3 ms·
Many standard rpg mechanics in a large, seamless, 3d world full of both NPCs and players can tax resources. Movement is one already mentioned, but in general,
by sbov 16y ago
Many standard rpg mechanics in a large, seamless, 3d world full of both NPCs and players can tax resources.
Movement is one already mentioned, but in general, AI isn't only turned on in combat. NPCs move outside of combat - most creatures in the world wander about or follow a pre-defined path. I don't recall if they did on WoW, but I know in Everquest creatures used spells of their class both in and out of combat, such as buffs and heals - a creature in Everquest would even heal and buff up their allies. If monsters are buffing, you now are tracking those buffs & their durations - when we added monsters buffing to our multiplayer game, we made them infinite in duration to get acceptable performance.
Another operation that could be taxing is calculating line of sight (LOS) - this factors into any action an NPC or player would do. You can't have monsters attacking players, or buffing allies, through walls.
- crystalis 16y agoThe problems movement incurs aren't "game mechanics" so much as "3d chatroom mechanics". Buff tracking as a performance hit is surprising to me, though. I'd presume you were tracking monster lifespan - with this and an offset for 'AI interruptions' (like for chasing players as the buff wore off) you could recover the buff times and remaining durations without touching the monsters when they were out of player LOS. I can see LOS as a more taxing system, but monster LOS has no z-axis and the dungeons don't seem to require too many nodes for a pathing graph... At any rate, most MMOs have rather... shallow... gameplay mechanics, and I don't think it's really computation that's holding them back.