Hello We had an online event with 20 driver approx. It was catastrophic. Switching to race, 3 players lost connection who were driving before practise, quali and warmup without any issue. In the formation lap, the pace car was jumping backwards, into the queued cars. We repeated the race, again those 3 were kicked, but now we kept on and held distance to pace car, which showed same unpleasant effect. During race start, out of nothing serious stutters for all - I don´t have to tell you what it means when you are at the limit and you have 0.5 - 1 sec freezes. Why is the heart of every modern race game, the online engine, so instable? We know stutter happens if someone joins during a race (maybe because he lost connection at race start...) or when he quits a race. In both situations, I ask myself : why? Can´t you deal with it a better way? low prio threads somehow? For the other stutters: Is there any possibillity to find out at least what caused problems? Is there a server log proving network issues or something like that? How shall we deal with it? thx Best regards Stefan
I second this, I had a very similar experience last night that had me retiring sitting on a tire barrier after fighting with 1sec freezes all race long and almost every lap, until in the end I found myself rolling after yet another freeze. For some reason when a car disconnects some people get freezes. The strange thing is that these freezes are not randomly "distributed" on the grid every time someone disconnects, the same drivers will suffer all through the race while others will not be affected at all, only for the next race to have another selection of unlucky people that get all the lag during the race. My internet connection is fine and has been fine all year long, this behavior though is well documented. It seems that internet traffic in RF2 has got heavier? We were 35 people which is a lot, I feel like, while the number of participants is not the culprit of the lag, the more racers present the bigger the impact of the lag. If someone with a bad connection joins in it seems to affect some of the others (again, the quality of their connection doesn't appear relevant in who gets affected) but it appears that,quite possibly, the more people connected the more serious the impact will be. It may very well be that, due to the increased hardware demands of DX11, some people's hardware cannot handle their quality options and this may be causing their PCs to be unable to maintain a stable connection, but the way this thing ends up affecting the rest of the grid has by now shown a strange and specific pattern.
Just a guess. Can it be that these problems are server related? I would guess that not every server, that is provided as a gaming server, is usable. I would suspect that, for example, dedicated servers are not suitable. In our community we always have used a root server with a good hardware, especially of the processor and ram and a high connection rate and speed and never had any problems, while other communities, that have used dedicated or a kind of shared servers, in most cases has had problems. And that was some years ago, when rfactor 2 was new, today, with the much higher use of the computer resources, it should be much more important to use a server that can handle the conditions reliable.
I see no problems with using dedicated servers (as have been using rF dedi's weekly for years now). Since DX11 is around, the dedi server is very unstable when race finishes and starts reloading. A few months ago there were occasional cases of client "connection lost", approximately 20% of the time. (not too serious). This when running the dedi on its own rF2 license and not Steam dedi. Since moving to Steam dedi, the last couple of months on 75% of the occasions, everyone gets "connection lost", local or online. Last night it was 95% "connection lost" at the end of the race and rF2 starts reloading. We do not have any freeze problems however, this can be due to only a small amount of players and a large field of AI. My server is an Intel Quadcore Q9550 which only serves the game, no other services running and is the same one used for years now with zero problems, only change is my internet connection has gone from 80down/10up to 200down/18up over the years. However when the dedi server is in race it is fine, only at end of race and reloading.
We probably know meanwhile at least why 3 drivers were kicked out. Guess what: they were all at the end of one lane for the formation lap, and the driver in front of them has an "ä" in the name. So we assume that the "follow driver ..ä.." message for the formation lap kicked player 1 behind him, then the next one after he got this message now, then the next one... We heard now about a known bug in dx11 about those special chars which is not fixed probably, also hitting you with "green flag" message in german ui (grÜne Flagge), so this could be the explanation Unbelievable actually... Still there remain the stabillity issues during gameplay where we don´t know the cause. Some logs with sensemaking output would be helpful. Or live charts in the dedi gui about network, timing, ping history for each driver, processor load, someting like this.
We had grid of 28 cars (gt3 by s397) in our pre-season race yesterday. I don't believe we had any freezes (that I know of) but car movement going through the first chicane in Monza wasn't all that smooth, not horrible but not great. Then I witnessed also a warp where a car in front of me suddenly warped behind me and hit me, that was lap 1. That was the only warp during the whole race I think. But a bigger problem was that when we moved to quali we got duplicate drivers. Soon we saw 37 names instead 28 when in fact there were still 28 drivers. As a result (or so we assume) many lost disconnection (connection lost message). We had to restart the server to get rid of the duplicate names. Does anyone have any idea why this might have happened? Note that we had to force the move to quali as we made a mistake jumping into quali too early at first, which made us return to practice (human error). As far as I know it's a known rf2 problem that moving from practice to quali introduces ctds for some from time to time but this problem was new.
