UKGPL Season 38 (Spring 2021) 1967 F1 Sprint (Works) - Montjuich v2 - Jan 24

[Alain Maurice]

Good morning all

Lasse and Markus were in the race as in the fastest practice, bad luck will not even allow them to finish the race, sorry for you.
Behind us are several in the same second, the errors will be fatal.
In this little game, I am lucky to only make 2 mistakes and at the same place in Guardia Urbana, the track is wide and I do not hit any rails.

At the end of the race, Lasse breaks his car at V1, here I am 2 behind Markus already far too far and anyway too fast.
Behind Greg T starts honking just seconds, he goes fast.
Concentration and no exaggeration of confidence, take care of the braking and we'll see.

Suddenly, I see several messages in RED at the top left of my screen, thin several pilots coming out like that at the same time, it smells of general disconnection !!!

Finally no, but Markus disappeared victim of the end-of-race freeze, again dsl for all of you.

There are 7 laps left, I'm 1 and GregT is at 2s, no stress or panic otherwise breakage is guaranteed, it comes back to 1s, the same after a virtual yoga session, my hands are starting to sweat.

Luck smiles at me once again, GregT running out of gasoline cannot keep his pace which allows me to end up without pressure in the end with 10 laps of fuel in the tank OUFFFFFF !!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!

Bravo Enrique for this beautiful podium, Alex and Arf in BRM for finishing this race.

Sorry for all the unlucky ones and see you soon

Thanks to Admins

[Markus Friedrich]

Nice going there, Markus.  

Thirty-eight seconds.  That's how far I was off the lead at the end of my first lap.

I just watched the server replay and saw the horrible chain reaction I caused through spinning at lap 1 turn 2  . I am very sorry and totally understand your frustration Doni. So the freeze I was suffering from later seems like karma. I have to apologize espacially to Raoni, Miele and Bob too. Raoni and Miele were taken out in the aftermath of my mistake. And Bob had a superb start from P5 to P3 only to loose it again due to me spinning. Apologies also to all the others who got frustrated by my mistake!

@Maurice: Congrats to the win! As you described the track is exhausting. Well done!

[Lasse Albrecht]

I watched replay, we got freezed at the very same moment. Very odd.

We had this the other day at oAo as well around Edmonton where NINE drivers experienced a screenfreeze in the same lap... GPL is a mystery sometimes.

[bagrupp]

Apologies to Bastian for a nudge in T1 in an early lap.  You careened off the inner barrier and swung wide.  I thought I was easily through down low til you pinched off the corner.

its ok. i had a weird line in the corner. my favorite track with my favorite car. could not believe it went that good, slow but stable.
I was finishing in mind when that f*cking freeze with 7 laps to go caught also me. Hoped the new track is more stable.

[GregT]

Congrats Alain and Enrique! Good job guys.

I worried lap 1 could get ugly. It did. It's not surprising the attrition was so high. It's a shame to see all the misfortune.

The drivers that took the Hondas and BRMs are brave souls. I doubt I could have made it. I would have had to go slow.

This was the first time I've driven the new version of the track. I drove 5 laps before qualifying. That was enough to see my old setup was very close for the new track. This new track didn't seem to puzzle me as much as Monza67 does.

My Cooper was excellent. It took some lap 1 damage. I hit the walls at least 3 or 4 times through the race and I ran the Maserati engine rather hard the first 2/3s of the race.

It was nice to drive decent. I felt alot better than I did at Watkins Glen. I was hoping to finish at least 6th, 1 point in 1967. I never imagined I finish 2nd.

That's the most I've enjoyed driving the 67s in many months. I was moving along fairly well by the midpoint of the race. It did suck that I didn't load enough fuel. With about 10 laps to go I realized I wasn't going to finish if I didn't start saving some fuel. That was about the same time I thought I might catch Alain. I saved just enough fuel to cross the line before the engine died.

Thanks for the fun guys!

[Phil Thornton]

Had a look into the screen freeze problem:

Markus, Fulvio and Bastian all suffered screen freezes at the same time (0h41m24s).

Positions at the time:
Markus P1, at Pueblo Españo
Fulvio P5, at El Ángulo de Miramar (exit)
Bastian P7, at El Ángulo de Miramar (approach)

Nobody on a particularly unusual area of the track. So, if it was a discontinuity in the road surface, it is surprising that it didn’t happen to many other drivers who have crossed the same piece of tarmac.

Looking at GPL htlm export, the race numbers are:
Markus #16
Fulvio #3
Bastian #2

The race numbers of the other drivers who were still running at the time were:
Alain #17
Greg #7
Andreas #15
Enrique #6
Alex #19
Arf #9

I can’t see any correlation with race numbers (i.e. sequential numbers affected).

Had a look in the “Detailed Race Report”

Code:

41m00.440s
Bastian Grupp - spotters reporting:
medium problems with right front suspension.

41m23.440s
Markus Friedrich gets disconnected while racing in position 1.

41m23.440s
Bastian Grupp gets disconnected while racing in position 7.

41m23.440s
Fulvio Policardi gets disconnected while racing in position 5.

41m44.440s
Alain Maurice overtakes the disconnected Markus Friedrich for position 1.

So according to the report all 3 were disconnected at exactly the same time. Not sure if the order the drivers are listed in the report is significant. All the other non-finishers retired for mechanical reasons or crashes.

Don’t know why disconnections are sometimes associated with screen freezes and sometimes they are not. It appears in most cases when a screen freeze occurs, it affects multiple drivers, no idea why. No idea why specific drivers are affected.

In the Privateers race there were no problems. Different servers but nothing to suggest it was a server issue. But will investigate further.

Martin (Maddog) did warn us that the track was susceptible to screen freezes which is why we ran a test race. After that we decided that it was probably worth the risk. Sorry it didn’t work out for Markus, Fulvio and Bastian. We should probably do more testing and investigation before we use the track in a league race again. Next use currently scheduled for Mixed Open Wheel – Round 10 – 8/6/2021.

[Baab]

Re the discos, Clive and I had a similar experience in the recent 69 fun race, not sure if it's significant.

This track seems pretty heavy for my set-up, I suffered reduced frame rate (below 50) in quite a few corners which was annoying and off-putting.  Since i only have this when racing online connecting to a race server I am wondering if it is due my internet connection, could this be so?  I only have a 16MB connection...of which ookla tells me I achieve 13MB.  This generally seems fine for my numerous conference calls and indeed online racing at other circuits (another test would be Spa 67 I suppose).  I've set-up port forwarding in my router and turned off my firewall  .  Do you all have much faster connections?

The race was okay until I crashed.  I had a few hairy moments but was going reasonably despite the frame rate issue.  The Cooper's tyres seemed to take a good few laps to come in but after that my front end was amazing, almost too good as I had to watch the rear skating about.  After Alain had a moment I closed on him but shortly after brushed a barrier which bounced me into another spinning me into yet another and ripping a wheel off (amazing damage for such a minor impact), sorry for not exiting immediately Fulvio, glad you managed to navigate around me.  Disappointing, I had high hopes.

@Markus, ah so it was you spinning L1!  No probs, sorry I couldn't avoid you!  L1 can be really tricky, cold tyres, other cars close by, gotta be cautious, I also struggled, was in 2nd when I thought I was in 1st, etc.

Cheers Guys

[Cookie]

@Bob

I just explained it to Bernie - the online CPU stress is way more than racing offline with 19 simple AIs.

AI have a simple alghorithm and don't do unexpected things.

Your pc gets much more info when you do online racing - just go into any other drivers cockpit and you see him driving and get all his cars data - and you can do this with all racing drivers on a server!

When you see one warping because he has lag, it is your pc wich computes where he will go next, if a different info is received belated the car jumps! It happens in your PC not in the server!

[Alain Maurice]

Good morning all

I also had drops in FPS in some places when I have a fiber optic connection.
To reduce this phenomenon, I used for racing the original FERRARI from the 1998 game, it much less pretty but corrects the drop in FPS.

For the race, I wouldn't be against suppressing the result, or replaying it if possible.

Thank you 

[Cookie]

Yes, fps-drops have nothing to do with your type of connection.
I was allready taken out in a mass dico sitting 5m besides the server!


Reducing the resolution of your car may help a little, yes, but it is not the solution, another way is to reduce the drawing distances of the track as Martin has mentioned.

BUT

these are all false stopgap solutions, because the real problem is not solved. I bet every mid range PC is able to play GPL in full glory without problems, if it is not older than 5-7 years.
The tracks have become much more demanding and require more from the CPU and GPU than 10 years ago.
Modern CPUs and GPUs running in lowest eco state cant handle GPL well...

I just made a test with an old Haswell 4130 and a very cheap MSI 1050 mobo with 8GB RAM - a fresh W10 and the integrated intel graphics.
GPL 60fpsaiV1 Spa67 full grid AI full HD 1920x1080
It did run fine with OGLV2 until you wanted to leave the car - black screen   so I resetted the W10 graphics to standard and replaced it with the old msi intel iGPU driver -  Problem solved!
W10 had installed its own signed inappropriate intel driver...
This would be fine for 67s offline, but for online it is too weak! Next step will be the GTX 960 added...

[Markus Friedrich]

Reducing the resolution of your car may help a little, yes, but it is not the solution, another way is to reduce the drawing distances of the track as Martin has mentioned.

@Cookie
Am I right remembering that Ginetto provided an update for the new Goodwood circuit that has a new 3do that reduces the draw distance? Because there were also problems with screen freezes during online races with that circuit.
And is there another way to reduce the draw distance on my own? I mean without changing the 3do, because I do not know how to do that.

[dave curtis]

Am I right remembering that Ginetto provided an update for the new Goodwood circuit that has a new 3do that reduces the draw distance? Because there were also problems with screen freezes during online races with that circuit.
<snip!>

Yes, the reduced-draw update for Goodwood65 is available at the track download location. Was added to the first post of the thread at SRMZ:  http://srmz.net/index.php?showtopic=13395&st=0

Cheers,
Dave.

[Cookie]

Markus, imo too much for little effect...
only if your pc specs are very poor you can reduce the graphic settings in game options to "few"
and set the detail slider to 50%

my 2GB VRAM GT 1030 passive office GPU does not need it!