Are there any upgrades planned for the netcode in rfactor2? rfactor can cause a lot of problems in endurance racing if you want to use the driver change feature. Sometimes everything works fine, 2 times this evening... And then after 5 hours when changing the driver during a pitstop for the third time suddenly everything goes wrong. "You are losing control in 20 ... 15 ... 5 ... 1 seconds" as usual, but then my teammates screen froze. I still was in control although rfactor told me I had lost it. But then somehow my car seemed to have transformed into a ghost vehicle. Other cars appeared just in front or behind me from one second to another. I was hit by other drivers who apparently could not see me and my car was severly damaged. OK that's just one way things can go wrong with the driver change ... These errors seem to happen randomly and I don't have a clue why as other games run smooth for hours on my pc without crashing. I can assure that I'm not the only one with this problem.
That's why rFactor 2 will include a reconnect-option, or at least they are testing this functionality...
Similar to NR2K3? I loved how that worked out. Everyone who will drive a certain car changes their name to the car name. You go in the pits, you disco, the other driver logs on and is in the car and starts driving. Had a glorious 24H spa race going until I stuffed it after 20 hours... Why did I just remind myself of that?
Actually rFactor manages the drivers swap a lot better than N2K3, imo. No lost laps during the disconnect/connect manouvre, no big time gap in the swap between the various crews becouse the way any crew manages the swap ... calling by phone, chatting etc. The only issue in rF drivers swap is the stability of the system (and indeed it is not an "official" feature), becouse can happen some drivers are disco from the server. Hopefully some intensive testing will give to rF2 a good stability in the drivers swap thing.
There is other bad effect that's lead to a crash. All the information of the PLR/Controler.ini (FFB settings mainly) are exchanged between drivers, not only setup. This lead to situation, A driver with 100% pure realfeel, and a driver with 100% pure rF standard FFB driving together have these issues The driver with RealFeel only, will receive the FFB without Realfeel when i get the car !! It's one of the many example existing, same for the Track Ir ... I don't know how it is managed on rF2, but you shall limit to the only information needed, setup (without wheel ratio and brake repartition and brake power) and only this, and no "FFB" or PLR specific tweaks to transfer between drivers. And for me the most important, the possibility for the driver to reconnect to the race. About this, how do you plan to manage this ? The driver can re-enter only if they participate on the previous session, of any driver is free to connect in race, even if they never connect on the server session before the race (like for live for speed). This points are worrying me, because in league races, it's forbidden to join a race without making the qualification to check the serious of the driver, so the free to join in race is to be forbidden for us. And what about the temporary car (box temp car), synchronization ... Can you give some information of what you expect to implement? because there so many question and waiting on this for endurance race pilots
While I will respectfully disagree with your assessment Max Angelo of the pros and cons of driver swaps in rF compared to NR2K3, I will concentrate more on your last sentence and hope for the best as well. That is all any of us really want.
Thank you for answering on this Max. It's good to hear you are aware of the problem and working on it. Yes that's right sadly. The problem is when rfactor crashes after a driver change or FFB feels strange then you never really know why this happened because it was fine 10 times before. Same with the other additional plugins (xd-tool, dynhud, map-plugin, motec-add). They are all quite useful but I don't use them because I am worried they might cause rfactor to crash.
tjg_marantz, N2K3 drivers swap was not a planned feature of the game .... people, with a good amount of creativy, did find the trick ... using the rejoin option they found the way to create drivers swap. I ran several endurance races in 2003/2004 with the Papy game, and when my mate was italian like i am, we used the phone in order to give the go to the mate ... when my team mate was american, we were forced to use a chat. Say using the phone the "dead time" can be 15, 20 secs and using the chat it can be 30, 40 secs: 15/25 secs of gap .... 15/25 secs trashed in the swap after swearing on track trying to race fast and clean. No matter who is gaining and who is losing time ... N03 system did not guarantee a fairness in the swap time becouse it was not a goal ... the goal was just to have a working rejoin option. Also, how you can be sure in N03 you lose 1 lap becouse the swap and the other cars too? Sometime you rejoin the track lapped 2 laps while the other cars lose 1 lap, or viceversa, becouse the rejoin system cant guarantee a perfect timing ... again, it is not a planned N03 feature, the driver swap is just a trick, a workaround. Last, you and your team mate are forced to "cheat" the system, that is why both the drivers have to share the same nick, ie you cant know who is on track on a certain car, if driver A, B, C etc. I raced also some endurance races in rF, beeing careful to remove all the game plugins before the race, so to reduce the risk of disco. Was lucky may be, but my car never was disco and i think the rF system is more fair, avoiding gaps in the time of the swap manouvre ... the time required for the swap is the time required for the pit stop and nobody loses laps becouse the rejoin, furthermore the drivers can use their personal nick. Now, opinions are always ok, and disagreening is nothing more than a normal thing in the life, i am just trying to be more explicative about my point in the previous post
Opps, sorry for the misunderstanding about my "staff" avatar. I am only the moderator of the italian section of the forum, i am not an ISI employed. I think i can say, yes, ISI is aware of the problem, but atm i cant assure they are working on it ... i wrote "hopefully" indeed
You are correct Max, it was a work around. Even with all the drawbacks you mention, NR2K3 endurance racing was always bigger than rF ever got to be. That should tell us something. Work around or not, it worked better than rF, in my opinion, of course. Either way, let's hope the glory of endurance racing will be felt with rF2!
If you can "force" an ISI member to go on this subject to provide some details/answer on the questions about this subject, it will be great
I think proper driver swapping and reconnection to a race status server are key elements for rFactor2. With this, real endurances events could take place with no issues. I think is something other simulators, like iRacing, misses, and is a big advantage I see on rFactor.
