(Monday, August 23)

Everquest 2 Warcry

"On another thread Moorgard talks about Collision confirming that there WILL be collision with PC's and NPC's. There is collision. When PCs or NPCs walk toward each other and reach a point where they would collide, one gets bumped out of the way. They don't simply pass through each other as if they were ghosts. However, collision isn't an absolute. Models have collisions spheres around them that define at what point they get moved out of the way of something else. You obviously don't want a badger to have the same collision sphere as a dragon. Additionally, there are limitations in place so that griefing and exploiting are avoided as much as possible. What we don't use is every-point-on-your-body collision. Is it technically possibe? Sure. But that would put an immense load on the server, because it would have to be calculating that on thousands of entities all at once. The performance hit would be incredible. As I've said before, there are weapon collisions that take place as part of the battle animations. That is, two people fighting with a sword will have clashes, parries, hits, etc. But we're not calculating every point on the sword to see if it collides with any other surface in the game world every single moment. So if you take frames out of a combat sequence, for example, you're going to see imperfections. Body parts will seem to pass through other body parts on occasion, especially when opponents are right next to each other. When you're actually playing, you don't see those individual frames but instead see combat as a whole, which I personally think looks amazing. " It is truely a beautiful thing when people are whining about collision levels on weapons against random objects within the space and plane of a game. It means that people expect games to have such real life characteristics and computers to be so powerful that they can decide such things. It great that people would actually look at a game in such stunning detail and say man "when I rip a fart, I should see the spray from my character's ass rebound off whatever object I am standing near." Man is EQ2 gonna kick ass or what? Everquest 2 Warcry: