How to Fix Race Positions Flickering Between Two Cars

The position HUD shows '3rd' then '4th' then '3rd' for the same car several times a second when two racers run close. Ranking on a stable progress metric instead of raw distance stops the jitter.

How to fix it

1. Build a composite progress key

Sort cars by laps descending, then by last passed checkpoint index descending, then by distance traveled toward the next checkpoint. This orders by real progress and is stable frame to frame.

2. Use spline arc-length, not Euclidean distance

Measure progress as distance along the track centerline (arc length), not straight-line distance to the finish, so cars on different parts of a winding track rank correctly.

3. Add a small deadband for swaps

Only swap two adjacent positions when one car's progress clearly exceeds the other's by a small margin, preventing rank churn when cars are effectively tied.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Godot error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.