I have never run EQEMU under a profiler. That being said, I still thought I'd mention a couple of things. Ancillary data structures of pointers to entities can be used to satisfy the requirement of multiple sort criteria. Adding non-standard containers (with the possible exception of hashtable) to the code is probably not wise - espescially if they are not proven or have unusual semantics. The caching suggestion is interesting and I'd love to see it under a profiler. I'm wondering if it would lead to natural extension using some sort of bounding volumes. Once you deliniate the caching "terrain" for a given entity, it seems like a natural extension to use that as a bounding volume to simplify in/out calculations. If one could assume square bounding boxes, the range calculations would be so fast as to probably eliminate the need to be cached (although it would open up some interesting new strategies - like sneaking up on a mob's diagonal).
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