Gray "Temp" car

[ProdigyXP]

I am having a problem in Multiplayer. When I am hosting, I see the other player's car as a gray polygon car with "Temp" written on the side of it. The other player sees both cars as they should appear. When the other player hosts, they see my car as the gray "Temp" car, but I see both cars as they should appear.

The odd part is this worked completely fine yesterday. A friend had just purchased the game. I hosted directly from within the game (not dedicated server) and we raced various tracks without any issue (no lag at all.. even with several AI).

Fast forward to today. Before we started, I sent him some links to a few downloadable tracks that I already have. He copied the tracks into his Locations folder and I hosted on one of the 'new to him' tracks. Our cars appeared fine to each other and we started to practice. He mentioned that the game seemed a little laggy (for the first time), so I figured it had something to do with the custom track. So I switched to a stock map. This is when the gray "Temp" car issues started.

He has since removed the custom tracks, but the issue still persists. Every stock track we try ends up with the host seeing the other player's car as a gray "temp" car. So I told him to put the custom track back that we tried earlier. When He joins, we both see each other's car as normal. All stock tracks still result in the gray temp car issue. So I tried switching to one of the Reiza Formula cars. Still the same issue. We drove around for a bit anyway. When I lapped him, I noticed his car was now showing correctly! Hmmmm.... ok, that's odd. So we went back to the Stock V8 cars on a stock track and had the gray temp car issue. We drove around for several laps, but it never went away.

Does anyone have any idea what can be the cause of this? It's driving us crazy. Instead of racing tonight, we spent the past couple hours fooling around with just trying to fix this. Obviously I find it hard to believe it doesn't have anything to do with the custom tracks, but he has removed them. But like I said above, when he puts them back and we try one, the cars show as they should. Very strange.

Sorry for being long-winded. I just wanted to include as much detail as possible in hopes it gives a clue as to what the issue is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ML2166]

Could be caused by a rogue custom file of any sort that one of you doesn't have.

Is it possible for you both to race with a copy of a completely vanilla unmodded game?

 

[Rob Fitness]

for fear of stating the obvious....

whomever is last to join will appear as a temp car if you are on track when they join... until such time as you (being the car already circulating) "garage" yourself and the game loads the car properly.

if you are aware of this and doing this already, then, yer, that's weird.

 

[Ho3n3r]

It's like this by design. The player's car will only load once you return to the pits. Obviously, because he came into the server via, well, the pits, he sees all the cars that were there when he joined, correctly.

The alternative - which leads to a momentary pause/frames skip in the game, which could be very frustrating with a grid of 15 or more cars constantly leaving and entering - is to disable it in either the multiplayer.ini or the .plr file - cannot remember the setting here from work, but it's pretty obvious when you find it.

I would strongly vouch against it, though...

 

[ProdigyXP]

Thanks guys. Being new to the multiplayer, I didn't realize that is how it worked (it makes sense). I will surely test this out tonight, but that sounds like what was happening.

The funny part is we didn't see this happen the first night at all, and we had switched tracks several times. Then last night, it happened every time, with the exception of one specific track. We even switched to several other tracks, all of which had the "issue", but then when we went back to the "working" track, it still worked properly. I suspect it was just good/bad timing each time. What are the odds?

Thanks again for the replies & help. Much appreciated.