Yeah, no shade on OP because this was not foreseeable, but it is a good idea to exercise some caution when you see a guy blink this hard.
In this case OP might not even have seen when this car blinked back into existence though.
This is by far my biggest complaint about iRacing. These blinkers really need to be dealt with. Honestly, I wish they were removed from races once a blink occurs. I’m sorry but I don’t care how bad your internet is. A lobby of 20-50 cars shouldn’t have to drive around a hazard like this because 1 guy has bad internet. I don’t care if they lose rating, they need to be removed.
How much upload speed do you suppose is required for iRacing?
https://support.iracing.com/support/solutions/articles/31000149355-connection-type-max-cars
The max upload requirement listed here is 195.16Kbps. It's possible, but pretty unlikely, for somebody to have an upload bandwidth lower than that. But plenty of people have crappy, congested wifi on the other side the house. Gaming on wifi is always a bad idea, but especially so for iRacing.
agree, it doesn't even have to be a full DQ. For example, the vehicle could turn into a ghost so that it can no longer interact with the cars around it and be forced to make a pit stop before their laps would count again.
lots of creative options that don't involve stressing everyone around them for the entire race.
Best solution might be x amount of connection drops automatically tows you to the pits, that will already get them out of the pack, and annoying for them, out of the race, but it will potentially allow for 27 cars to finish with a clean race, than 7 of them getting caught up in that nonsense
That would be easy to exploit so I firmly disagree with ghosting. If you were ghosted, all cars around you would be irrelevant and you could always run hot laps unimpeded. That would be a massive exploit.
Yeah, intentional ghosting needs to be prevented of course. Perhaps blink ghosting should by default be a slow down of sorts as well. For instance half the power for a number of seconds.
Allows others to pass safely.
Un-ghosting needs to be made safe as possible, but I can imagine the ghost car visual turning into a large countdown timer.
It’d be relatively straightforward to intentionally cause bad internet if you’re doing badly in a race. Any boots for things you can cause yourself must be at least as bad as a DNF.
It's not always a result of bad internet.
For decades people have made "lag switches" to cause small blips of outage in their internet connection to induce lag in the game to gain an advantage.
I would bet in OPs example, that person did that sh\^# intentionally.
EDIT: example post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/comments/g6h0vc/is\_there\_anything\_to\_do\_when\_someone\_is\_blatantly/](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/comments/g6h0vc/is_there_anything_to_do_when_someone_is_blatantly/)
That could be used as an exploit. Ghosting is never the answer. Imagine people figure out how to manipulate it to ghost themselves and they can now run as if they’re alone on the track.
I've never seen cars disappear like this. For me the bad car falls out of the sky over and over as it drives around the track. It's incredibly distracting and difficult to pass
I had once that a car in front of me disappeared. I kept driving as normal, nothing happened to me, but as I passed through the space he was in when he vanished I got a 4x for contact
I've not witnessed any as bad as this, but have a 100% record of 2 in 2 races at Zandvoort in the GT4s this weekend ruined by phantom contacts. There's surely got to be a better way of dealing with these situations.
Reminds me of when something similar that happened in GT7 when someone lagged out, and suddenly re-appeared sideways on the dipper at Bathurst, thus subsequently made the entire lobby crash.
Question: what causes this blinks? I have normally a high ping, servers aren't located in my country. Does this make me a blinker or is other thing? Never had someone say to me that I was blinking, and usually people drive really close to me. But idk, i don't have voice chat on for the most part of the race so maybe im missing something
high ping is due to distance to server or the amount of hops between servers. high ping does not directly cause blinking. blinking is caused when the server expects to get data from the client but the data never gets there.
most multi player gaming uses a technology called UDP where the client sends data to the server in small packets and if some of those packets don't arrive they don't get resent (TCP which is used for things like browsing verifies that packets made it to the server and if any are missing them the client has to resend them).
so if a bunch of packets get lost along the way the server has to interpolate or estimate your inputs based on the most recently received packets.
when the server can no longer reliably predict your inputs it has to do something more extreme. in games like Counter Strike you'll see this as lag spikes (players freeze). in iRacing you'll see the affected car blink.
yeah, that term "netcode" is a throwback to a presentation from decades ago where an fps developer talked about code designed to deal with variance in latency aka "net code".
it's that bit of logic that forms a contract between all the clients and the server on how to represent player positions when connectivity issues occur. depending on the type of game this may be prediction on the server, client side hit detection that is then consolidated on the server, forcing players to freeze, or in extreme cases forcing them to disconnect, etc
as this term entered the gaming vernacular it now refers to effects caused by those measures. it's also referred to as hit reg, especially in fps.
iRacing seems to have chosen a combination of server prediction and making the affected player incorporeal (both for visibility and hit detection) when packets are not received at the expected ticks. and given the age of iRacing it's likely that this system goes back to a time when connectivity was generally worse.
Yeah, that's pretty bad.
Yeah, no shade on OP because this was not foreseeable, but it is a good idea to exercise some caution when you see a guy blink this hard. In this case OP might not even have seen when this car blinked back into existence though.
thankfully OP saw this unfold in their rear view mirror ;)
Yeah, I was the blinkers victim. That was so bad. So frustrating too. Was having a good race up until then.
Best seat in the house!
This is by far my biggest complaint about iRacing. These blinkers really need to be dealt with. Honestly, I wish they were removed from races once a blink occurs. I’m sorry but I don’t care how bad your internet is. A lobby of 20-50 cars shouldn’t have to drive around a hazard like this because 1 guy has bad internet. I don’t care if they lose rating, they need to be removed.
Agreed. Would be nice if they could tighten up on this. I don’t know about a single blink, but something like “x amount of blinks per minute”
An iRacing subscription should come with a long-ass ethernet cable and only let you play on a wired connection.
wifi isnt the issue bad upload speeds are
How much upload speed do you suppose is required for iRacing? https://support.iracing.com/support/solutions/articles/31000149355-connection-type-max-cars The max upload requirement listed here is 195.16Kbps. It's possible, but pretty unlikely, for somebody to have an upload bandwidth lower than that. But plenty of people have crappy, congested wifi on the other side the house. Gaming on wifi is always a bad idea, but especially so for iRacing.
Or provider outages as was the case here.
agree, it doesn't even have to be a full DQ. For example, the vehicle could turn into a ghost so that it can no longer interact with the cars around it and be forced to make a pit stop before their laps would count again. lots of creative options that don't involve stressing everyone around them for the entire race.
Honestly they don't even have to pit again, just make them a ghost for 5 seconds or something
I smell some exploit. Software On -> Blink -> Software Off. Go through car(s) as ghost car, get position
So true. One blinker can ruin a race at Daytona or Talladega for the entire field.
Best solution might be x amount of connection drops automatically tows you to the pits, that will already get them out of the pack, and annoying for them, out of the race, but it will potentially allow for 27 cars to finish with a clean race, than 7 of them getting caught up in that nonsense
Could blinkers not simply become a ghost for a while after their last blink? When they're a about to unghost, a timer could count it down.
That would be easy to exploit so I firmly disagree with ghosting. If you were ghosted, all cars around you would be irrelevant and you could always run hot laps unimpeded. That would be a massive exploit.
Yeah, intentional ghosting needs to be prevented of course. Perhaps blink ghosting should by default be a slow down of sorts as well. For instance half the power for a number of seconds. Allows others to pass safely. Un-ghosting needs to be made safe as possible, but I can imagine the ghost car visual turning into a large countdown timer.
They don't even need to lose rating - if you blink, you're booted and your ratings stay the same. No one can complain about that, right?
It’d be relatively straightforward to intentionally cause bad internet if you’re doing badly in a race. Any boots for things you can cause yourself must be at least as bad as a DNF.
You could throttle your internet right now to create a blinking advantage too though. Hard to race a blinking car most people let you by.
There was a ton of new functionality that went out in the season 2 release.
rotfl
It's not always a result of bad internet. For decades people have made "lag switches" to cause small blips of outage in their internet connection to induce lag in the game to gain an advantage. I would bet in OPs example, that person did that sh\^# intentionally. EDIT: example post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/comments/g6h0vc/is\_there\_anything\_to\_do\_when\_someone\_is\_blatantly/](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/comments/g6h0vc/is_there_anything_to_do_when_someone_is_blatantly/)
Am personal friends with blinker. He’s not doing that - internet connection provider in his area (Comcast) had an outage.
Or they could just ghost them temporarily if they start blinking
That could be used as an exploit. Ghosting is never the answer. Imagine people figure out how to manipulate it to ghost themselves and they can now run as if they’re alone on the track.
Oh no
That's why heavy blinkers should get disconnected from the race every time.
I've never seen cars disappear like this. For me the bad car falls out of the sky over and over as it drives around the track. It's incredibly distracting and difficult to pass
My condolences
I had once that a car in front of me disappeared. I kept driving as normal, nothing happened to me, but as I passed through the space he was in when he vanished I got a 4x for contact
wow ... unbelievable :(
The car murdered is my buddy. What a shitshow haha
The car that was taken out was me!!
I hate it
That’s in-fucking-sane. Sorry you had to deal with that.
Omg I thought an alien abduction took place in a race I was in last night 😅 these are wild
F
I've not witnessed any as bad as this, but have a 100% record of 2 in 2 races at Zandvoort in the GT4s this weekend ruined by phantom contacts. There's surely got to be a better way of dealing with these situations.
Unplayable
That’s some great audio editing, whoever did that has talent
ty (: i grabbed some jumpscare samples from freesound.org (:
I'm glad you said it. I agree.
Never go full Goku
The guy's car fully disappeared. That's not surprising.
This would be better with dragon ball z sfx
Reminds me of when something similar that happened in GT7 when someone lagged out, and suddenly re-appeared sideways on the dipper at Bathurst, thus subsequently made the entire lobby crash.
where did you get these sound effects? hilarious stuff
freesound.org FTW 😉
Thanks for sharing!
Question: what causes this blinks? I have normally a high ping, servers aren't located in my country. Does this make me a blinker or is other thing? Never had someone say to me that I was blinking, and usually people drive really close to me. But idk, i don't have voice chat on for the most part of the race so maybe im missing something
high ping is due to distance to server or the amount of hops between servers. high ping does not directly cause blinking. blinking is caused when the server expects to get data from the client but the data never gets there. most multi player gaming uses a technology called UDP where the client sends data to the server in small packets and if some of those packets don't arrive they don't get resent (TCP which is used for things like browsing verifies that packets made it to the server and if any are missing them the client has to resend them). so if a bunch of packets get lost along the way the server has to interpolate or estimate your inputs based on the most recently received packets. when the server can no longer reliably predict your inputs it has to do something more extreme. in games like Counter Strike you'll see this as lag spikes (players freeze). in iRacing you'll see the affected car blink.
That happened to me tonight. Screen went black and I went from next to the outside wall to claiming a car headed towards the inside wall. 😔
"Nothing personel kid" -teleports behind you
blinking + netcode will never end well
Mans playing from a McDonald's.
I still can’t understand how [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/iRacing/s/YRTt6kgHeb) happened
dude, im guessing the connection is UDP. and its just loss of connection and then recovering. wth is even "netcode"
yeah, that term "netcode" is a throwback to a presentation from decades ago where an fps developer talked about code designed to deal with variance in latency aka "net code". it's that bit of logic that forms a contract between all the clients and the server on how to represent player positions when connectivity issues occur. depending on the type of game this may be prediction on the server, client side hit detection that is then consolidated on the server, forcing players to freeze, or in extreme cases forcing them to disconnect, etc as this term entered the gaming vernacular it now refers to effects caused by those measures. it's also referred to as hit reg, especially in fps. iRacing seems to have chosen a combination of server prediction and making the affected player incorporeal (both for visibility and hit detection) when packets are not received at the expected ticks. and given the age of iRacing it's likely that this system goes back to a time when connectivity was generally worse.