Hey guys,

I've had this problem since I downloaded Live for Speed in 2005. It only occurs online, while offline is fine and smooth.

Here is the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU498eu7oiY

I've been reading the forums for a solution, but with no success. There are other stuttering problems so I thought I would post a video with my problem I'm experiencing. In the video the framerate maintains above 20 fps, so it's not a lack of hardware power and I use broadband. I've tried the minium sleep option, but with little success.

GTR, GTR2 and rfactor run fine and smooth online with no stuttering at all. It only appears on LFS. This problem is frustrating and stops me from playing online.

I'm not here to put down the LFS netcode, just merely to rasie awareness of this problem and hope there's a solution or the development team could solve this problem with the next patch.
I think LFS is a great game and would love to play it online. Until this problem is solved, its GTR2 and rfactor in the meantime.

Any positive comments and help is welcome

Cheers

thats not stuttering, thats just.. really horrid lagging

stuttering would be when your FPS drops from like 100 to 5 or so

Note your connection bar down in the lower left corner, it is pretty high. You are lagging quite a bit on some servers I bet. Not many Aussies get a clean and lag-free environment, they usually suffer from this kind of problem on servers that aren't very close to them.

stuttering or lag, its a pain.

this is a stutter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... ;mode=related&search=

if its like that for every server, then you'll need to find a team or a league or something which mainly consists of austrailians (cause i know there are quite a few aussies here) and that would deffinetly help

Cheers for the advice.
I must admit the connection for most servers are 200ms and above. Still, I can race on rfactor with someone lagging at over 800ms yet its still smooth.

Take particular attention to the pings in the server list before you connect to a host. LFS defaults to LOWEST ping first to improve this annoying gameplay problem. The ping is the time it takes your PC to bounce a message from you to the host. Its like a response time.

The ping is measured in mS (milli-seconds) If you are joining servers that have a higher ping than 150mS your going to start noticing the lag alot more. The problem is, most populated servers are in Europe and USA so the ping from Australia is pretty shocking, (around 300mS) from Sydney.

Cant find any populated servers with a good ping?
Sometimes you can join a server that is located closer to you with a really good ping and that happens to be empty. Eventually other players in the same area will notice you in that server and also connect because they are also looking for lag free reacing. This attracts more racers with good ping and soon you have a good 10 or so players in the same server all with really good ping. Then you can start racing close and have a great tight race.

Apologies if you already know all this.

yes, i know how lag is measured but thanks anyway

unfortunately all the servers have a high ping and even the low pings with only 2 people still slightly lags. rfactor and GTR2 work fine on oversea servers. i only play online, so i'm hoping this problem can be fixed and minic rfactor's and gtr2's online code.....fingers crossed

I was first impressed with LFS because I was able to play it online with a dial-up connection and semi-old graphics card really-really smoothly (both fps-wise and lag-wise) to servers that were over 1500km away. So I stuck with it and bought S2 and got an ADLS connection to help out a bit more.

In fact I never even bothered to play anything on-line because I thought dial-up and gaming = "no point". So I was quite shocked to be able to race real-life people on-line on dial-up later last year.

So anyway, I was under the impression that LFS had much better gaming online because it was better at "extrapolating" the position of other players around you so warping was minimised and lag was sort of made rendundant to a degree. I've never played GTR2 or rfactor, so I have nothing to compare LFS to. Can any one else confirm that these other games experience less lag and perform better on-line? Just to correct my assumptions. Dont worry, I wont be leaving LFS, the physics are too good.

**WARNING** Blatant plug follows

www.mondaynightracing.com is an Aussie/NZ based league you might want to try.... we run full servers (23 slots currently) every monday night with very very few lag issues.

If your quick you might sign up in time for our new series to be announced soon!

As for rF, I have played this extensively online also, connection to US servers mainly, and found lag to be just as big an issue as playing on UK or US LFS servers.......a good test is the STCC Bronze servers which are usually pretty full. Lag will be evident but doesn't render the game unplayable by any stretch of the imagination.

I might suggest your ISP is doing something screwy with particular ports that LFS uses?

i'm so jealous of your lag-free lfs gaming jason, especially on dialup

i recommend rfactor. i've played gtr, gtr2, netkar pro, and race. i played gtr2 for a while, but then went back to rfactor. great selection of mods and great netcode. hopefully netkar pro will get a lobby

Quote from Sapient :

www.mondaynightracing.com is an Aussie/NZ based league you might want to try.... we run full servers (23 slots currently) every monday night with very very few lag issues.

I might suggest your ISP is doing something screwy with particular ports that LFS uses?

cheers Sapient. i'm always keen for some fast close racing

unfortunately i'm not that technically minded, so i'm unsure which port lfs is using.

i find that other popular car racing games don't suffer from this lag.

Quote from XCNuse :

this is a stutter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... ;mode=related&search=

thats what i get all the time...
cant seem to get it fixed, neither i know whats the reason.
it also seems like lfs does rebuild the whole area from time to time which does cause that.
GPU temp is fine and the card is just a month old... tried different drivers with no success.
im so lost with that.

Quote from rocky32 :

cheers Sapient. i'm always keen for some fast close racing

unfortunately i'm not that technically minded, so i'm unsure which port lfs is using.

i find that other popular car racing games don't suffer from this lag.

Rocky we have just recently had one of our racers who had similar problems and managed to solve them I believe.
You can read all about it here: http://ozbee-racing.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1576

From memory Defrag HDD and cleaning up your registry will certainly help!

thanks for that advice Sapient. i normally try and keep those things current and sorted, but i'll do a fresh one and try it

cheers

Just reading over the old post I linked too it also appears keeping your version of DirectX current helps........ now I really must go and do some work

I'm poking around areas I have little knowledge in, but you stated that the other games you play you have significantly less lag. Does LFS use different ports than other games for transferring data and if so, is it possible your ISP is shaping those packets because it looks like torrents. Just a stab in the dark. I might be totally way off the cause. Feel free to take a poke at me.

I am with primus in TAS and the only trouble I have is conjestion at peak hours. 5pm-11pm. After 11pm I get very good latency, (Im now on ADSL BTW)

good point jason

my knowledge is probably about the same as you, but less :-p
how do i check the ports?
i use stupid telecom in kiwi land. unfortunately there's no decent competion for telecom so the broadband product is crap compare to ozzie and us

i tried the tune up utlities with no success, but helped to speed up my pc cheers for the link Sapient

Well, I cant offer much help there, I dont even know if N.Z. is 'lucky' enough to even have ISP's that use packet shaping. All I know is that its a really disturbing practice that should be outlined in a customers' user agreement, but most probably is not.

I failed to realise that you are actually are in N.Z. not Australia, so many of the closest servers you most likely visit are in fact in Australia which are probably around 150mS on your server list. If thats the case your gonna get lag effects and cars warping about. You might be able to test the packet shaping theory by finding a server as close as possible to your home. And have some online races there. Something around 60mS or less if thats possible. Then if that gives you a lag free game then you probably arent being packet shaped.

I made a 1 lap mpr replay (BL2r) of a server that I get 50mS ping to on the server list and it also had about 5 other players connected. They all had good ping because they lived close to the server from what I could tell, except one guy lagging (twofold). Maybe you can find a server like this (~50mS) and compare your gameplay lag against mine. If yours looks worse than mine then it's something at your end or its your ISP.
I have 512/128 ADSL.