This thread is a question toward body count when players die. I just found an option in Dawn of War that allows me to make bodies permanent on the battle field, making piles and piles of blood and dead Ork scum and Chaos traitors. I wonder how long a body will remain until the game decides to take it out. Longer lasting bodies make it more impressive I think than if they disappear every six to twelve seconds. However, that could cause issues I am sure. What do you guys think? How long should bodies remain until they are taken out? How long would you estimate or how long would you want it there for?
Steven covered it pretty well in ItW#15 from the Dev's point of view (Linky). This is one of those immersion meets reality issues for me: Do I want corpse walls ala 300 ? Yes. Do I want at least 60 seconds of corpse persistence ? Yes. Is it at all necessary to me ? Not really. Can't see a *need* for it therefore it's likely to be cut when they look at hardware budgets. But it is interesting to think about.
Yup, too much stress on the server keeping bodies littered about. Id love to see it, but id rather see those thousand player battles with no lag and acceptable amounts of FPS.
I think they should divide the map in squares and keep a certain amount of corpses if the corpses go over the limit the oldest corps disappears or they should keep the corpses on server for like 10 seek and then it hand over to client side and disappears on server this way the player can decide how many and how long they want their corpses
If not permanent player or Nid corpses, at least place holders in the form of highly visible blood splatter or a generic corpse pile. These placeholders which would be low intensity as far taking up memory should persist for at least 5 minutes or longer if possible. It would be nice to know if you're walking into a killing field/ambush site where members of your faction have recently been killed. Or if you're tracking an enemy force, if they're killing things as they flee the area they should leave a bloody trail for you to follow. I've tracked many an enemy player by following animal corpses(that the player has killed) in various MMOs. If all the corpses magically vanish it would appear in game that no fighting has been occuring in the area which would not only be cheesy and unrealistic, it wouldnt properly represent what's taking place on the battlefield. We need something to show us in game that fighting has recently occured in an area as we are moving through.
Are there going to be ragdolls or just animated deaths? If there'll be no ragdolls, are you guys going to record ragdoll death effects and put them in as animations? A few modders way back in Battlefield 1942 replaced their hard ugly looking death animations with some pre-recorded ragdoll effect animations and they looked pretty believable. Just have barely 3-5 death animations to give variety and taddah! You've just dodged having to make the physics engine run in overdrive.
