Midair is a defunct video game released in 2018 and developed by an independent team called Archetype Studios. Since its inception, and even today, Midair continues to receive high praise for the teams self-proclaimed custom tailored netcode built from the ground up, and proprietary lag compensation implementation. There are numerous posts by fans and members of development team across various forums regarding the efficacy of the aforementioned features. By reverse engineering the publicly available client I (a) develop a solution for hosting a game server to perform a mathematical analysis of the lag compensation, and (b) perform a code analysis of the netcode and lag compensation. I found that Midairs netcode is almost entirely identical to the original Unreal Engine 4 implementation, with no measurable improvements due to their claimed customisations. The lag compensation implementation is purely client-side and relies on basic kinematics providing both inconsistent and inaccurate results, and is also plagiarised from Epic Games Unreal Tournament 4. Thus the claims made about the efficacy of Midairs netcode and lag compensation are grossly overstated.
