Yup that's it, it was sagging down from your forehead and dropped down onto the keyboard...

Quote from Becky Rose :

Yup that's it, it was sagging down from your forehead and dropped down onto the keyboard...

Did you have names displayed? Maybe you clicked on someone's W?

Hi,

This happened to me in the past two days. I got to the lead in a 3 car race (very unusual) the other two people spun off, and driving along nicely and bam, I'm off. On the SS1 server.

I have also been suffering from quite a few disconnects.

I checked my connection and all seemed to be fine.

Is this a Southern Hemisphere problem?

I probably have the race saved if that would help.

Cheers
CRAIG

Craig, next time it happens start to raise a report in the next race and select the replay so you can email it to yourself. This will show you the replay from the servers perspective so you can see how badly you where lagging. My guess is that your connection is not too hot.

I would love to setup a CTRA alternative in the Southern hemisphere, but it would need a new server 'down south' somewhere and that takes money. And some staff to run it all of course. Whilst it's amazing that global communications are so fast these days, it does unfortunately still take time to get a signal frtom the penal colonies to our server in Heathrow.

It's also worth mentioning that most Australian ISP's use budget connections to the outside world and do not reserve enough traffic for outside connectivity, which is something worth bearing in mind. I know Australia does have the infrastructure to talk to our server with very low ping times, but the people controlling that infrastructure charge a lot for it. It might be worth asking around about other ISP's in your area.

Quote from Craig WA :

How do I raise a report in the next race.

Type in $rep, and at the replay selection select "the last race to have ended". Then click on the "email link to replay" (or something like that) button, that will send you an email with the link to the replay. You must have set an email address for this to work, though. You can do that somewhere else in the menu, not sure where, you'll have to look for it but it shouldn't be hard to find.

If you got the email, download the replay and watch it

Yup you set email on the $ctra menu. Getting the replay from the server will show you how other players are seeing you, and you will be able to see if you had lag. Looking at your own replay will often not show your lag, because you didnt lag out... Sometimes you can get one direction lag where you dont upload but still manage to download everyone elses car position - in fact, this type of lag is more common as ISP's generally support downloading (for web & email) better than uploading.

@ Craig WA - what Becky is saying is pretty spot on, you can have real good speed results locally but when you are connecting to a server in London its a whole different kettle of fish

I just checked my stats (8:30pm which is peak time for internet usage here) using the following website:

http://www.speedtest.net/index.php

My ping to a Perth server is 13ms with 863kB/s download and 37.3kB/s upload. Sounds ok huh?
I've noticed at this time of the day that the ping times to Europe increase quite abit within LFS. A speed test to the london server shows quite a different story to what the local figures show.
My ping to London is 365 with 185kB/s download and 14kB/s upload this is the worst time of day to connect to europe I've noticed. In non peak usage times it is normally significantly better for download and up load speed, even then is still sigificantly weaker than local speeds. So in peak times I have to be careful about joining heavily used servers in Europe even though I've got fast interent. In non peak times I have far less troubles.

Having said that I've had many trouble free years racing LFS servers all over the world even on a lowly 56k modem at times it's just being from this part of the world we have to be much more concious of how many people are connected to a server, what ping it is giving and what time of day it is. I thought this problem would go away with ADSL but unfortunately its still there just in a lesser amount.