ATAG Dedicated Server is up!

[SNAFU]

I spend some time now, trying to figure out the phantom`s origin and what I came to the conclusion, that they are lag caused.

The game seems only to render what is in your sight range. You can easily proof that by the extrenal camera. All objects out of sight are there and you can switch with the camera onto them, but they are not rendered. The moment they come into your viewing distance, they appear.

During escort missions I often notice that the formation of bombers remain at the positions they were the moment they get out of your sight range. So when you return and try to catch up with them, they first appear as phantoms. If you wait a while, they suddenly warp away to the position they actually are and that is often far away and out of sight. This repeats until you PC as interpolated the position and they become real dots.

So I assume all the phatoms are planes, that are actually from former rendered positions extrapolated positions of planes. The calculation of the real place takes some time and the more planes there are, the longer it takes and so is what you see, always lagging behind, what is actually happending, due to this "render-and-calculate-only-what-is-in-sight" method.

It is best seen with the slow ships. Just place enough AI vessels somewhere and start out of viewing distance. They will appear as dot, where you placed them and at some point they will warp to the position they have sailed to in the time and where they are actually.

I hope this gets sorted out, especially because you have no chance to simulate something that gets somewhere close to the real battle. In the missions I made for our training server I used up to 24 He111 in a formation, + the 12 109 Escorts and the 18 Interceptors. I have little phantoms on our sever, but the AI is lagging around like hell, if you get closer and the scene is getting hot. Some AI are even flying backwards...