Hope you don't mind me opening a new thread for this, but something strange happened to me a few minutes before. I was driving on FE gold rev (afaik, i'm not really familiar with names of track configurations yet ), and on the first lap, at the chicane my back suddenly got loose, and then i spun. First i thought it was a tap from the driver behind me, that's why I said 'thx', thanks god i didn't start bashing the guy. Because when i viewed the replay, i was surprised to see that he was not even close to my back, let alone contacting me. So the question is, what caused the spin then? Lag? I watched it several times, with forces on and in slow motion, and it seemed to me that my rear got bumped a little in the air just before they lose traction.
Aha, now I see that, it flies under the asphalt, and bumps my rear tire up from down below. Haha So I wasn't wrong that I saw my rear get bumped up a little.
Similar thing happend to me at the same FE chichane however this was a backmarker who refused to move over and tried to fight me going into the chichane, I had the line, he went flat out into the tires and one of those said tires took me out lol. Made a right mess of my UF1 as well.
I dont think thats a game related problem, I rarely get stutter, and when I mean rarely, it is rare. I found it started to become a little more frequent lately, but it all cleared up when i defragged my drive.
I have never noticed stutter upon connections during races or whatever.......
Its probably related to processor speed.... My CPU is right down at the bottom end of what can run LFS, and I get that pit lane stutter so badly, its a 50/50 chance I'll crash unless I'm on a straight.
until my hard drive failed, i then reinstalled everything on a new HD and the stutter started right after this.
i think its a small conflict somewhere along the line but trying to trace it is a nightmare, its not as bad as it used to be, but its still interesting when i had none, and with no changes except a complete fresh install of windows/LFS etc etc it "arrived"
I think it's reassembling the 3D geometry of a new car, i'm not 100% sure. Although the problem does exist in other sims. GTR2 for example features the awesome feature that it refuses to show cars that connect mid session... It just doesnt create the 3D geometry, meaning that they are invisible on your screen... This method can cause problems when one car tries to pass the other. Dont panic though because as soon as you end up in the gravel trap from the inneviteable accident the car is then loaded so you can see which driver to shout abuse at.
Applying skins may cause some latency, as the file (much larger than its disk size once loaded into RAM) but they are already on the master server... I dont think you've quite understood the process. When you dont have a skin it is downloaded from the master server to your local machine, this LFS handles very efficiently, it does not cause lag for most players. Any moments of lag may occur when loading the file from disk to RAM, and then moving it from RAM to the graphics card. Images are much larger in RAM than they are on disk, 4 bytes per pixel (RGBA).
Where LFS gets it's jitter from is most likely the loading and assembly of the 3D geometry of the car itself. LFS cars are around 10-20 thousand polygons...