SimRacing.org.uk

GT Sprint Cup - Season 1, Round 2 at Magny-Cours

Date: Wednesday 20th July

Practice 1: 8:45pm (15 mins)
Qual 2: 9:00pm (15 mins)
Warmup: 9:15pm (2 mins)
Race: 9:17pm (30 mins)

Cars allowed: Any GT car or Corvette or Viper G2. (Seat Toledo is allowed but will not score points.)

Notes:
(1) Please try to arrive 15 minutes early during Practice 1.
(2) Server Password has been emailed to those registered racers for each championship. Please contact a member of the admin team to get the password if you are registered and have forgotten or not received the password. It will not be given out in the GTR chatroom as that is a public place.
(3) See  UKGTR Season 1 Info (http://www.ukgtr.org/series.php?series=103) for general Season 1 info.
(4) Please make sure you are fully aware of the UKGTR Rules (http://www.ukgtr.org/rules.php)

Sorry I won't be able to make this one.
I'm away on holiday for last 2 weeks of July, will resume racing 1st week of August.
Cheers

I will be there  ;D

if the bloody lobby lets me see the server this time, i'll be there.

PMF

I'll be there, too. Especialy as I saw such a skinny grid in Season events - I guess it won't really matter if you're reserve or full time. More players - more fun.

Sorry, I can't make it this week.  I am having PC problems  :(
If anybody knows how to overcome the "no directx 8.1 adapter found" problem I would be delighted to hear from you.
It has something to do with taking my HD and GF6800 out of my Shuttle system and putting it back into my old box which has a PC Chips mobo.  Needless to say I didn't do a clean install.  I justed hoped it would work.
I should have time to get it fixed for next week.
Cheers
Stewart

sound like 'blows knows no gfx card. (re-)install drivers for it.

Seeing all problems in n-gt race and my track record, doubt I will get to end tonight (invisible cones
will probably get me this time!). Would be a shame because I have grown to like Magny and now
getting pretty respectable, i.e. mid-field, times  (1:36 qual and 1:38 race pace). Still, looking forward to
seeing you tonight even if it is only briefly.   

I'll be there tonight, always big fun...
 :D

i've never recieved any password details :(

The password is the same as last week and will not change unless there is a security issue.

I will PM anyone that is registered and has forgotten or has not received the password at all.

Is the server up?

Cheers Fozzmeister, that is what I guessed but I have lost count the no of times I have installed and uninstalled drivers.  I think a clean install is the only thing that can save me now.
I think I will put the GF6800 on eBay anyway as the performance boost I had hoped for over my old 9700Pro has been negligible.
Cheers
Stewart

Championship Server will always be launched on time.

Well what a waste of time that was too.

Suprised to be dropped to 4th on grid after some stunning times from Luis, JonM and Locutus (well done chaps), happily going along in fourth, hoping for a mistake from one of the leading three to be able to get a podium as i did not have the speed to stay with them and BAM! again 1 fps bug, actually it was 0.9 fps bug as the counter went up 1.1 seconds every frame.

I do hope this is 1 fps hell for Magny only cause if i get this at Enna too I will have to consider giving up with GTR online. It's a lot of effort to put in practice just for it all to end from a stupid bug in the game.

As a last resort I am going off to reinstall GTR with no addons cars or tracks and latest ATI drivers (not that i havent done that before).

Are you trying to run with detail levels set close to the maximum your system will sustain? 'Cause I'm running a litle "detuned" and I've yet to encounter the 1fps bug...

Well, I qualified 11th, and had a good race setup ready to go. Was quicker than the 4 or 5 in front of me, could well have got a top 6 if I was lucky but as per f**king usual, im far too inconsisten and made loads of mistakes.

I then touched the grass before going into the imola chicane and ploughed into the contrete supports for the bridge before the chicane, destroying my suspension  >:(

Well, I saw my race getting finished with the message: "Connection lost".
The lobby was empty and no more sign of the UKGTR Sprint server.
When joining back in multiplayer mode server was there allright with about seventeen players left. Just before I got the "connection lost" message I saw the counters( seconds from the car before and behind you) going up(and down).
Right after crossing the finish line my race really finished.
Needles to say that I'm really pissed off, was running in tenth position with about fifteen minutes to go.

Not everything is maxed out, nearly all. What do you suggest turning down?

I've spent so long fiddling with this game I just want it to be fixed not waste another 10 days trying to work out what the problem is when clearly the problem is that there is a bug in the game that needs fixing.

ug, ug, ug, ug.

Oh well i shall look forward to tomorrow when our company tells us whether we're being made redundant or not, at least you get a yes no answer on that unlike Simbin software. LOL.

Worried and depressed.

Shark.

Principally things which affect texture memory usage - especially car details.

I have other car details and my own car details set to medium. Track to full.
Never experienced the 1fps bug in a race.

Well I can safely say that was one of the worst drives I've done lol, started badly, got bumped, middle was good made up places  :) Then threw it all away on the 2nd to last lap giving away 3-4 places after a spin on turn 1 followed by several more. Not a happy bunny  :'(

Lol begining to question why I keep doing this to myself  :)

Some form of masochism?

Cheers

Rob

Replay and exports zip file uploaded in the usual place on the website.

To give us. your fellow racers pleasure for picking up places?

Fozzmeister

I have a very high spec PC, but I have other car detail set to high instead of full and draw distance to far instead of very far. I've never had 1fps, so turning those two settings down might be worth a try.

Was pleased to qualify 5th. Had a stupid spin down at Adelaide on the first lap which bumped me down the grid, but had a pretty steady race after that if slow. Finished back in 5th after several cars went off or had PC problems. Checked my pedal calibration at the end and found, as I'd suspected, that I was missing the very top of my throttle again.

Still, fairly pleased to get my season underway after failing to finish at Barce.

Qualifying went well this time. 10th place. Could have been a little faster I think but I was happy with it anyway.

The first lap I made a mistake in which I lost 5 place. I was happy to make up some places. Halfway I got to 9th place. But then all went wrong again. With about 13 minutes left the 1fps bug showed up once again  >:( . Further than that there were no serious incidents.

But I enjoyed the race anyway because last race I couldn't even make it to the end of the formation lap without getting the 1fps bug.

I am willing to give it one more try next week at Enna. If the bug shows up again I will seriously consider to withdraw from the championship. IMO racing should be fun, but unfortunately it isn't fun for me at the moment.

If anyone knows how to overcome the 1fps problem, please say so. I allready tuned down the graphics so that they are reasonable to race. I also checked my internet connection. The connection with the server was OK also (ping was about 35 I think). My firewall is off. Does anyone have any ideas?

Well for quite a while (many online races) now I thought I had overcome my 1 fps problems by turning off all replay options and putting the sliders for fidelity and instant replay down to as low as they would go (even with everything off I thought it wise). This alone seemed to fix it for me until yesterday and today when I've been hit by it again. Perhaps trying this will work for you as it did for me for a while.

Had a decent quali and started the race in 2nd behind luis. Didn't really have to do much to do in the race, I followed Luis for about 7 laps and could see his back end twitching out now and then and I think he got the power down a bit early out of a bend and span, saw loc then run into him which  left me a clear run home  ;D Thanks to all the guys being lapped, Didn't have any bother overtaking at all :) Enjoyed the race, Cheers Lads  ;D ;D ;D

I got 1fps during qualifying, don't normaly suffer with it (touches wooden head) but it saw me go off 3 times during qualy

I’m sorry to see so many with 1FPS. It really is a bitch to end a race this way. I myself experienced the same frustration when I got a “lost connection with server” in last Sunday’s Wosec race at Brno. It’s quite frustrating.

I think my system can handle GTR pretty well and since I put High Process Priority="0" I never had 1 FPS again (more then a month now). Use to have it now and then before changing plr. I run with all options at it's fullest, with 30 viewable cars, including Replays On at the fullest
Another thing, every time I change drivers I delete the config file and run GTR configuration again.

However I got another “lost connection” today. It happened just after the race ended when I was back in chat. Ended up in UKGTR chat lobby.

As for the race itself, I managed to pull a good time to take the pole.
I kept Jon behind me till I made a very silly mistake (another >:() and dropped back to 5th.
After Locutos 1FPS I taken 3rd again and ended up in second with the best lap of the race.

I really must stop with these driving mistakes. They are costing dearly in race finish position.

Could be, I got my first single fps race around last two corners today whenever
there were more than two cars around me. I have now had complete
set of simbin sins :'(

At least I was lucky because out of traffic it eased and I was able to complete race.
Got to say it was almost worth all the aggravation. Thanks to jam for letting me through
and then letting me through again after I span. Gutted I lost 5th with three corners to go.
But Aargramn was so much faster than me I had to crack in end. Well done m8.

Still, the fact that so many dropped out of race makes me wonder if its all worth it. We have ALL been
there. I worry more about ctd, dropped connection or 1fps than i do about race times.

Results are available here:

http://www.ukgtr.org/lm2-report.php?group=10111&event=5

Yeah, the unreliability of the game is really hurting us now. I'm sure we didn't get this many problems when we were running the fun races.  :(

Right well I just tried with Track distance set to Far and car detail down to high rather than Full and within 5 mins of practicing on the server got the 1 fps bug again.

My process priority is already 0 as I tried that one when Luis suggested it on Simbin's forums.

Max visible vehicles is max at 104, but then i just practiced on my own so dont see how that could affect it.

I still feel so uncomfortable behind the wheel in GTR.... back flicking out all over the place. Throttle seems soft all the way to 3/4 then suddenly leaps in power if I press any further, it's like where did that power come from???

I buggered up the last chicane and span over it, parked on the kerb... cars kept coming full blast even though I was sat there, and blew my car to pieces it seemed. I didn't know how damaged the car was, until I tried to turn, splitter was gone apparently. Managed to coast round.... until fast left at the end of the lap and it went straight on, tried to slow the car down on the grass, but I ended up spinning onto the track before the chicane hitting someone, sorry about that.

Mid race I had a car I could hear behind me.... but I could see nothing. I could hear the car come through me.... totally invisible!! If I didn't have the car labels on, I would never have seen them!! Anyone had invisible cars pass them before??!!

A few things that have pissed me off a bit. All the chat in the race.... I don't wanna hear it/see it. Attack of the big blue text puts me, and probably other off! Leader crosses the line, one thing you could all do is wait for the last person to cross the line before bombarding everyone's cockpits with blue text!! ARGH!

It shouldn't do, unless the game is stupid enough to allocate a chunk of memory for each possible car. All I can suggest is turning down lots of settings (graphics, sound, replay) and see if you still get it. I also like to reboot my PC before a race, just in case something running in the background is leaking resources.

All I want is get to the finish line, no matter in which position I am.

Woodee, what wheel and pedals are you using?

MS FF

Thanks Shark. Will there be a practice server tomorrow night? I set everything to minimum right now to rule the graphics out. I really hope it will work  :)

Woodee

After much "fun" in public servers I have turned in car chat off.
Its in multiplayer options. Dont think I miss out on to much with it off?

What % have you got the throttle set to in game?

50

I would have thought textures would have little to no effect providing you have the vid memory, the go in and don't come out (thats teh whole point).

May I suggest the CPU strainers, swaying trees, effects (smoke etc). I think they are more likely. There has been word that its lost packet related, perhaps you you have some progs running in the BG etc... What is your upstream like?

Fozzmeister

Good luck with that. In a similar industry to you and it seems, unfortunately, it's a bit par for the course. Happened twice now and the last time was the best thign that could have happened because I was in a rut and miserable. Stay positive fella!

Gutted, really gutted to see more of you had bug problems. I'm sure I would have run out of patience long before most of you. It wouldn't be quiteso bad if we just knew a patch was coming. But we don't and I'm pretty disgusted with Simbin. Thinking about it- is this how GPL will work? Support for 9 months and then a silent "f*ck you" to any issues it may have while they drop it and work on something else? I don't see why we should think it will be any different.

Bottom line though, we've got a really great racing community here and that's the most important thing. Should GTR get patched (lol) or should we get fed up and move to another game en masse we're all set for great racing in the future.

the whole 1fps is a total mystery to me, ive never seen it once  ??? i also have a very well specced machine (3000AMD64, 1gig ram, 6800gt) but i run it with most detail settings on medium, as i like to have silky fps rather than detail. i find that as server fills up, fps drops quickly, so i always leave myself *loads* of headroom.. never bothered with any changes to .plr, never re-run config & have never changed any replay settings. shark, might i suggest try leaving a stupid amount of headroom & see what happens.

as for the race, enjoyed it immensely. pretty consistent, had just 2 spins from putting the power down too early. but one of the spins meant i had a great race with truetom, so i'm kind of glad in a way. a podium finish - happy with that  ;D

& my apologies to whoever got really arsey at the end, for us all chatting at the end of the race. you're quite right, we need to cut it out till everyone finishes, its very inconsiderate. but it is easy to forget after 30 minutes of adrenalin fueled racing  :-X

PMF

I run on 2mb down / 200k up NTL. It's rock solid connection.

I have a fast PC it can cope with whatever I throw at it. X800 XT, P4 3.2, 1Gb RAM Dual DDR, SB Audigy 2 ZS etc etc.

I've reinstalled GTR afresh again so we'll so what happens next race I guess. Put special effects down to medium, turned visible cars to 16 and track distance far rather than very and also other player car detail down to high rather than very.

Fingers crossed.

I'd advise setting visible cars to at least 24. When I had it on 20 I ended-up trying to lap an invisible car.

Still about the 1FPS I'm very curious to know if this only affect ATI card owners or Nvidia as well.
I'm guessing that this is ATI only, but I'm might be wrong here.
I asked this some question some long time ago at SimBin but didn't get a clear reply.

Simon, my system is similar to yours:
X800 XTPE, P4 3.4, 2GB Ram, SB Audigy 2 ZS, 4M/256kb, and I'm running wireless net connection which can be a bit more troubling then direct line.

I normally don't use ATI drivers. I'll go with Omega or NGO. Currently I'm using NGO 5.7. I'm really shooting in the dark here, but if this is ATI related, perhaps drivers can have some role in this.

Cetainly a good system, but your cpu will prolly run out of puff before your gfx card, particularly on GTR, Perhaps putting everything to maximum might make your GFX card the bottleneck releasing strain on the CPU, try stupid resolutions etc if your monitor will cope.

Really I'm just stabbin in the dark tho, just like you, just like everyone who's playin this game...

Fozzmeister

I'm really hoping R-Factor does the business. From the amount of pissed people here I reckon at least 2/3rd will give it a go if anything like a clean brake can be made. Truth be told tho, If the community here sticks with GTR without significant movement toward GTR then I'm stayin put. If people move to GTL then I don't know what I'll do, probably go back to Indycar2 by papy!

We'll play it by ear Fozz. There is no alternative to GTR at the moment so we're stuck with it till there is.

I'm using the latest 5.7 ATI drivers Luis. I must admit i never got the bug when i had my 9800XT, but that might have been for any reason, but it could be that I upgraded the drivers at the same as replacing it with the X800 XT when the 9800XT died.

With full of 56 field on and full graphics and 4x anti aliasing it only drops to 15fps at start and after that 30fps is about minimum depending on number of cars. Normally it's up there in the clouds with framerate.

Are the Omega drivers reliable? I try to stick with standard stuff whereever possible with PCs as so many times where you wander off the path and your PC or Windows gets unhappy and you wished you stayed unmodified.

Luis

Im running Nvidia Ge Force 4 Ti4800, P4 3.2, 1 GB Ram, Asus P4 Mobo and Ive suffered the 1fps bug quite a lot recently. Gonna turn off replays next time online and see how that goes.

Cheers

Rob

I'm using BFG 6800 gt, with old xp3200 chugger, and got problem for first time last night. Usually I have no
dips below 60fps at 1280 by 1024. I will now install latest drivers (tend to stick with ones that work) to see
if that changes anything.

Also what is figure, at top, you can change in sound settings? Not sure if its number of channels or
quality but lowering setting does appear to increase fps for me.
 

I think they are hacked drivers, probably to support oc'ing etc. i would not expect them to make a diff

It's how many cars you can hear. I got mine on 8 I think.

I also have an X800 XT and I'm running the Omega drivers and <fingers crossed> all seems OK. No problems in my last 5-6 races

Pops

Omega drivers are for better quality than standard ATi ones. They are not for performance, so you will most likely see a decrease of fps, but they should make it all look better.

Never had the 1 fps bug myself and I don't have an awesome system, which makes me think it's not related to the hardware. Can't really call an AMD 2400+ with a Radeon 9800 pro top of the line at the moment. And since people with Nvidia cards have the problems too, I don't think it's manufacturer related either.
Maybe Fozz is right and it's about lost packets. I did read somewhere that GTR is really heavy on the connection, since it's sending over lots of info, because of the very nice damage model and other stuff. My conn is 400.0Kbyte/s (3.1Mbit/s) down and 96.0Kbyte/s (768.0Kbit/s) up.

T

Both Omegas, DNA, NGO, etc, modified drivers have the purpose to improve both image quality and performance by introducing some drivers optimisations.
For as long as I remember, even from the first times with my 9800XT, I always used Omega drivers, initially, changed to DNA when Omega started to take way to long to release new versions, and currently using NGO, a they seem to be the ones to have better performance and IQ.
I never had any problem what so ever with any of these drivers. The same I can’t say from Ati Tray Tools, for instance, which I don’t use anymore due to the troubles it caused me.
The optimised drivers performance can have some significance when using high or highest quality image in game, as well with the use of AA in particularly.
For instance, when using ATI 5.7 (CP) the maximum frame rate I get running at Magny is 66. With NGO 5.7 it’s 75, running with all game options at the fullest, 4xAA, 8xAF, 1280*1024*32, 75 Hz refresh rate, Vsync ON (application preference)

Ok, I may try the Omega drivers then. Save me a google search you have a good download link?

And do I have to uninstall current drivers to install the Omega ones or do they just go over the top?

I follow this:

1. uninstall any gfx drivers
2. run driver cleaner
3. install new drivers

links for omegas
http://www.omegadrivers.net/

for NGO
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=ati