Not only did I never see it on course (it started on the pole and I started alongside it in second, so I should have seen it), it never appeared in the standings during the race, and it does not appear in the replay of the race. What, exactly, happened here? It's not a big deal, because this was a casual race, but I'm curious about how this came to occur... <scratches head>
It just happened to me again! For a few seconds, the cars ahead of me disappeared and the standings showed me in first place, before the screen went black and I found myself at the screen showing the available races again. This suggests the problem might be on my end, as I'm in the U.S. and this race was on a European server. Going forward, what is a reasonable ping limit (and what does "-ms" mean)? Thanks!
Below 100 ms. A bit above is not too bad, but already starts to lag and warp quite noticeably. AFAIK this is shown when your ping is so high that the ping check actually times out. Don't join such a server. Better to keep it to US servers when you're situated over there. And in general - use a cable, no WiFi.
Well, if that's the limit, then this pretty much kills online racing with RRE for me. I checked three times today and there were only two servers showing pings lower than 100 ms, another two higher than 200 ms, and the largest group was "-ms", with the next largest group clustered around 150 ms, +/- 10 ms. FWIW, the driving experience from my perspective has been plenty good with a 150 ms ping, but I have no idea how my car or driving looks to others at that point and I certainly don't wish to interfere with their races or even just annoy them by blinking on-and-off or jumping / twitching around. Unfortunately, that's much easier said than done, but I will look into this, as it appears I may not have any other option. Thanks for the info, though, even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear.
I use cable and fast internet and it still happens from time to time. More often I see cars in front of me with some strange visual behavior like moving side to side like drifting effect.
If your WiFi connection is generally good than your ping should look OK. But even then WiFi usually creates lag spikes from time to time that can lead to a kick. But if your WiFi connection is weak/bad in general, this might be the problem you're experiencing. Another possibility is that the internet is generally bad in the area you live. But you should surely have quite a few servers with a ping below 100 when everything is fine and upto todays standards. Try pinging game.raceroom.com on the command line several times and see what's the average ping.
I've done so several times over the past 12 hours (and again just now) and the results are typically in the high 150 ms range. My internet connection is fairly robust generally and when I ping other sites, the results are typically in the high 20 to mid 30 ms range. So it appears this issue is more or less unique to the RaceRoom server. I guess I need to spend some time troubleshooting it ... oh, joy!
It still bugs me that there is no US server you have a good ping to. There should be plenty. There are even ranked servers situated in the US that should theoretically give you a very good ping. Have you checked your server filters? Maybe you're filtering out the good ones accidentally...
I apologize, as I should have made it clear the best connections I can make are to the U.S. servers and the ping with them is usually in the 30-40 ms range. 8^) The issue with those, however, is that they're hosting ranked races for cars and tracks I haven't driven yet, so I'm not ready to jump into a race -- especially a ranked race! -- without doing some off-line practice first, because I don't want to ruin the race for everybody else. To that end, it sure would be nice if the ranked racing schedule was published a week ahead so I could get some practice and be ready to race at the beginning of the week, instead of at the end of the week. <shrugs>
Ah OK, then everything is fine with your connection. High pings to servers abroad are to be expected I'd say. And warping/flickering and even invisible cars and the like are the usual consequences. Maybe you could go on Discord and suggest the race schedule to be published a few days ahead. S3-staff is usually online and you can talk to them directly. No guarantee that they will do it, but it's worth a try. And generally keep in mind that all the ranked stuff is still not 100% complete. Things will become more fleshed out in the future I think. RR is always evolving. Not always as fast or in a certain direction that you might like to, but still, it's moving...
I was reading somewhere that you could use Wired and WiFi at the same time from the same router. This will insure more stable connection. I am using both as suggested and noticed stable connections indeed. There is another option for combining Wired and WiFi so called Bridge but unfortunately this didn't work on my computer for some reason.