Speed optimizations?

[Eglin]

Originally Posted by smogo

This is true as regards to standing mobs. Those that move are a bit different.

Aye, but I'd venture a guess that for those to whom los is a consideration (indoor critters), their natural mobility is restricted to an area no larger than their intended los. Thus, it doesn't matter.

Generally speaking, this is a kind of BSP you refer to, clipped by Aggro/Assist/whatever radius.

Generally speaking, I'm referring to bounding volumes. BSPs are a way of partitioning space. Bounding volumes are a way of approximating an object's geometry - in this case the object is the mob's line-of-sight. The biggest difference between the two can be seen as the area around the bounding volume grows. My scheme doesn't care - a point is either in the box or out of it. BSPs, on the other hand, get very very ugly in such a case (which is why doom is an inside-only game).

Such BSP exist in the client's zone files. It seems also that the map package in zone (will|might|could|ought to) be used to describe, and thus maybe partition, space. It uses *.map files, but i spent very little time looking at what it does, so maybe it's just missaying.

Whatever the case, I think that utilizing some geometry is going to prove a better solution for checking los than the existing baby-steps method. I'm definitely NOT going to write a bsp tree implementation, though. Espescially when perfectly satisfactory results can be had by simply specifying aggro area w/ a rectangle instead of a radius.