What Happened to That Plane?

[funked]

When you get a pilot kill or a pilot bails out, for some reason his airplane dissappears.  And so does any immersion that the game has achieved...

How about showing the plane?  It would be cool to see the out-of-control plane going down.

Do one or more of the following to make it clear that the plane has no pilot:
1.  Change the icon color.  Gray would work.
2.  Give the plane full forward and left stick.  This should result in a nice death spiral.

[Dowding]

I agree totally.  

I know why they do it, i.e. to free up bandwith for the planes still in combat, but why not have the plane's position mapped client-side? Is this possible?

BTW, is the position of ack as seen by you created by the server or your computer? It's just that when I log onto a friendly field when coming into the game, the ack is sometimes firing at friendly A/C.

[Dinger]

I'm right with ya funked.  Things could be improved from the current regime of pkills exploding and abandoned planes disappearing.  Take care of these first, then we'll start asking for dead tanks to leave smoking hulks for five minutes.

Ack tracers/flak are client-side.  Basically, if your FE detects an enemy plane (such as your own) in range of a functional AA emplacement, it shows tracers.
My understanding of "tracers on login" phenomenon is:
You come into the arena, and you are assigned a position (the lowest numbered airfield on your side).  You sit in the tower, and the host streams UDP packets at you containing information on all the planes near you.
Meanwhile, TCP packets are sent to you concerning the arena setup: (probly clouds and wind at start, as well as basic settings), Ownership and status of airfields, ownership of strat targets, the roster (name, squad, country, plane type), and (finally) damage status of all objects in the arena.
The ack firing at friendlies is because your FE is receiving packets for a player whose roster info has not been received.  Therefore, it is assigned country 1 (bishops) and plane 1 (p51).  When this gets cleaned up sometimes the acks don't stop shooting.  Of course, what I've said above is entirely conjecture and without doubt contains errors (for example are those "enemies" always p51s?)
I think ack hits are done by the host.

[This message has been edited by Dinger (edited 11-29-2000).]

[Rickenbacker]

That sounds quite likely, actually  . Ack hits are determined by your FE though, the host basically just passes packets along, so it doesn't actively determine anything.

 

[Citabria]

I asked ht about that he said no.

my thought is if the pilot bailed he should be the same as a bomb dropping out of the aircraft (ie both show up on everyones fe and niether disapears)


the only catch would be to attach the players point of view to the bomb er... bailed pilot.

then have the aircraft remain on a death autopilot which augers the aircraft.


if the pilot dies? death autopilot autoengages.


its sad they wont fix this part of the game because the current disapearing stuff is really crappy.

[LJK Raubvogel]

One of the only cool things about FA2 was bailing out, and watching your burning plane spiral into the ground next to you. It was also cool to have to swerve around smoking airplane hulks to take off. Not sure how they handled it software-wise, but if that crappy game can do it, I'm sure AH could do it even better.

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LJK_Raubvogel
LuftJägerKorps