OK. First off I want to say I’m not here to prove or disprove you claim. I’m only here to provide what I know about the collision model and film system so the rest of you can make an informed decision of your own.
If you are flying around making smooth maneuvers and are filming it, on play back you will notice some jerkiness in the play back that wasn’t there in real-time. This is because the film is only a sampling of the original flight, not an exact duplication. Meaning every X number of frames, the film recorder samples the current state of the simulation and serializes it to file. However, it is a lossy capture. There are data points in between the sampling that are not stored. The film is only an approximation of the original flight, not an exact duplication.
EVENTS such as damage and collision are written irregardless of the sampling. The sampling is only for positional data. So all the events are stored without loss. So even though the flight path is not an “exact” duplication, the event of collision was stored. That’s how the film recorder functions as far as I understand it. Now before you say that is BS and the film recorder is broken if it doesn’t EXACTLY reproduce the flight path you need to consider the trade-offs that always have to be made in any design decision. If the film recorder tried to capture, package, and write to file the exact position and orientation of every object in the simulation for EVERY single frame, then your frame rate would be brought to its knees. The film recorder would be basically unusable during online combat. In order to maintain a reasonable frame rate during recording, the positional data must be sampled. Sampling is always going to intale data loss.
Now, keeping that in mind, lets look at an exaggerated example for illustrative purposes:
Two aircraft are flying at a reasonable speed with one aircraft curving up at the beginning of a loop, and the other curving down at the top of a loop. Their flight paths trace to smooth curves that intersect at the point of collision.
This flight is filmed by one of the planes. During the film recording, these two flight path curves are sampled at regular intervals.
During playback, the aircraft positions are interpolated across the sampled data points. Due to data loss during sampling, the two flight paths in playback do not
exactly intersect anymore. There would be a gap showing between the aircraft.
However
events such as collision are not sampled but are saved no matter what. So the collision effect is still in the playback even though it looks like it was only a near miss.
So what you need to realize about the film system is that it IS an exact recording of
events (i.e. text, explosions, collisions, damage, etc…) but it is only a sampled approximation of position and orientation. That’s not really a bug, but a design tradeoff in order to minimize the frame rate impact of filming during online combat.
Hope this information is helpful.
Regards,
Wab
