We on XboxWorld.nl are racing in active tournaments and in FM5 this is our second tournament with GT3 cars. For the first time we have a lobby with 16 people every Tuesday at around 20:00(CET), but we are experiencing some strange lag issues, will try to explain what happens.
When racing all racers (mostly) experience a sort of slow motion for a short moment and then you jump to were you should be driving. (this is not like normal lag that some people have due to a bad connection, jumping cars etc.) This slow motion lag is very irritating and is making it less fun to be racing with a lot of people, can you please solve this for us? Or at least explain what’s happening… this behaviour is not there when we enter public lobby’s.
Hi, thanks for the info. I know Xbox live was experiencing some problems at the weekend which may still be continuing. There was also increased solar activity last week which can play havoc with electrical systems. Hopefully the problems you have experienced will clear up soon and you can get back to some good multiplayer racing.
I have experienced the slow motion/ fast forward lag a couple times. It’s not a Forza problem, it’s a connectivity issue.
Like Dragon said, hopefully it is temporary due to the current network conditions.
I would advise, though, to have a different person set up the multiplayer room and see if that makes a difference. Make sure the person who starts the room and sends out invites has Open NAT. I can’t say that this will work with certainty, but it’s worth a shot at least.
Other than that, you might have to wait it out until the network improves.
I’ve noticed it happens more often if there are people from different continents are in the lobby, especially if they are from Australia (I’m from Europe), so I assume it has to do with lag. And yes it’s getting worse the last couple of weeks.
I’ve seen it in public lobbies only. It usually results in a crash for me - if it happened in any league race it would be a bigger problems since we usually have damage on.
The host is mostly the same, and he has OPEN NAT. Also this was in the last 3 weeks, so the solar thing and the netwerk issues from this weekend couldn’t be it.
Will let someone else host and ask if all players have OPEN NAT. (although i still see 1 or 2 guys lag and the rest are not experiencing anything unusual)
We had some ideas that it has something to do with the updates that usually come at Tuesdays, but this Tuesday there was no update (at least I saw none).
And the last thing, we all live in the NL so that’s could not be an issue, and all players have decent connections. (it’s The Netherlands so …)
We will try to race with 16 guys on sunday to see if we get the same results, with 12 players there is no issue so it seems.
To give some further information. I am the host of this weekly competition and I have been hosting them for over 2 years without ever having any major network problems. Over at our forums we developed two theory’s for these global lag spikes.
The first theory is that, somehow, the bandwidth that we get as a lobby is smaller than that we use when the lobby is full. I don’t know the numbers but let’s say the bandwidth for a private lobby is 2000kb and all 16 players use about 125kb on average than we should be good. But as the network usage never is the same and you spike on occasion, it could be so that, when more people use let’s say 150 kb, the bandwidth is topped over and the lobby can’t handle ‘the stress’. As a results the whole game slows down for a moment, get’s it together, and speeds up again. That could explain the slowmo effect that we all experience at once. Proof for this theory is that when we race with 14 or 12 players there are no such extreme lag spikes.
The second theory is what Lawaai described. We always race on Tuesdays and the last few weeks all major updates have been released on Tuesdays. Millions of gamers are downloading Xbox One updates of of the same servers that Forza lobby’s are hosted on, and when normal gamers don’t have any updates to download the other gamers in the preview program have. As Lawaai also mentioned yesterday there was no regular update, but there was the Forza Horizon 2 demo, which released here about two hours before the start of our practice session. It seemed to be quite a stress for the servers as a lot of gamers where having slow downloads (meaning that the servers are working hard, meaning that it could mean trouble for other tasks such as our Forza lobby).
As for trying another host. We can try that, but as far as I know all Forza 5 lobby’s (privates as well) are actually hosted on the Microsoft server park (same one used for Xbox One updates and other games and MS stuff). So, although I am the host, all I really do as a host is telling the MS servers what to do and then the lobby runs from there instead of of my console (as is the case with Forza 4 and other older games).
I really hope we can solve this because we have been racing in a serious way for a long time and we all invested in this new generation with better physics and good stuff to look forward to in Forza 6 (Horizon 2 rain effects? Looking good!) So it would be a shame if we could’t get everything out of this game due to these slowmo lag spikes!
your group should really be looking forward to Project Cars in November. That game has several different types of weather & time of day transition. Fully animated pits. All cars are unlocked, no currency. No career gind to afford the cars you want to race. The physics in that should (key word, should) be better than FM5. Sure you can’t upgrade the cars (besides tire compound), but you can tune the setup of the car more so than any previous FM title. IMO, you should be looking forward to Project Cars, not FM6.
Yeah Project Cars is something to look forward to for sure! We might do one Project Cars and one forza 5 competition a week so we can enjoy both games. Although Project Cars has more of the racing features that Forza 5 does not have, the big big plus on Forza 5 is that we can turn any car that we like into a racing car. In Project Cars you can only drive with the spec cars you get at launch (And DLC).
True, but the vast majority of the cars are race cars that don’t need parts put on them. You can do GT3, LMP 1/2 or Nascar, etc & have great race events with your friends.
I’ve seen a photo from Project Cars where the Front Left Wheel on BMW Z-something had come completely off the rotor after a crash. Now that’s taking it to the next level!
and back ontopic please, like to hear from some Turn 10 or Microsoft what this issue could be, because every tuesday for at least 3 weeks seems a bit more then a hickup. So please who can tell us something!?
It would be very interesting to see the netcode Project Cars uses. Would be hilarious if that game really has no lag issues besides people with a slow Internet connection & FM5 still has issues for some. I haven’t experienced slow down lag on FM5 in months myself.
If that’s the case than that potentially means the end of full lobby racing meaning the end of Forza 5 competitions all together. Would be crazy that we have a console with more power and than a physics engine that is not optimized to work right.
Thinking about this I think it can’t be the physics engine alone and it has to do with some sort of bandwidth limit. Because racing with 15 other drivatars/ai drivers I don’t experience any slow downs. So if it is the physics engine then it probably is the bandwidth of the physics engine from the game to the network and back (times 16 drivers). A reply form Turn 10 would be nice on this because they could improve their game and next project. If they have plans to make the next Forza Motorsport 20 or 24 players then they should listen to this feedback first before moving on. And if they do listen please let us know that we are heard.