going back to the whole 'you don't see f1 drivers backing it in' argument, there is another good reason for that which is the millions of pounds worth of car that cannot be repaired by pressing shift+r
If you gave F1 drivers an unlimited supply of free cars & made them unkillable, I think you'd see a very different style of driving.
I had the same opinion until I bought one. Then I was crashing so much I put it in as a warning. I do like to know whose using the 720 deg lock, manual clutch & H shifter, because they make a huge difference, but as has been pointed out not everyone with g25 does anyway.
Turns out, I reinstalled my 'acpi PC' to a standard PC and it's sorted it out, I thought it can't possibly be that as people were reporting stutter every few seconds and not horrible, sould crushing lag.
So if anyone has this prob, try that. How embarrasing.
Thanks to everyone who helped
EDIT: Celebration was premature, the server is now in sync (no more +timeinit messages), but I am still getting lag spikes every 20-30s, where the netgraph fills to max (all bars) for a few seconds, then drops back down to 'normal'.
Cars are now much less jittery, but still teleporting a foot or so here & there. I will fraps tomorrow.
I run Windows XP Pro service pack 2
Offline, perfectly smooth
Online, I do get judders every 10-20s but that seems to be when all the netgraphs peak. A lot of people who had the 4-5s stutter problem were falsely diagnosing a cpu clock desync as lag, but I'm 99% certain that's not the case here.
All of those were fixed by really random solutions (reinstalling mobo drivers etc) most of which I've tried, to no avail. My old man thinks it may be someone else traffic shaping along the route, but I'm not so sure.
None of the solutions posted are actually for this problem, they're for CPU clock desync etc. The ones with this prob have never been answered. Most promising I've seen is someone who reccommended guaranteeing 66% of upload bandwidth to LFS, I will try this later. (though I have tested at night with no other PCs/programs running in the house & it's the same)
"mostly good" means 0% packet loss to all the UK servers I've pinged/tracert so far, and on tracert to all UK servers I get under 100ms (usually under 40ms) per jump.
There is no spyware, malware, p2p software or anything like that on this PC, I reinstalled windows 2 days ago (and I run a fairly tight ship anyway).
I've never had problems of this nature I couldn't solve before, my dad works as a software engineer so I'm fairly computer literate.
Tracing route to city-driving.co.uk [145.97.127.3] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 172.16.1.254 2 21 ms 21 ms 21 ms gay-dsl1.wh.zen.net.uk [62.3.83.20] 3 23 ms 22 ms 20 ms bolzano-ae-0-232.wh.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.233] 4 21 ms 23 ms 20 ms 195.16.169.89 5 23 ms 22 ms 21 ms so-6-1-0.mp2.Manchesteruk1.Level3.net [4.68.113. 118] 6 28 ms 30 ms 27 ms ae-1-0.bbr2.London1.Level3.net [212.187.128.57]
7 29 ms 28 ms 30 ms ae-21-52.car1.London1.Level3.net [4.68.116.47] 8 32 ms 32 ms 43 ms 195.50.118.230 9 30 ms 30 ms 35 ms as0-dcr1.tsd.cw.net [195.2.10.165] 10 41 ms 40 ms 39 ms so-0-0-0-dcr2.amd.cw.net [195.2.10.145] 11 39 ms 40 ms 40 ms so-5-0-0-bcr1.amd.cw.net [195.2.10.29] 12 41 ms 41 ms 41 ms surfnet3.amd.cw.net [208.173.211.202] 13 41 ms 44 ms 42 ms AZ-500.XSR01.Amsterdam1A.surf.net [145.145.80.21 ] 14 43 ms 44 ms 44 ms roc-on-router.customer.surf.net [145.145.4.42] 15 44 ms 44 ms 44 ms 145.97.127.3
Trace complete.
EDIT: One of the most common explanations for this type of problem is the ISP shaping packets to block p2p software. I'm with zen however, and
I'm at home, my old man has quite a gnarly setup, but at night mine is the only PC on and I'm going straight into the router.
no p2p or other programs running, done some traceroute with mostly good results, will try more LFS server addresses & see what happens.
I'm pretty convinced this is a random LFS bug, as searching on the forums here I found one or two people describing the same thing, but all of those threads fizzled out with no answer.
Ok I get horrific lag in all multiplayer LFS server. It's not gfx based so don't tell me the difference between FPS and latency.
Most obvious symptom is that all the cars on the server randomly teleport 20 feet (my client projecting the last known input I presume) or so, and then back, and then teleport, and so on. I have unblocked the relevant ports on the router, and my local firewall (I am usually running through a linux server, but this occurs even straight thru the router).
I have reinstalled mobo drivers, LAN drivers, Windows (I *really* want this to work) and tried most of the (somewhat bizarre) fixes on the forum for similar probs. Unfortunately most of the people complaining of 'lag' are actually getting a CPU clock desync, which this is not.
I am open to all suggestions, as I can't race & have now been told to stay off even the city driving servers until it's fixed.