Could a player cause intentional lag?

[daloon]

How can you shoot down the Zorro's (jet laggers) in AH? I have noticed on many occasions that enemy planes often fly in
 (Z)orro paths when being fired upon. At first I assumed it was a net (or game) wide occurrence, but on many occasions only the enemy aircraft are flying Z patterns while friendlies are still flying straight and true.  Is this a net problem or could players intentionally cause the lag to try to avoid certain death???

[bloom25]

It's probably just their connection, but in AH a plane will make a minor jump at around 4k to 3.5k.  That part at least is normal.

[Vulcan]

If your close to a guy and he does the "Z" thing it usually indicates they are on a TCP connection. AH tries to connect first using UDP, then if that fails (usually due to a firewall or router based internet connection) it switches to TCP.

AH uses a sort of lead-predictor to predict where planes are going to keep the flow smooth.

UDP is sending fire and forget packets of data, ie, if a packet gets lost then it is not resent, and AH fills in the gaps itself.

TCP is sending packets which are checked, confirmed, and if not received resent.

So, when you see a Z'er, its usually that one of the TCP packets has been resent, in the meantime AH has guessed a path fairly close but not exactly the one he took. The resent TCP packet with the right data arrives and is rendered and you see that little Z jump.

If the data is lost at too high a rate then the plane appears to freeze in midair or disappear.

The best solution is to get the person to setup their firewall/router to allow UDP traffic in from the AH server.

Intentional lag is relatively hard to do. The easiest way would be to start a massive download while playing, but that takes time, and in the heat of air combat you'd crash setting up the download