Who here has not read an explanation from HiTech on how the collision model works? Maybe he could be persuaded to add it as a sticky with Skuzzy's stickys in the Technical Support area. Then complaints can be told RTFM HiTech's STICKY.
Those of you who have read it may or may not agree with the reasoning for why only one player looses and the other flys away. But for the most part the only other choice is to turn of all collisions which as I remember at one time was off between fighters and bombers. Any of you remember flying through bombers during an attack run, chopping throttle just below and emptying your clip up into the box before the gunner figured out where you went? Wouldn't that be the end all of gameing this game where the other guy slips into your plane to hide for a moment.
It keeps being pointed out if player A and player B films the same fight that ends in a collision that one film will show the collision and the other may or may not. Why? Because of the nature of our computers and connections. We do not see each other in real time as we fight. There is a small persitant delay due to hardware processing and network time. Thats why when we collide, sometimes we dont see the collision, then our planes fall to the ground in smoking peices. Factor a slow or poor quality Internet round trip to this and we have angry players venting on ch200 or this BBS.
From what I understand the server detects which aircraft of the two "initiates" the collision vector and awards the initiator with a busted airplane rather than two broken airplanes as in the real world. Because of the persistant delay in the game, the initiated vector is probably always innocent and unsupected as the collision vector by the looser. As things stand with this collision model, just like killshooter rewards you with the damage your guns do to your countrymen by accident. Right or wrong, the collision model rewards you with a busted airplane for getting too close to your protagonist in a fight.
I suppose some of the logic behind this would be to disallow using ramming as a tactic to stop bombers and hoards. Or ramming to get out of hand for reasons of revenge and greifing. Do any of you want a squad of sqweekers ramming into your furballs as their best tactic? As it is now, we are getting excellent collision avoidence training by virtue of negative feed back. Remember, if you loose the collision it's not because you got rammed, it's because you got too close to the other player.
Smokey the Bear says: If you are accusing some one of ramming you. You got your busted plane by ramming them first whether you saw it or not.
