Speed Dreams Community

I have a very similar spec machine, and although I don't get great frame rates I don't recall it pausing/skipping. Normally run Linux on this machine and don't know if I tried the beta1 on it, so I'll give is a special boot into WinXP during the week and let you know....

Most likely there is something else on that machine which is causing the processor or disk to be 'distracted', can you try to shut off any other programmes to see if that makes a difference.
Simon.

Closing other applications didn't help.
The issue often occurs when I switch Driver Board mode or cycle between cars (with PageUp/Down). However, it happens without doing so, too. The freezing and skipping occurs abruptly, there aren't any frame rate drops or other problems before.

i too had this problem with some revisions of my car models, but unfortunately i never found out what caused those lags nor why it disappeared with a later revision (either after adding or changing sth).
so the only solution i can offer is to look which model causes the lagging and not using it
if it is the same problem, maybe you could also report which one it is.

Recently I was playing with Monoposto America 1 cars and SD seems to freeze with them most (few times per minute with only 4 cars on track).

i tried it on several tracks with the mpa1-car but i didn't get any lags so maybe it's some more obscoure bug that isn't readily reproducable.

btw. it just occoured to me: do you use a virusguard program? if so, did you try wether SD works better without it (maybe it slows SD by trying to check)?

Yes, I use anti-virus. I haven't tried disabling it. I remember that the freezing occurred more often when my web browser was running simultaneously with SD (Opera minimized to Toolbar). Recently I ran several SD races in following configuration:

Track: Straight-10
Participants: 3 Simplix robots (2 Vieringe 5 RB and Taipan LTS-R) and 1 human (Vieringe 5 RB)

SD froze only a few times (less than once per 10 minutes). The MPA1 races I mentioned were runned on Chemisay, with 4 different car models (controlled by 3 Simplix robots and 1 human).

EDIT: I ran the race with the same participants (3 Vieringe-Taipan) on Chemisay. The freezing seems to occur a bit more frequently, but still it is far rarer than MPA1 race. Also, web browser running simultaneously increased the frequency of freezing (in fact frame rate was affected, too).

This sounds like a diffent problem after all, because for me it was clearly traceable to a specific car, while your problem sounds more like a resource or graphics-card related problem (eg. driver problem or lacking support for some OGL-function). Maybe you try posting your problem on the speed-dreams mailing list as some of the developers (like J-P) are currently not active here.

btw. maybe you could try if updating your graphics-card-driver makes any difference.

I have up-to-date drivers. According to OpenGL Extension Viewer, my graphics card supports all core features up to OpenGL 3.3. So it seems to be a resource problem.