Driver Swap / Rejoin Server - Different weather/track condition

Discussion in 'Bug Reports' started by benkay, Dec 16, 2019.

  1. benkay

    benkay Registered

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    During VEC race at the weekend (Nurbs), the first part of the race was wet.

    By the time I was to take over the car after 2.5 hours or so, the current driver was saying that the track was basically dry.
    However, when I passenger-selected and joined the car...it looked extremely wet....indeed it WAS wet to drive for a few corners, then it miraculously dried instantly to 2% wet.

    I then suffered a game crash mid-stint, dropping me back to the desktop. At the point it crashed, the track was 0% wet (i.e. fully dry)....I quickly re-joined the server, took control of the car again, and went out of the pits.....suddenly I was facing 60% wet track again....and of course I was on slicks....it took over 1 lap of nightmare driving before again, the track suddenly instantly dried to 0% wetness.

    This seems like strange behaviour. People have suggested it is the RR loading in, but surely it would make sense for this to load in during the track-loading procedure?

    It meant I not only lost a ton of time re-joining server, but also lost at least 90 seconds trying to drive round a totally wet track on slicks.....and I was a danger to other traffic, who of course I'm sure couldn't understand or expect that I was struggling for grip so much!
     
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  2. stonec

    stonec Registered

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    The RR indeed always loads after you join, probably because it has to sync with the server, whereas the actual track loading stage is just done offline. Years ago it used to take up to five minutes until the RR got fully loaded online, but after my complaints ISI released some update that improved the loading time to just seconds. I have a suspicion Nordschleife with its huge length and laser scanned surface might contribute to increased loading time of RR.
     
  3. Jason Whited

    Jason Whited Registered

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    RR, Nords or not, never loads up in 'seconds' for me or any of my teammates.
    Sometimes, it takes riding with them for 2-4 laps.

    I see no difference in the time it takes for the RR to fully load at Nurb verses other tracks.

    @benkay....it was the same for us. I started the race, handed the car to my teammate (when he took the car from me, track was at about 43% saturation)...while he was in the car, the track dried. I came back later to take the car back, and I was in the car with him for 3 laps...him telling me track is dry, but I'm seeing water, spray, the whole 9 yards.
    Slowly but surely, as the laps went by, it drastically dropped and by the time we swapped it was showing correctly on track and in my HUD (and felt like it was as it should be)

    Even cleaned PC and rebooted between stints (we always do) thinking it might clear whatever temp file it built saving that first part of the session (allowing me to go in and see the track as it should be and had been for hours at that point)...yet, every time I went in, at least initially, it would appear that conditions were as they were in warmup prior to race. Then RR would finally fully load, and it was ok.

    I would not want to be tossed in the car before RR had time to load, in such conditions. Everyone else on a dry track, fresh driver driving on some false wet surface :eek:
     
  4. McFlex

    McFlex Registered

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    This looks like a typical ISI/S397 fail again *facepalm*. Do something but never think it through completly and only do it 75% the right way. rF2 is full of these things. But hey a new UI is so much important. I wonder what the will fuck up again this time :D
     
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  5. Jason Whited

    Jason Whited Registered

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    Looks like a typical reactionary, non productive post to me. :rolleyes:

    Not sure exactly what your point is...but ok.

    Do some of you just sit in this forum all day, waiting for a thread to jump on bashing the sim? :confused:
     
  6. stonec

    stonec Registered

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    Not really. As I said, there used to be an issue where realroad would take minutes to sync every time you joined a server. This was fixed by ISI years ago. RR cannot sync in a second since the server has to limit bandwidth, otherwise everyone who joins would download the RR at once, which would cause huge lags for the other drivers. So there is a reason it's done this way and it has worked fine always. That's why I speculated maybe much larger tracks with more detailed surfaces like Nordschleife could cause new issues or maybe it was just a server bandwidth limitation that caused OP's problems. If I join for example a server with Silverstone, it will load the entire realroad in less than 10 seconds.
     
  7. Jason Whited

    Jason Whited Registered

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    In my experience (and that's a lot of online racing)...no, it won't load the entire real road (even at Silverstone) in under 10 seconds.
    Certainly won't load it at that pace if the session is long underway, and I've never even stepped in the practice servers and seen it load that fast.

    You may assume it was "fixed by ISI years ago" but I assure you I am not the only one saying otherwise.

    Do you do a lot of online racing?

    And again, I see no difference in length of time it takes to load the Nordschleife real road (even during recent 24 hour events, way deep into the race) verses other tracks. It does not appear the larger track causes it to take any more time than usual to load the RR.

    But, OP wasn't even talking about Nords...he's talking about Nurb GP (I know this because I was there :D)
     
  8. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    I've never noticed a long delay but I've only ever jumped in the car (no driver swaps etc). Sometimes in the pits I can see the RR update but from there it's fine. My assumption was the game updates where you are first, then loads the rest of the track which in practice means it's ready when you get there. I might guess this doesn't quite work right when spectating and doing driver swaps, but would need testing to work it out.

    PS session elapsed time shouldn't matter - it only needs to communicate the current state.
     
  9. Jason Whited

    Jason Whited Registered

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    Yeah, that's the way it 'should' work. In reality though, when we do our swaps (VEC team manager here) it never happens that way.

    Besides during swaps, where we are often coming into sessions 8-10-12 hours or more deep in, it is very very noticeable and many have complained.
    Our practice sessions on those servers are structured to be 30 hours long. Often times, when I go into those sessions, and they are 5-6 hours in, it's noticeable for....maybe 2-3 minutes. Sometimes a bit more or less.

    Saturday...it rained just prior to quali. It stopped about mid warm up. At race time, track was showing 77% saturation. By the time my first two stints were over, it was down to around 48% or something like that. A clear dry line had formed, very wide. I had already turned my wiper off.
    When I returned to take the car from him after approx 90 mins, I load in and on the HUD it's showing me 77% saturation, just as it had been when the race started, yet...he is seeing only about 15% saturation on his HUD. I ride with him a few laps, and in a couple sudden instances, that value dropped to the value he was seeing. Took 3 full laps before that was the case.

    So, I am assuming it's not only communicating the current state, but is saving something about the entire elapsed session.
    I lack the technical knowledge beyond that.

    A few months ago, a driver of mine told me that when it had been wet in a session, and he came to take the car from me (for me, it had already dried) that when he took the car, he drove 2 full laps seeing spray, with almost zero grip...and I kept telling him this was only a graphical thing and it was placebo.

    I was wrong. lol
     
  10. GoldenBear

    GoldenBear Registered

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    Exactly. The game is falling apart in several ways because of two things. S397's tunnel vision on the new UI and their lack of knowledge of proper coding.
     
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  11. Jeremy Talbot

    Jeremy Talbot Registered

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    Yeah lately we've been making sure our drivers come in with 5 laps to go before the swap to try negate this issue. It was most noticeable in the rf24. Obviously this won't help if you have a disconnect like Ben did, that is a very unfortunate thing to happen and to top it off having a "wet track" to come back to is ridiculous. It does seem like a relatively recent thing to have happened as I don't remember it being like this before the rf24 at le Mans
     
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  12. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    You absolutely cannot draw that conclusion from available evidence. With that sort of logic I hope you don't code.
     
  13. stonec

    stonec Registered

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    Yep. You are kind of limited coding-wise in these kind of situations. Wait in the track loading screen for five minutes for realroad to load? Not a good idea, at least most would agree. Let clients download the realroad at a faster rate? What happens if you have lots of drivers joining back and forth (like often is the case in these 24 hour events) and server bandwidth becomes congested due to all realroad loading going on? Surely this is even a worse scenario than having a somewhat slow (but safe) rate of transmitting the RR. These are hard problems to solve.
     
  14. ebeninca

    ebeninca Registered

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    If the server was configured with the real weather plugin, you have an option to define the refresh weather period, probably this period was defined to a higher value, thinking in performance optimization.
     
  15. Lazza

    Lazza Registered

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    That's certainly something to consider for the server admin, but not related to the rate at which the current track condition is relayed to the players on join.
     
  16. McFlex

    McFlex Registered

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    Who has ever confirmed that it is a problem of downloading the RR file from the server? Do you guys actually know the size of the RR file? I am not 100% sure but what i have in mind is the it is not over 5MB even for the NOS. So even if the DL speed from the server is limited to lets say 100kB/s it would take around 50 seconds to load. This is far less than the loading time of the track and far far less than 3-4 laps on any track.
     
  17. GoldenBear

    GoldenBear Registered

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    Bop's that break the game etc. I sure can draw that conclusion.
     
  18. GoldenBear

    GoldenBear Registered

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    Most real road files are no bigger than 100kb. Nords being the largest is just over 400kb
     
  19. Littlejoe1999

    Littlejoe1999 Registered

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    I have seen this behaviour for a couple of years on every track. My guess its an online game engine issue. And its not hard to test the RR loading time. Make an offline RR on any track, problem is more noticable with larger RR file size. Look at the file size of the saved file. Start your own server with the saved RR and then save the RR with 30s intervals and you will see that it can take a very long time for the complete file to be loaded/built up to the correct filesize. And the larger the starting RR file is the more noticable the lack of grip is. My testing also show that when im comparing my saved RR to other drivers RR saved at the exact same time its different in size its like its never catches up, escpecially when rejoining midsession. I might add that offline RR always loads instantly. I must say that im happy that more people are noticing this problem so i can hope fotr it to be fixed as i reported it over two years ago for the first time.
     
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  20. McFlex

    McFlex Registered

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    That makes it even worse :D

    It is not only an online issue but i also saw this problem of loading times for realroads in replay files
     

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