Diablo 3 Physics Info

[Luke]

Bashiok has released some info about the Diablo III Physics.

First, touching on the corpse fade timers as they stand, the tech to have them last longer has been in for a while. Pretty much how it's working is that there's an allowed number of physics "actors" that are allowed to remain at a time. These actors could be corpses, but they can also be pieces of destroyed tables, or railings, etc. anything that relies on physics. These are corpses and destructables generally. As you 'create' physics actors the oldest ones disappear. So as you're fighting there are always a number of actors remaining in the world, and it works out pretty well. Obviously how many of them can remain at one time will come down to final performance tweaking, but right now I believe it's around twenty.

On to blood and fading; the "cost" of decals, which include the blood stains, are fairly high. Cost being the relative strain put on the machine running the game. Decals account for blood, but they also account for quite a few other effects, most of which haven't yet been revealed. In the potential case of a full party creating these decals, blood flowing from creatures, skills that create them, as well as monsters themselves using skills that create them (Wretched vomiting all over the place is a good example), there is the potential to have a large number of decals on screen at any one time. So again, it's going to come down to final performance tweaks as to how many of them will remain on screen and for how long.

[Mathalamus]

good more blood

[Lux Aeterna]

Sounds good, can't wait to see the final outcome and continuous updates.

[Magister Mundi]

I really, really hope they make the overall limit machine-dependent, other than some hard-coded "everyone can play this" limit like some games. Because my machine is a bit of a beast, and I imagine I could handle a lot more that 20 corpses and x amount of splatters.

And if they're worried about people not having a clue what kind of settings their rig can handle, a good auto-detect feature would do wonders. Maybe even a stress test...

[Frai7ty]

Yea, hard coding a set limit is kind of like 2 gens ago , and even back then they was more than 20 dead things around. Hell even Morrowind had persistent littler, and body's. And they could handle way more than 20.

[hellsing293]

I really, really hope they make the overall limit machine-dependent, other than some hard-coded "everyone can play this" limit like some games. Because my machine is a bit of a beast, and I imagine I could handle a lot more that 20 corpses and x amount of splatters.

And if they're worried about people not having a clue what kind of settings their rig can handle, a good auto-detect feature would do wonders. Maybe even a stress test...

If there is corpse interaction though (monsters eating them/necro-like skills etc.), then wouldn't everybody have to have the same amount of corpses to interact with? I'd rather they lower the number of corpses and prevent some lag.

[Aka Gambit]

I like blood, but the 20 limit sounds sketchy...I think it should be more.

[///Reaper\\\]

I think that they should have some sort of 'stress' test for the amount of corpses or 'other' factors that they have and yet for online play this would be hard but perhaps they could do something for the person that opens the game is what the test is based on... err
so like some guy on dial up makes a game you would only have like 3 ... maybe 4 corpses and limited blood
yet someone on highspeed with a possible super computer could have a beautiful amount of corpses and such in their games...

[Frai7ty]

I don't think this game will be very dial-up friendly. If it is, that will be quite the accomplishment in this era of gaming.

Also, internet speed does not effect the graphics of the game. So the amount of corpses on the ground will be limited to you Video Card, CPU, RAM and like hardware.

[DaRkStAr]

Yeah pretty much any game now isn't dial up friendly, hell im not dial up friendly.

[///Reaper\\\]

yeah ... used to live in the 'Dark Ages' of internet but was still able to keep up with most of my friends playing D2

something we did find those was when we 'crashed' our game we went and started dropping pots and after all of the rogue encampment was covered we started losing people and the lag was gruesome thats why i think that while playing online your internet connection still needs to be included into the equation.