. There can be some problems with master server causing flaws when downloading skins, who knows?

LFS only downloads skins if you are stationary / between races if your bandwidth is tight it waits. What it cannot do is magically turn your router into a £250 QoS router that can allocate bandwidth to individual machines on your network, or integrate into the operating system as a bit-torrent load balancing server. If you are playing an online game, then you need to shut down your other internet related goodies.

I would bet money, if I had any, that all the people suffering from this stuttering are either doing stuff in the background or are infected with some form of malware.

DirectX grants no control over balancing your internet bandwidth, it's handled by a Windows process known as QoS which tries to guarantee each program a 'fair' slice of the pie - the problem is balancing bandwidth in this way does not guarantee low or consistent ping - both of which are needed for games - but tasks like bit torret or email clients are not effect by.

This isn't unique to LFS, it's any online game.

It doesnt matter how much bandwidth the game uses or is available, if your modem/router is busy with another task when LFS is ready to send/receive it's time stamped packets then your time stamped packets have to wait, and arrive at the wrong time...

I payed some more attention to it and I do have more slight freezing then before. This even happens when nobody connects, leaves, no skins are downloading or anything else, just when racing and suddenly it hangs a bit, a slight second and the fps drops enormously.

I went back to the U version and drove around there online: not a single stutter since 2 nights.
Went back to the V version, just was online doing AS national with the XFR, 4th turn and the freezing happens again with a huge fps drop.

Also starts have become a lot more laggy then before, including also higher fps drops.
Skin compression is on and graphics quality is set at low.

Tested some other games and I can conclude 100% sure: my internet connection and fps is very good to play LFS with, have one of the best connections in Flanders and an updated computer. No other programs were running in the background beside my AVG 7.5 virus scanner.

Quote from Becky Rose :

LFS only downloads skins if you are stationary / between races if your bandwidth is tight it waits. What it cannot do is magically turn your router into a £250 QoS router that can allocate bandwidth to individual machines on your network, or integrate into the operating system as a bit-torrent load balancing server. If you are playing an online game, then you need to shut down your other internet related goodies.

I would bet money, if I had any, that all the people suffering from this stuttering are either doing stuff in the background or are infected with some form of malware.

DirectX grants no control over balancing your internet bandwidth, it's handled by a Windows process known as QoS which tries to guarantee each program a 'fair' slice of the pie - the problem is balancing bandwidth in this way does not guarantee low or consistent ping - both of which are needed for games - but tasks like bit torret or email clients are not effect by.

This isn't unique to LFS, it's any online game.

It doesnt matter how much bandwidth the game uses or is available, if your modem/router is busy with another task when LFS is ready to send/receive it's time stamped packets then your time stamped packets have to wait, and arrive at the wrong time...

You might be getting the point, but I have a bit differend experience. I have a small 2PC NATed network at home sharing 3072/256 ADSL connection using crappy dumb router. And I can simulatenously browse the web, download via FTP and bittorrent and play flawlessy CS, LFS or even WoW on another computer. I bet that my router should be pretty busy by handling all this stuff and I have never had a single lag problem related to excessive bandwidth usage. And people here are not complainig about lagging - or to be exact not only lagging. Serious FPS drop while downloading skins or LFS stuttering cannot be caused by high ping rate.

Version U worked great for me, and so does version V. No problems at all so far.

@ Becky..
No i do not have any downloads in the background or something, just Kerio Firewall 2.5, AVG free, MSN, and sometimes Mirc...
That all worked fine with U, without stutters..
As i said, people seems to deny this problem, and want to believe in the "improved multiplayer experience" but it is not improved... Something has happened after Patch V, which causes these stutters, and Scawen needs to find out what is it, because it is really ruining my online experience...
We are so loyal to LFS, that we seems to deny obvious problems with it, and hide them under the carpet..

Just a short note about how many percent of "the people here" are having problems wit online play: There is a poll on the top of this thread, you know, and according to that atm 20.31 % are finding multiplayer on patch V worse than on patch U. I know that this is not represantative either but it's certainly not "90 %".

And for further clarification: More than 20 % is probably enough to consider the fact that there might be a problem somewhere (could be that 20 % are having processes running that f**k up LFS). I don't know where the problem lies, but as I said before I didn't notice any problems myself. Not even when firefox, thunderbird and AVGuard are enabled, but than again, I'm on a 6MBit connection which seems to be rather reliable and I usually race on servers with a ping around 50.

@Boris: I can only comment on what I experience myself, and if I don't have any problems whatsoever. Stating that, certainly does not mean denying that others might have problems .

Nobody is denying anything... I'd say your experiencing system load problems on your machine... It might be your system is just too slow to buffer the information, skins etc from players joining and handling the existing cars on the track at the same time...

And when you have to grab statistics, at least get them right... It's 20 % that think it's worse, not 90 %...

No problems here.

Except my router that keeps rebooting itself randomly, but that's hardly LFS fault.










Anyone want to buy a great Zyxel ADSL-router?

<spam>

Quote from spankmeyer :

No problems here.
Anyone want to buy a great Zyxel ADSL-router?

I will exchange it for my OvisLink ARM-104
</spam>

Quote from spankmeyer :

No problems here.

Except my router that keeps rebooting itself randomly, but that's hardly LFS fault.










Anyone want to buy a great Zyxel ADSL-router?

What's your current router? Possibly a Prestige 660HW-61 S (had one of those, got it replaced once and got the money back the 2nd time)?

Currently using 660H-D1 Triple Play (supplied by Telia, not sure if it works with other than Telia(Sonera)), and a Prestige 336M connected to it. Better than the old Zyxel and a D-Link I've used previously.

for me it's worse than with U, lots of crashes caused by warping cars.

Quote from bbman :

And when you have to grab statistics, at least get them right... It's 20 % that think it's worse, not 90 %...

I haven't looked ad the poll while saying that, i got those 90 % from the posts here, i exagerated yes, but people were saying as i was saying, it's better than U most of the times, but there are stutters which do happen, and can cause major wreck, or something, and that is worrying me.. but i know that Scawen will fix that surelly..
Maybe these 20% of people including me, really do have some non LFS related problems that is causing this, but i didn't have them before..

Quote from Becky Rose :

it's handled by a Windows process known as QoS which tries to guarantee each program a 'fair' slice of the pie

first thing you should do with any new windows installation ... disable the useless qos service

guys I'm NOT talking about bandwidth problems here... I have a 13mbit line and I'm not stupid enough to not tell the difference between net lag and when my machine freezes. It's not a net problem. The big warps we're seeing is when the pc freezes for some reason or other, which basically stops everything including tcp packets being sent/recieved. Judging by the explanations people have written it sounds EXACTLY like what I have. I may be wrong on the loading part, but it is most certainly caused by a process doing *something* with the hard disk. Perhaps it's freezing up the ide channel or something? Whatever it is, it's caused by certain processes. Some people need to realise that closing all your unneeded apps isn't enough, most malicious or intrusive processes are always running in the background and you need to kill them manually. The process I had trouble with was a file indexing service that was obviously probing my hdd at very inappropriate times. Perhaps the new LFS patch has introduced something that makes it more vulnerable to things like this? I believe it started for me with test patch 30.

Please don't dismiss what I'm saying here, it's not just a placebo effect. This process was the cause of what many people are complaining about.

Turning file indexing service off is 2nd thing you do after fresh XP install

Can't find any trace of these problems you mention, LFS plays nice and smooth, I run only LFS not any other software at same time as I want good experience, immersion, whatever, without anything coming to drag me out from enjoying LFS, no hiccups or popups, phones or whistles are allowed when I go online

Quote from Davo :

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 agree with this, i had noticed it a little bit a few days ago, but my HD failed last night so i went for a full clean install today, mine was stuttering really bad today and i was wondering WTF was going on, once i had the skins downloaded into the skins-x folder it was playable.

i was convinced i had forgot to install some GFX drivers and was scratching my head for ages illepall

Quote from Becky Rose :

I would bet money, if I had any, that all the people suffering from this stuttering are either doing stuff in the background or are infected with some form of malware.

...

fresh install last night, game worked perfectly in single player mode, i had to practice with the inferno setups (i lost all my old ones when the HD failed yesterday )

there was next to NOTHING on my system, not even a virus checker at that time, no MSN, nothing!!!!!

it stutterd like a fooker REALLY bad

this is with a wired broadband connection, after a few mins, which i assume was all the skins being downloaded and stuff, it settled down and i could join the race, but it did stutter a few times while racing, when somebody else joined??

whats intresting is that this has got worse scince i did a fresh install, i`m thinking its related to downloading skins, as my skins-x folder was massive until last night, and i race the same people 90% of the time.

Quote from JTbo :

...as I want good experience, immersion, whatever, without anything coming to drag me out from enjoying LFS, no hiccups or popups, phones or whistles are allowed when I go online

The problem some of are having is, that's EXACTLY what U was offering without us having to jump through hoops to hope for a stutter-free race.

How is that going overlooked? Bunch of tech-wannabes jump in this thread suggesting to disable this, close that. Do you not understand that before patch V, all we had to do was click on the LFS icon and race with NO PROBLEMS? And now V is out we have to flinch at any slight indication of lag, because it could be ''The Stutter" comming to wreck us and all cars around us.

With Boris and I, can you not see how this concerns us? We try and race on servers with strict admining. It would be stupid of us to not be concerned over a NEW problem that could potentially get us banned from those servers (wrecks).

It's obvious to me that this problem exists. Regardless of arguing over what percentage claims it exists or not, all I know is it exists FOR ME and is close to RUINING the sim experience. All I want is the same experience I had before, without having to alter the way I run my system in hopes that it MIGHT fix the stutter.

Quote from Slopi :

The problem some of are having is, that's EXACTLY what U was offering without us having to jump through hoops to hope for a stutter-free race.

How is that going overlooked? Bunch of tech-wannabes jump in this thread suggesting to disable this, close that. Do you not understand that before patch V, all we had to do was click on the LFS icon and race with NO PROBLEMS? And now V is out we have to flinch at any slight indication of lag, because it could be ''The Stutter" comming to wreck us and all cars around us.

With Boris and I, can you not see how this concerns us? We try and race on servers with strict admining. It would be stupid of us to not be concerned over a NEW problem that could potentially get us banned from those servers (wrecks).

It's obvious to me that this problem exists. Regardless of arguing over what percentage claims it exists or not, all I know is it exists FOR ME and is close to RUINING the sim experience. All I want is the same experience I had before, without having to alter the way I run my system in hopes that it MIGHT fix the stutter.

But as others don't have this problem can it really be fault in LFS or is it something in those systems which makes it prone to this problem?

Is there something common in those systems suffering from this, that is what should be looked then.

If there is few people with problem, majority without problem, why majority should agree there is problem in LFS?

My job is to fix computers, hardware and software problems, also network stuff, if that makes me tech wannabe then I guess I am

Anyway I hope that you can find solution to your problem, it surely can be something LFS does differently than before but it is somehow related to your installation and enviroment too because there is majority that does not suffer from issue.

Quote from JTbo :

If there is few people with problem, majority without problem, why majority should agree there is problem in LFS?

Not even what was being asked of 'the majority' ok? This is a simple poll, to ask who MIGHT have this issue, then we can work on resolving it based on similarities. NO ONE asked for you, or anyone else to just fall in and agree with us, but by no means does that give you the right to pretend it doesn't exist.

Not to mention this is only being discussed on the forums. How many people don't use these boards? How many of them have this problem? Who knows...

Point is, if you don't have this problem, good for you. But there's no reason to come here and suggest "fixes" that don't work. Especially when NO FIXES were needed before patch V (the fact that some people seem to be overlooking).

Simple questioning of "What's been changed?" in a trouble shooting aspect is the normal route to go about fixing a problem like this. So, what's been changed? The install of Patch V, and that's it.

Quote from Slopi :

Not even what was being asked of 'the majority' ok? This is a simple poll, to ask who MIGHT have this issue, then we can work on resolving it based on similarities. NO ONE asked for you, or anyone else to just fall in and agree with us, but by no means does that give you the right to pretend it doesn't exist.

Not to mention this is only being discussed on the forums. How many people don't use these boards? How many of them have this problem? Who knows...

Point is, if you don't have this problem, good for you. But there's no reason to come here and suggest "fixes" that don't work. Especially when NO FIXES were needed before patch V (the fact that some people seem to be overlooking).

Simple questioning of "What's been changed?" in a trouble shooting aspect is the normal route to go about fixing a problem like this. So, what's been changed? The install of Patch V, and that's it.

It would be pretending if I would say I have this problem.
Poll question was if multiplayer was better in U or V, I find it rather similar maybe bit smoother in V, also some say they have problem with patch V and I don't think that I have ignored that or said that they have not problem, only I mention that I have not this issue. I think it is much more useful than go saying patch V has bad multiplayer issues even I have not seen one.

I really don't get it why get so upset about it, really nobody is not disagreeing with you and that you have problem in multiplayer with patch V which you had not before.

Not upset at you. What I get upset at is the droves of people that this doesn't apply to, trying to throw out suggestions that no one knows will work or not, while apparently ignoring the fact that the only change made was patch V.

And yes, my bad, this pole was to ask about the overall experience, not just about those who had lag. Though, that was the entire intention of Boris. I say that only because I was on the server with him when he suggested making this pole.

Right now I'm waiting on YouTube to churn out my tiny video (sure I'll be waiting an hour on this...) so I can link it here and show exactly what the problem looks like.

So, I ask you to please forgive my frustrations while Boris and I and the rest of the people that are affected by this try and sort it out.

Much quicker than I hoped on YouTube...

Let me explain this video. Yes, Fraps was recording, no that is not the source of the lag you see in this replay. Although during the race, I had no lag at this corner, during the replay, the exact lag I normally experienced online occured while recording.

My game drive and Fraps drive (seperate) are both defragged, not dying and have plenty of room. As you see me come up on the inside of TypeR and start to pass on the corner, you will notice the screen 'snag' and the sound 'pop' a couple of times. This is very "light" stuttering compared to the bad type that will wreck you without much chance of recovery. Although this is much lighter, it displays the exact same symptoms of the stutter that Boris and I have been talking about.

The "Bad Stutter" happens for about 4-5 seconds. You lose all feedback from your wheel and you have no idea where you are on the track anymore. When the stutter clears, you're often times thrust into a wall or off the track as your wheel regains FFB and you are warped to where you should be on the track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuj5tynjF_U