Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Helge Hafting
2003-04-25T08:53:15Z

Daniel Phillips wrote:
> On Fri 25 Apr 03 00:45, Alan Cox wrote:
[...]
>>In the MUD world we solved that by not telling anyone about objects they
>>can't see.
>
> Doing the visibility calculations on the server, down to the pixel, is
> possible but not really practical.
>
Sure, but one can do better than quake. The server can have
a look at the "terrain" at startup, and divide it into a
bunch of regions and calculate which regions cannot
bee seen from each other. You can then do
fast simplified visibility calculation on the server,
by looking up positions in a lookup table. Players
in tunnels and such isn't visible from most of the
level so such structures would then provide the
desired surprises - even for cheaters.

Also, one can use a representation that makes it hard for
an AI to guess what is "wall" and what is a "player".
The players could be polygons just like everything else,
and a good level would have more moving items than
players so movement detection won't be a good
heuristic either.

Helge Hafting