I worked on EQ and left shortly before Kunark.
Believe me or not, doesn't really affect me in any way.
If you look back, I think on the first page of this topic, I explained exactly how pathign in "real eq" works. I don't have time to retype it all up again right now, but re-read what I posted, and if you still have any questions, I will be back later and can answer them.
In short, the developer lays PPOINTS along the map where he wants mobs to travel. Each PPOINT is a point in 3D space, thus it has a z coordinate. There is no gemoetry map of the zone, there are no calculations to determine obstacle avoidance. The pathing takes care of all that, at least it does when it is pathed right. This method uses very little resources. I did something very similiar with a Neverwinter Nights server, and on my machine, with about 100 wandering NPCs, using a pathing I wrote in NWScript, there was very little hit AT ALL on the resources. And that was implementing the system in the NWN scripting language which is obviously slower and has more overhead.
Anyways, I gotta run for the moment. I'll be able to check the net in about 2 hours or so. Maybe less.
|