P4/1.7
512MB RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, 128MB
WinME
DirectX 9.0
I finally found somebody willing to fight online yesterday. This was a first for me, so maybe others have noticed this problem before. But whenever a new type of plane appeared and got to about d1000, it would vanish for several seconds. Then it would reappear and things would be normal thereafter, until another new plane showed up. This only happened once per plane type, too. When I met the same type of plane again during the same sortie, it did not vanish again.
When the plane vanished, my FPS went to zero for a split second, just enough to notice everything had stopped, and then FPS returned to normal. But still the other plane was gone. While the other plane was invisible, my FPS was back in the low 20s where it always had been, and I could fly around desperately looking all over for it, all seemingly normally. Of course, the other plane was really still there and flying around, so when it reappeared it did so far from where I saw it last and usually on my 6
.
The above hardware isn't cut out for AH2 and I had the video settings fairly high because I'd been working on a skin and forgot to set them down again. Thus, my FPS wasn't great. However, it was in the low 20s most of the time, which was quite good enough for 1-on-1 ACM on the deck with no stuttering, until somebody fired a bunch of tracer. That would give me a slide show for the duration of the firing, but that was the only real FPS problem per se that I had. So I don't think the vanishing plane was an FPS problem.
I think it has something to do with loading a bunch of new graphics for the new plane. However, it wasn't custom skins because the planes I fought were all stock. I did get 1 "loading skin" message but that was for a P51, and I never fought any 51s.
