Darren New wrote:
> I've been amused when I noticed (for example) that the AIs in the older 
> thief games keep moving when they're far away, but they stop walking. As 
> in, they'll just skate back and forth until you get close. There's only 
> a couple places in the game with line of sight straight enough to see 
> it, tho.
> 
Less to do with AI than with animation limitations. The more things you 
have moving at the "best" rate, the harder your hardware needs to work. 
EQ2 you can adjust this from "everything is moving at best frame rate 
and best graphics resolution, but no machine in the universe will give 
you better than a frame rate of like 0.001 fps doing this", to, "Stuff 
uses almost no animation, textures look worse than Ultima VII, when 
games ran at 640x480 and 8-bit color, and you can't see more than 20 
meters in front of you." lol

In general, since you never see more than about 20 people, and 20 mobs, 
and most don't move around a lot in EQ2, you can place the animation on 
high, as well as the textures, and not take much of a hit. I tried 
setting mine far higher on the new card I have, (which is well past what 
was available at the time it came out), and only got brief lag in 
"certain" stages of combat, or when moving from a low mob part of a 
region to one where I could see a "lot" of them. But, its a basic 
optimization that "position", and "activity" be computed, which is not 
terribly high cost, compared to loading all the textures, animating the 
skeleton/mesh, etc.


-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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