Hi,
Did anyone notice much more frequent disconnections on latest patches (8,9, possibly earlier) or recently in general? Recently i just cannot play at all. as soon as there are more than few players on a server, it just disconnects pretty soon. I tried installing P2 but it didn't find fonts (i'll try to bring the font files from original LFS zip but for now i didn't try it)

I can see the other cars just fine (no lag with them), but it just disconnects. as the title says, i've noticed more than once that it's sometimes preceded with "MP Replay, out of stash space" (iirc).

there hasen't been any changes to my computer, i'm pretty clean from virus/trojans (although there's always this chance), maybe issues with ISP, but the thing that alerted me that it might be a bug is this message from LFS before disconnection.

Maybe the master server has gone through some changes recently? maybe new patches to dedi servers?

I'm running on winXP Pro SP1, FX5600 ultra, ADSL 1.5M/96kbps.

Scawen: do u have any data on the amount of disconnections? do the servers send this info to the master server?

Help pls, i just can't race :/

ps. some more info:
ping times are fine on the multiplayer servers list (100-300, most around 120-150, it's always been this way here), this happens on any server i connect to usually, the connection procedure is not as smooth as it used to be (wait long time on some sections, like "waiting for 1st message" etc), and sometimes i need 2-3 tries to be able to connect.

tried with P3. the same :/

I was going to make a post about this. Im having similar problems. For no apparent reason about 2-3 months ago I started getting disconects, or every car lagging (with my connection "bar" rising slowly) somtimes it goes away somtimes it doesnt and i get disconected. I have changed OS's recently (from Win2K to XP64) and still have this problem. I have also changed firewalls and virus checkers with the OS change.

Another strange thing is the fact that i can usually race for about 30-40 minutes with no problems then it just starts happening, and continues to do so on most servers i join from then on. If i get a timeout/disconected from a server, the Master Server list takes longer to respond than normal, and all pings are slightly higher.

It definetly seems to happen on servers with more people on (about 10+), but I have had it happen on servers with only 2 or 3 people on also. It also seems to happen regardless of having a good constant ping to the server.

Finally, when this was happeing to me yestarday (every car lagging to me and my Connection bar timming out) ) I was asking some people on the server about it and they said that they could see my car fine and that all the Connection bars looked normal.

I am using S2 P2.

Sorry for all the info, but this is really starting to get to me and ruining my enjoyment of LFS. Im also finding it very hard to trouble-shoot.

Not quite as bad here, but I have gotten a lot more "MP Replay, out of stash space" messages than I did before P3 (still on P3). Ping times are fine, I always get well below 100ms on my fave As3 servers for example. Yet when I connect, the green bar goes high, sometimes goes all the way to red and occasionally disconnects even when there's nothing else using the 'net connection.

Playing on any server with a ping of over 100ms is almost impossible.. having said that, I get a much better quality connection to demo servers. After getting disconned from registered-side servers, I can play fine on the demo servers. On some occasions they too are affected :\

Dunno any way of improving this.. maybe it's packets getting lost but still the ping is ok?

@DratsaB: try to close/disable antivir and especially software firewall. I closed the firewall and it didn't help, but it might help on some scenarios. gonna try to reset the ADSL modem and reboot the PC. although i don't have much hopes that it'll help.

edit-
well, it didn't help for me. i just joined a host with 20 racers and just spectated, disconnected after about 3-4 mins. i joined another host with 5 cars, tried to enter pits, nothing. a green bar started rising at the bottom left and after few seconds i disconnected. during the whole time i was able to see other cars just fine without noticable lags.

this is really nasty. it's just impossible for me to race...

Haven't raced too much recently, but I also was getting this problem a while back. But it was only one server that it seemed to happen on - I think there was/is a gfs motodrom.de server that was always full of AS3/GTR racers?

Anyway, I'd get the exact same problem - my bar steadily creeping up even though i was getting no lag on the cars. What I was getting lag on was the messages and chat, votes, etc, which would suddenly all burst through at once.

Sometimes it would be the other way round, and I'd be receiving all the messages and stuff, but I'd be sat looking at an empty piece of tarmac with "(lag x.xx)" hovering above.

I noticed that when this was happening, I seemed to be the only person on the server who was affected by it. It also seemed worse when the server was at capacity. Then, it suddenly stopped and the last few times I've driven on that server, it's been fine.

How does LFS netcode work anyway? It seems bizarre that I can "lose connection" even though I'm comfortably watching all the other cars go round with no lag. (Or does it mean I'm receiving data but the server isn't getting what I'm sending?) And is the car positions and in-game messages/votes/etc handled separately, which is why one or the other can fail independently?

Quote from avih :

it's just impossible for me to race...

Well every cloud has a silver lining. Sometimes I'd actually feel quick round AS3 in the GTR cars until you show up.

That's precisely what's happening to me, Strobe. Thing is, it's not only the motodrom.de GTR server (yeah that's the one alright )..

It'd be kinda sweet 2kno wot's goin on wit dis stufz0r u kno, sorta anoyink

Is the server recording a replay? That is the only time I have seen regular disconnections where a server seems to have no prior or obvious issues and a server crash has not occurred.

Quote from Gunn :

Is the server recording a replay? That is the only time I have seen regular disconnections where a server seems to have no prior or obvious issues and a server crash has not occurred.

can a player know that about the server?

although, i have a feeling it's not related...

I've had the message: "MP Replay: Out of stash space" pop out, but never a disconnect due to it. During one Endu race it happened twice on a single lap.

I've had similar experience even on servers with sub 100ms ping time (most notably the OLFSL servers) - I get disconnected in a race but I can spectate fine for over an hour.

People have said that I was lagging massively while I could see them moving smoothly and the latency bars on the lower left weren't that high really. Always put it down to my outgoing bandwidth and the route towards the server. On rare occassions I've been on servers which obviously must of had some problem because they kept on dropping people, not just me, after 16 or so connections where active while no one seemed to notice any lag whatsoever.

On none of these occassions though have I seen the "MP Replay: Out of stash space" message - usually I have MP replay recording off anyway.

Is there a list of Ports that should be open on your router for a Client of LFS?
Or should ports be opened only if hosting a server? (im guessing this wouldnt be a problem, as i would expect it to not work at all if it was a ports problem, not intermitentaly/after a period of time, but i may be wrong.)

Also, where does LFS get its connection settings? Like how fast your connection is etc. The only place I have seen Connection options is in the "Hosting" section.


on a side note :-Yesterday, I managed to have several races (on different servers) without any problems, first time in a long while that has happend.

does it still happen for you guys? (the disco's?) I'm wondering if it's either a new bug or simply some internet router/hub somewhere along the line that refuses or refused to work properly.

No, it won't be a new bug. Sometimes, your internet connection can be bad for several weeks, and cause lag and so on. I have no idea why but all i can say is people have had this kind of problem before and then after some weeks, it's miraculously fixed. When we've looked into it closely, it can be narrowed down to problems with sending UDP packets, receiving UDP packets, sending TCP packets or receiving TCP packets.

If you have problems now that you didn't have before, it can only be your computer, or your internet connection, or that of the actual host you are racing on. You can check some things on your pc like making sure it doesn't have extra background processes running, try increasing the minimum sleep in LFS Misc Options, to make sure Windows has enough time to update its vital tasks like receiving packets.

Good to know, I thought it was more network related than LFS. Cheers for the confirmation!

Quote from Scawen :

No, it won't be a new bug. Sometimes, your internet connection can be bad for several weeks, and cause lag and so on. I have no idea why but all i can say is people have had this kind of problem before and then after some weeks, it's miraculously fixed. When we've looked into it closely, it can be narrowed down to problems with sending UDP packets, receiving UDP packets, sending TCP packets or receiving TCP packets.

If you have problems now that you didn't have before, it can only be your computer, or your internet connection, or that of the actual host you are racing on. You can check some things on your pc like making sure it doesn't have extra background processes running, try increasing the minimum sleep in LFS Misc Options, to make sure Windows has enough time to update its vital tasks like receiving packets.

Thanks for your answer. I do have problems that i didn't have before, that's for sure. I was racing regularly without any issues and in the last few weeks it's quite impossible for me to finish more than one race.

There have been no changes to my computer. it's pretty clean from viruses, extra proccesses and stuff that sits in the tray etc. No new firewall or any other software that might affect for this matter. I regularly monitor my cpu and network traffic and there's nothing new here too.

As i've further investigated the issue, it seems that more gamers recently suffer from high ping times from Israel. So it might indeed be a (hopefully) temporal routing/network issue.

However, the UDP issues that you brought up are usually not visible at the servers list and their ping readings (or perhaps to a very small extent that doesn't indicate the actual sevirity). I was thinking, if you can create a utility or add a button on LFS to check the network pattern that LFS uses. Maybe add a server API for udp respons time and allow a user to test the connection to this particular server using the type of connection that LFS uses during a race. Of course, a user won't be able to issue this test more than, say, once a minute per server to prevent exessive load.

Thanks again for your reply,
avih

-edit
maybe even a TCP fallback can be programmed if UDP doesn't work efficiently?

Quote from avih :

-edit
maybe even a TCP fallback can be programmed if UDP doesn't work efficiently?

I don't know if you had seen a mention of it in a thread sometime back, but there is TCP fallback for incoming car position updates. You can invoke it manually by using CTRL-T when you connect to a server.

thx, i'll check that. just looked at the keys pdf at the docs dir and couldn't find CTRL-T there, but there's shift-F8 which is network debug. I'll try both.

update:
TCP fallback doesn't solve anything, but it's nice to have. network debug (f8) shows nothing special when disconnecting, but when connection fails when i try to connect to a server sometimes i see quite a lot of "sending udp packet, sending again, sending again..." and then it just fails to connect.

so it might be an ISP issue, but if i won't be able to solve it then i won't be able to play LFS anymore only.... grrr so anoying.

Uhh today was terrible, was on dRSC Battle Grounds #1. The list showed a ping of 20ms so I thought hey great, no lag. Surprise surprise, my green little bar was up there.. going red, staying high, lagging blah blah. Eventually had to leave cuz I was gonna take someone out sooner or later. Why such a good ping, yet terrible "quality" of connection :S

Hmm got the same prob today, and think I finally found out what it is.. Getting over 500ms pings to my ISP alone :o

Seems ukonline in so'ton is just crap :\

I don't want to create new thread about this..and i havn't found anything about my problem( i suck at searching) so here it goes:

I just bought d-link wireless router DI-524:
I configured it so my server is now visible on list( it wasn;t before) everythng is fine except online play...i can enter any server i want got low pings as usual..but i got disconnected every couple mins(sometimes after 1 min sometimes after 5 )...no it;s not long rising green bar it disconnects me immediately....what have i missed? can anyone help me with right configuration of this router..i never had similar problems with my connection...it started just after i connected my router...i can't play online coz of this can anyone help me ?

sry for double post:

i think i solved my problem..

To make my own server visible i had to add it to virtual servers section in router config...i also added lfs with same port range in application sections...they must have been fighting toghether becouse when i disabled virtual server lfs stopped disconnectingn me....strange coz this router was always telling me when 2 things are fighting with each other..now he didn;t oh well i hope problem is solved.

well maybe somebody will have this problem too so i posted what i did.

Solved partially (for me only, rest of the users on that ISP still suffer). Follow on this thread.

Problem/Solution summary: the ISP let normal accounts deteriorate in connection quality when they launched a "Gamers" service (pay more -> get better connectivity). They changed my routing to that of the "Gamers" service. Works for me but still sucks otherwise.