What causes a time trial restart leaving a stale ghost and timer?

The restart repositions the car but does not reset the lap timer, recording buffer, or the playing ghost, so the old run's state bleeds into the new attempt.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix Time Trial Restart Leaving a Stale Ghost and Timer

Quick answer: On restart, stop and clear the timer, reset the ghost recorder, reload the best ghost from scratch, and reposition the car at the start before unfreezing input.

Players restart a time trial and find the clock already running or two ghosts on track. Fully tearing down and rebuilding the trial state on restart gives a clean attempt every time.

How to fix it

1. Reset the timer and recorder

Stop the lap clock, zero it, and clear the ghost recording buffer so the new run starts fresh rather than appending to the previous attempt.

2. Reload the comparison ghost

Reset the playing ghost to the start of the stored best lap and restart its playback when the new run begins, so only one correctly-timed ghost is shown.

3. Freeze input until the start signal

Place the car at the start line, zero its velocity, and hold input until the countdown completes, so the timer and the car begin together cleanly.

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.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.