Even so, the idea of bounding boxes is growing on me. It is looking like a really elegant solution to the line of sight problem. In the simplest case, you attach a vector of rectangles to each mob. One rectangle would be the mob's aggro area and the others would be facets cut away by occluding intercepts like walls. Determining line-of-sight then becomes a simple matter of taking the difference of our rectangles and testing for inclusion of a point. Extend to 3d as necessary. The math is simple and the bounding areas/volumes can be precomputed and stored in the db since mobs always spawn in the same location AFAIK. Contrast this to the existing method (or at least the method I saw suggested by Wiz), which says that if you want to find out if you can see from a to b you should take delta-sized steps in the direction of b and check at each step to see if you're standing on a wall (I doubt there is an acceptable delta in terms of both performance and wall-thickness).
The prime need for line of sight calculations that I'm aware of right now stems from the fact that radial distances are the only way to specify aggro distance. I.e... in a dungeon, you can't specify that a monster in a corner should only attack critters in the same room. Even without using multiple rectangles per mob, moving to a rectangular bounding area would allow more intelligent specification of aggro ranges (IMHO).
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