Originally posted by A_Clown
Is it possible to boost a planes armor capacity & increase its firepower lethality without a game patch up-date? If so this would easily explain the B-26 uber increase, thus explaining its popularity increase.
From my understanding, here's the way damage works:
1: your FE (front end, your computer) is sending periodic (2x per second or so) position, direction, and velocity updates to the server. A plane type/loadout update was sent to the server when you spawned.
2: Server sends these position/direction updates out to other people's FE, at a slow rate for people far away, and at a fast rate for people close to you.
When you get into a fight:
1. Your opponent and you both send updates to the server. The server sends these to the opposing pilot.
2. One pilot takes a shot at the other plane. His FE computes that all bullets miss. His FE sends a message to the server saying "fired, tracers on." Server sends the information on to the target plane, whose FE displays tracers being fired in his general direction.
3. The same pilot fires again. His FE computes a series of hits, which he sees immediately on his FE. His FE sends the data the server, saying "Fired, tracers on. 6 MG151 hits to left wingtip, 3 MG151 hits to left aileron, 1 MG151 hit to left flap." Of course, this would be compressed/encoded in some way to condense it and save bandwidth.
4. Server passes this information on to the plane that was hit.
5. Target plane's FE recieves hit information, computes damage against the FE's damage model for his particular plane. FE determines that the player lost his left aileron, took damage to the flap (but it still functions), and lost his left wingtip.
6. Target's FE immediately registers damage, forcing pilot to compensate for the loss of his left wingtip or lose control.
7. Target's FE sends damage information to the server, along with its next position/velocity/orientation packet.
8. Server sends this info to the attacking aircraft.
9. Attacker's FE displays the enemy's wintip and aileron falling off, as well as any changes in orientation of the target.
I don't know everything about HTC's programming, but that's the general idea behind most online games as I understand it. There is probably increased complexity in a flight sim - for example, velocity of striking bullets affects damage. I don't know if that's handled on the target's FE or the shooter's FE. It's almost surely not handled server-side.
So to your original question, it would be possible to insert a damage filter for particular airplane types in the server. However, it's pretty impractical. It'd make much more sense to compute it on someone's FE - through a game patch. I'd be surprised if HTC has ever tweaked planes through the server.
