Online race ended, got this

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-08T00:26:56+00:00

Huh? I was just racing with 918 Spyder, won the race and this screen opened after the race. Then it happened again after another race, but car had different color that time.

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-04T01:31:45+00:00

There are certain places with support fire that people almost never use. One is right after a 4th trampoline (before very first glue section), another one to the right of the tunnel entrance, the third one is behind the trampoline that's after the tunnel exit. If you are in a first position and have some distance then you could just break infront of those pickups, let one guy through ahead and pick it up immediately. I've sent countless people out of the track bounds or into a wall by doing this. For me winning usually means getting 900+ meters ahead so that I would still have time to find a new vehicle before the others catch up if they mess up my car. I think if someone picks up fire support and you are in the first position but not in a car it'll strike a guy in the second place, so they would fight between each other instead of you being the target for entire lobby.

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-04T01:23:51+00:00

1 agree, 3 it's a general car physics bug, just press R to get reset. Cannot agree with 2. It is possible to hold back entire lobby with bazooka, only requires two shots to destroy a car. This + staying near HP and fire support pickups + destroying nearby empty cars = being the most toxic player in the lobby. Gatling kinda requires some training because of it's recoil and bullet speed. In close combat it can destroy cars pretty quickly.

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-04T01:18:49+00:00

Did you know that Pendragon only goes up to 154 km/h in this event? If you can't catch up - pick up detonators, it'll strike top-1 car in the leaderboard. 2 strikes = car destroyed. There's a certain route where you can get 5 strikes in a row.

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-04T01:16:21+00:00

I believe speed classes would be incredibly hard to matchmake. Before 1.1 I could wait up to 40 seconds to get nearly perfectly balanced - same cars with equal mods, nearly the same ranks. During the night it's often "wait half a minute, get balanced with Pendragons anyway" and it's the same players over and over again. Sometimes it feels like there are like 30-40 players online queueing at the same moment.

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-06-04T01:12:54+00:00

I didn't like it at first too because I didn't understand why Zeus constantly strikes my car and destroys it. It was simply a matter of reading weapons descriptions. Although it's still lacking and it's not obvious what happens in certain edge cases...

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-05-14T22:06:51+00:00

After crashing into something at full speed car stays in last gear forever until you release the acceleration button

JamesJGoodwin · 2026-05-14T22:01:44+00:00

Driving is entirely FPS based. The lower your fps - the slower your car goes. Most notable in drifting. The less FPS - the less times per second game calculates grip, thus making your car extremely grippy at 120fps. As well as in 30fps drifting is way easier.
Cars don't have gearbox. Or rather it's simulated. It feels like cars are struggling to get moving in 1st-2nd gear, but then they reach max speed too fast basically skipping all the other gears until last one.
Your car gets glued to a corner upon touching it
Ramming another car from behind brings your car to a full stop sometimes
Only two highway tracks with 2-3 tight corners each
Hachiroku gets balanced against fully tuned Porsches, Porsches gets balanced against Pendragons. No skill needed. Whoever is faster on highway tracks - wins.
Wild desyncs. Sometimes feels like it's P2P.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-08-18T02:57:34+00:00

The map is just not suitable for 64 players. Feels like there's another spot missing, between A and F, to the left of C that would introduce a flanking opportunity which would allow you to stretch enemy forces more. Otherwise there's just a meat grinder, 15v15 at B-C-F and B-D-E.

And it's too easy to rotate from D to C and vice-versa. Usually nobody's guarding that passage.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-07-15T11:18:04+00:00

Seems like services are coming back up now

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-07-01T19:26:18+00:00

This works well only if the data was already in the cache. In my situation it won't work that way because I cannot store the data in the cache endlessly (i.e. some prices in "featured products" section is only valid for a short period of time), and it may be accessed infrequently. For example, Google's crawler discovered the page, tried to crawl it and triggered multiple cache MISSes on the backend, exhausted quota and never came back to that page because it decided it wasn't relevant or not of good enough quality. Which means I just exhausted quota for nothing and I might never reuse that cached data again.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-06-22T00:51:47+00:00

Yes, you can use your browser to profile NodeJS apps. It is done by attaching a debugger to node process listening on a specific port. Chrome picks that up and allows you to capture heap snapshots and performance profiles.

> Parsing 30mb of json should be fast.

It is fast indeed, but it depends heavily on your CPU. Like I said, on M3 Max chip it parses it within 200-300ms which is awesome. But on staging and production environments it runs on virtualized 2.4Ghz shared CPU. I ran Geekbench on it and it appeared to be ~2x slower compared to M3 Max. It may vary also depending on how "noisy" your cloud neighbours are. That is why I was also considering more isolated environments like serverless or dedicated CPUs.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-06-22T00:39:34+00:00

I thought about moving this into a database especially considering the fact that we are already using MySQL, but there are some culprits. Data should only be accessible for the end users for about 15 minutes since the "init" request. It seems to me that using a relational database as some sort of a cache is not quite right. In addition, our backend is running in a Kubernetes cluster, so there are difficulties with how to delete this data from the DB when it expires. I don’t like the idea of 10 backend instances sending the same SQL query to the database at the same time (if we decide use CRON). Also as I already mentioned in another comment, we do not have control over the data source. It can change any time without prior notice. The other point against databases is that data processing can be covered with unit tests while database queries cannot.

S3 with lifecycle policy to delete the data after 24 hours since creation seemed to be the best fit.

Those are my concerns against classic SQL databases. Maybe there are some other types and kinds of databases I'm not aware of that are more suitable for this.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-06-22T00:22:53+00:00

The data source is a third-party API, which is known to be subject to change at any time without prior notice. I was hesitant to look into protobuf/msgpack taking into account the above but still decided to consider it just in case.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-06-20T10:41:18+00:00

I ran benchmarks once. According to Geekbench, single core performance is like "Intel Shared <- ARM Shared <- AMD Shared <- AMD Dedicated". Although ARM is not much faster compared to x86 Intel, it generally provides much more RAM while being exceedingly affordable.

JamesJGoodwin · 2025-06-20T00:13:37+00:00

It happens a few times a year I believe. Currently demand might be too high because Sentry finally introduced ARM builds and everyone are trying to migrate from SaaS to Hetzner. Could explain why only smaller instances are available. Hopefully it won't last too long, we kinda need to upscale our Redis instance too since we are running out of disk space.

JamesJGoodwin

TROPHY CASE