[marty]

Here is my replay file of the race, http://www.mediafire.com/download/y31w99shkqpxv4h/lotus_evora_gtc+MARTY%40silverstone_20150825215211.rar

Grat that's a strange one with your micro warp at the line. I have never noticed this maybe you can also post a replay file here, if you have the warp then that's just likely something to do with how the replay is captured maybe an app causing a conflict at the line. Not sure how big of a warp this is and it may be something all do but I haven't ever noticed it, what is your replay quality set at also as this could be a side effect of very low setting possibly.

[marty]

I downloaded Gratulins replay file but for some reason my game wont play it and simply crashes when its loaded. So I checked my replay for that incident and it clearly looks like his car has warped so this is likely dropped packets on his end. Though as you can see in the video its how the netcode deals with this that's the main problem and its the same as in the other thread I posted which the devs have noted and are working on it

[youtube]_qEeqmsJp9Y[/youtube]

[Gratulin]

It now looks like more than dropped packets. The car moved 50 metres backwards! That's a software bug.

[marty]

It is a software bug for sure, its the way the game deals with an unstable connection and its far from good. The post I made a couple weeks ago with the same issue did get them to tag it as working on it so lets hope it gets improved as really this part of the code would be hard to make worse if they wanted to. The netcode is really quite impressive amongst solid connections but any unstable connections for whatever reason (In most cases there is nothing the user can do about it) it really has some major issues.

This is the same reason I stopped using stracker as it made many people do this at or near the line, with minorating I have noticed this happen to many people when a new client joins. In that case its more of a join lag then anything else but its not something that happens much with that plugin and only happens quite rarely. The benefit of the MR plugin outweigh still the odd warp and even though stracker is a great app it does it quite often and with most people so I will wait til something is done before running it again on my servers.

If they do fix this warping issue then maybe even the odd join warp by MR for example will be fixed as it clearly something to do with clients not sending or receiving packets. We did see in earlier builds when the server would crap itself with the flow control option at some point, this shows the code has a habit of going from real good to real crap fairly quickly. There must be something they can do about it either a bandaid such as disable collisions from cars doing this random weird warp or fix the issue at the source and stop it from happening all together.

[Gratulin]

I've changed my view to the belief that it is nothing to do with the connection quality. It is simply a software bug. Somewhere the positional data gets confused, corrupted or out of sync. With some good debug traces in all clients and the server it could be tracked down. Problem is that it would take an extreme amount of effort.

I used to solve communications issues at the beginning of my career. One of the most common problems was application programmers reporting to me a 'network problem' where their application data was being 'corrupted' by the network. I would take line traces using software trace tools and, in some cases, put a data analyser on the line. I never found a network problem - it was always a problem with the application code which I would kindly and diplomatically point out to them. We had lots of network problems especially in those days. They just never manifested themselves as those types of problems where the application data got corrupted.

This is why I am interested to see the replays from the other clients. If a positional change of my car ( backwards by more than 50 metres ) has been propagated to the server and to the other clients incorrectly then this is a serious problem. It is like overwriting the wrong version of a file. Surely the system checks previous positional data and thinks to itself - does this new position make sense given that I am a car travelling at 180km/h in the forward direction? Surely there are sequence numbers and clock time stamps on the position updates that are sanity checked for reasonable time gaps.

[marty]

The thing is nearly every time I have seen people do this and its always when someones ping starts to climb so seems to be connection related. Everyone else sees them warp so its either the game on their end or a connection issue of sorts. The only time its not has been when its quite clearly stracker related, this mostly happened at or near the start line or minorating which is even more obvious where it happens only when someone's name comes up on top of screen saying they entered the server.

Pretty much all others has been when someone ping is unstable, if you saw everyone elses replay of that incident I think it would most likely be the same and only yours would see it differently. I did dl your replay from the ac forum but it must be corrupted or something as it crashes the game each time I try to dl it. Its also quite often the same people that do the warps so seems something to do with their connection or pc, warps have also happened at times when peoples computers have a big stutter though GB said he was getting stutters and I never saw him warp once when I was near him last race.

Though it is also clearly a code problem, but as it seems to be related to either data spikes from an app stracker MR or a clients ping climbing this is somehow causing either data corruption, sync problems or lost packets entirely. Its fairly obvious that its happening so a bandaid fix such as disable collisions for weird location data or they need to find the problem in code which may be much trickier. Probably best to do both as its always likely something may go wrong with any network connection or data being transferred at any point.

I think as you say the system should be able to know if a car is traveling at a certain speed and then registers a position in a spot where the speed of the last and current data has is not possible is how they can do the no collision type fix. Just basically have it say the car cant possibly be here and there is an error so disable collision til data is making sense again. This should also come with an optional autokick to pit feature if someones connection is having issues over an extended period.

There are lots of guys both in the league and in my pub server who have pretty much never warped and quite a few that do it quite regularly for me to see its system related not a random code bug that can effect anyone.

[Guybrush Threepwood]

My overdue race report...

I stuffed myself up by setting up my car and practicing offline with a 37 degree track and full grip.  I also didn't get a chance to run a reasonable number of laps on the hard tyre so wasn't sure on the difference between it and the medium.

So I made a few changes on the fly once in the server and thought I'd put on the hard tyres to start with.  They turned out to be around a second per lap slower than the mediums, and because of the track temp, etc. it was impossible to get temperature into the front tyres which meant lots of graining and even less grip.  I managed to get a reasonable getaway and maintain position in front of Marty who had the pace on the medium tyres.  I could see everyone was running medium tyres so decided to swap to mediums at the half way point which felt a lot better.

I think I came out just behind Marty who was 2 stopping and had a good little dice with him until he pitted again for the second time.  From then I was just trying to put in some reasonable times without sliding or wearing the tyres too much.  At one point I came around T4 or T5 and had to take avoiding action, going off track as Phil must have spun.  So that was interesting.

But I learnt to create a setup under the race conditions as the setup i'd created offline was all about not overheating the rear tyres, so all my cambers, suspension and everything else weren't really optimized for low track temps and grip which meant the only reliable quick fix was to increase the rear wing by a click or two which left me vulnerable on the straights.

it was good fun though, and if Marty had have got in front in the opening stint I think it would have been a lot closer at the end.