![]() ![]() Rejoining with the wrong car or upgrade would often cause lags and freezes for all other drivers already on the server as everyone was forced to load a different car in real-time while on track (instead of the car that got parked in the garage when you disconnected). This brings us to another important point and side effect of rejoin errors. For example, if you join with a ‘BMW M8 GTE’ with the ‘Le Mans package’ and ‘my-team-livery’, and you have a network issue during the race and are booted, instead of seeing the whole list of cars, team liveries, and upgrades on rejoin, you only see your BMW M8 GTE, and the option to change upgrade package is no longer available. We enhanced the network protocol to communicate to your client what car, livery and upgrades were used before, so we can choose the right car for you. Next, we worked on making this process more user friendly, so that it’s actually impossible to make a mistake on rejoin. RFACTOR 2 AI DRIVERThis means when you join with car A and upgrade X, it will be logged in a more robust way that prevents the driver history getting lost. RFACTOR 2 AI CODETo tackle this problem, we first looked at the core code of the rejoin process to make sure all options regarding car and upgrades are inherited and stay with each driver, regardless of disconnections or previous driver swaps. Making a mistake, it turns out, causes problems for more people than the driver rejoining, so we needed to make sure this could no longer happen. You might ask, “Why is this a problem, I always pick the correct options”? Whilst that might be true in 99% of the cases, it’s the 1% that hurts us here in the end. It’s hard to be sure a team of multiple drivers always chooses the correct options. Of course, these outcomes are incorrect and the question for us was: what triggers these scenarios? Our research and testing quickly showed that, in most cases, these issues were related to rejoining and either a) picking a totally different car from the car selection, b) picking the right car with the wrong livery from the car selection, or c) picking the right car and livery but with a different upgrade package. rFactor 2 has always allowed for a driver to rejoin a race after a computer crash or network issue, but in some cases on rejoining the server, the driver would end up with a DNF (Did not finish), a DQ (disqualification) or their name would show at the bottom of the list as simply ‘pending an open session’. One of the main areas we focused on was issues related to rejoining after getting disconnected during a session, for example when the network connection goes down for a moment. As a team, we meticulously went over each of these reports and looked for any specific details that could point us in the right direction. ![]() Thankfully, we also had the massive support of the rFactor 2 community through post-race feedback and stories, as well as logging – this was invaluable and an enormous push to help find the root cause of many of these issues people have in online events. This intense focus has given us an insight into the many ways things can go wrong in the heat of racing. Having to go back and test multiple scenarios repeatedly and working to find fixes and workarounds required a well-thought-out approach with a solid understanding of the issues from all involved, both on the testing side and the development side. So of course, much of the findings relied on intense and focused testing over the past weeks. Their cause turned out to be very specific edge cases in ‘rejoins’ and ‘driver swaps’ so we proceeded by focusing on trying to break these features in as many different ways as possible. With a lot of help of the participating teams, we analyzed all the problems and for the first time were able to reproduce most of them. It was not a simple task, but we rolled up our collective sleeves and dug in. We decided to immediately regroup and redirect our priorities towards dissecting and fixing what turned out to be long standing issues. Releasing a new rFactor 2 build is typically something we do with a classic bulleted changelog, but this time we felt it deserved a bit more than that.ĭuring our recent rF24 event, technical issues cropped up that left us no alternative but to red flag the race. Studio 397 has released a new rFactor 2 build fixing some technical issues after the 24h of Le Mans. ![]()
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