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karlan · 05-21-2003, 01:35 AM

At the moment I have some very vindictive mobs, that not only remember a player but will also activley seek them out, unfortunately the system used to choose their next move is almost guaranteed to lead them to the target. Now I want to change this to use the traking skill (builders can asign skills to mobs by specifying a range (or just a min as a fixed value, but that is discouraged) to decide the next step, this frees me from having to use any graphing algorithms, and seems more realistic, if a player can hide their tracks well enough, or lay a set of false tracks that are good enough then the mob should be thrown off. But, I am in the middle of rewriting how tracks and tracking are handled, and I am back on the issue of CPU vs Memory usage, I would like to have the tack information stored in a list (prob really an array *shrug* ) associated with each exit of each room, but if you have a struct for the track information (who, ttl, ifReal, amtHidden - all bytes would be good, since it puts the size of the struct on a 32bit word boundary), and an array of 8 of these on each of 10 exits (n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw, u, d), you have 4 * 8 * 10 = 320 bytes of data, just on track information, for each room, and that is using the smallest amount of information I can (which would mean I couldn't have more than 255 players and mobs - unrealistic I know, just an example).

So, how do other people handle it? Do people use a complicated but hopefully more realistic method, or go for quick and simple. Also once you start adding in scents....

05-21-2003, 01:35 AM	#1
karlan Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Brisbane Australia Posts: 74	At the moment I have some very vindictive mobs, that not only remember a player but will also activley seek them out, unfortunately the system used to choose their next move is almost guaranteed to lead them to the target. Now I want to change this to use the traking skill (builders can asign skills to mobs by specifying a range (or just a min as a fixed value, but that is discouraged) to decide the next step, this frees me from having to use any graphing algorithms, and seems more realistic, if a player can hide their tracks well enough, or lay a set of false tracks that are good enough then the mob should be thrown off. But, I am in the middle of rewriting how tracks and tracking are handled, and I am back on the issue of CPU vs Memory usage, I would like to have the tack information stored in a list (prob really an array shrug ) associated with each exit of each room, but if you have a struct for the track information (who, ttl, ifReal, amtHidden - all bytes would be good, since it puts the size of the struct on a 32bit word boundary), and an array of 8 of these on each of 10 exits (n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw, u, d), you have 4 * 8 * 10 = 320 bytes of data, just on track information, for each room, and that is using the smallest amount of information I can (which would mean I couldn't have more than 255 players and mobs - unrealistic I know, just an example). So, how do other people handle it? Do people use a complicated but hopefully more realistic method, or go for quick and simple. Also once you start adding in scents....