Magic Staffs, Darting Assault & +Vision radius

[Llama8 8]

I've been thinking about how the insane "Area of Effect" of Darting Assault while equipped with a magic staff (with staff lore) works. If we start from the premise that Sacred 2 only spawns monsters that it needs to, otherwise it'd use a stupid amount of unnecessary resources for the server software (since it has to keep track of all the monsters it's spawned) & that DA/Magic Staffs hits every spawned monster within it's cone, then we add in the presumption that +Vision Radius increases the range in which Sacred 2 spawns monster, what would happen if you had a lot of +VR (say, ~400%)? What should happen is that Sacred 2 spawns a lot of monsters & then DA/Magic Staffs hits all of them...

[locolagarto 15]

Cool isn't it?

[tapir 0]

I think neither visibility range nor attack range affects the spawn rate.

 

Maybe I am totally wrong but my assumption:

 

All mobs are in place right from the server start, they are very simple objects, they do nothing but stand or walk along waypoints, todays CPUs can handle ten thousands of such objects without strain. They are only consuming more resources when something awakes/interacts them. I suppose the vicinity (or attack) of the players activates them and triggers their real-time AI (still they have rather primitive AI... actually the Doom from '93 had smarter monsters ) and their behavior is controlled by the game client. The server (s2gs) holds only basic information: their presence and location on a given area, maybe HP, and a respawn timer.

 

So the client's point of view it seems that the monsters will appear when the player gets there, in fact, the server only passes them to the client, they are already there.

 

What should happen is that Sacred 2 spawns a lot of monsters & then DA/Magic Staffs hits all of them...

Hitting a few dozen monsters at the same time doesn't seem to me so resource-consuming.

Edited July 11, 2010 by tapir