I posted an email about this a while back but recieved no response. I later learned why. Here are the details and some guessing on my part.
Your flying and come up to a bandit to shoot him down. Hes in your piper then all of a sudden, "vanish" into thin air. You (in my case at least back then) can actually still kill the bandit if you just pull the trigger and hope for the best. Sometimes I would nail the bandit and other times, he would slip away. This proved to me that the bandit was there. It didnt happen too often and seems to only happen when an enemy plane is in your piper, never a friendly. Never got chance to get film, too busy playing. Well I suffered from this problem for about two months and even whined about it online and in emails.
Solution:
Then one day, I decided to download a video card clocking GUI to increase the performance of my video card. Whola, problem went away. In the process I learned a bit about how ah works as a game at the graphics level by initially over clocking to the point that things like instruments on my cockpity front panel disappeared or updated strangely and differently. Once I found the best clock setting for my video card, all was ok. No more disappearing bandits. I was using the latest GeoForce3 Video card with a slower 333MHZ PC at that time. Perhaos that may have something to do with timeing of objects recieve within the game.
An example is when you initially log on and are put into a tower of a base. You might see things like enemy P-51s rolling from your base being shot at by acks, or tanks in there place, etc... Then as the load finishes, the objects turn into simply a friendly Yak Spitfire taking off. Acks stop shooting at them because they are now friendly objects. This shows how AH is constructed. I believe that not all attributes or factors of the objects are updated in the same time frame. Such things as plane type (dont need so many updates bcas its a spitfire or not) are less imprtant to updates than x,y,z position and trajectory or instruments. Ack gun operation triggers faster than other game objects and etc... When the net or local timeing in hardware/software is affected somehow, some of this information is not recieved by the local FE and server while some are. Could the object position or some other hi update object type be a "link" status mechanism to the server causing the game to continue without a "host disconnect" in a state that leaves objects from someones local FE causing a disappearing con or invisable bandit.
All the above is guessing as I really no nothing about game programming. Just an observation.
Comments, thoughts, corrections...
Please enlighten if you can. This is interesting stuff.
