Originally posted by Grits
If you are in a furball, and you "ping" a bad guy in one of those "lost" frames, you DONT get credit for the hit, its gone. The only thing in the AH system that "registers" hits is YOUR FE, so if your computer doesnt "see" it, it doesnt exist. AH waits for a screen "frame" to send the hit information, if your "hit" frame is lost in one of the ones that doesnt get drawn, but thrown away, you lose it and the information is not sent to the server. If you have V-synch on, your computer will only draw another screen when the monitor is ready, and you will not have "lost" screens, and as a result, no lost hits.
First off I have to admit that I am not a game programmer and I am not an expert at the internals of Aces high. However intuitively I don't understand why it would work this way. I could be totally wrong here, but let me explain what I am thinking.
First of all I believe the FE is more than just what you see on the screen. I think of the front end as everything that is client side code (or in other words is running on your machine and not on the Aces High server someplace).
In order for anything to be seen on the screen it has to "happen" in the client side code first. For example your "hit" has occur and some code has to decide that you hit a target and generate that graphic for you to see. Just because that brief flash of shot gets dropped by your graphics card (because it can't display the frames fast enough), doesn't mean (to me) that the actual "hit" didn't occur on the front end and the appropriate response get sent to the server to let it know that it occured.
Of course I also don't understand why Aces High would wait for a screen frame to send information to the server, so I may be way off in left field.
I would love to understand this better though!