My biggest problem is that I know some defensive maneuvers are more effective than others because I don't get a lot of practice in defeating them. So, here is an idea maybe Pyro et all can consider for the new release (or at some point)...
The ability to tape a maneuver in the recorder as you fly it, then play it back in the offline area to practice against. I know that right now we have some nice drones that fly around to shoot at, but mostly they just help my shooting confidence (I like the Superfly one the best
). I have no problems fighting a someone pulling a 1.1G corner
Flying some template type flights and being able to practice against those would be a great asset.
Scenario, incase it isn't clear, go in and fly a cornering Spit on defensives... record the whole thing. Start the offline arena, load the Spit recording, take off in X plane, start the recording and have the Spit flying around for you to shoot at. Some work would be needed to work out the details (where should the start point be from where your plane is, etc, etc) but it could probably be pretty simple. No need to have defensive gunfire from the recorded plane.. though it should be possible to even have that I would imagine... nothing quite like getting shot down by a recording
From my understanding, the flight portion of the graphics are delivered by your pc, it's the updates on certain flight parameters that come from the other guy. I'm assuming that the exact same parameters are in the flight recorder that already exists (since it can duplicate your flight). How about if we could stack up a couple of recorded customer maneuvers by flying them and recording them, then playing them back as the enemy plane while you fly normally.. that way you could do the shooting at them and try to follow them.
Possible? I have no idea how AH handles the positional updates for other cons (I can only guess from what I know about how these types of games work and my own coding background) but it sounds like we are at least comparing apples to apples in some way.
Good idea, bad idea, ugly idea? I'm sure a library of good maneuvers would pop up pretty soon for playback and practice. Might lighten the load on the training corps too.
Soda
The Wrecking Crew