Thanks, LyquidBashiok: First, touching on the corpse fade timers as they stand, the tech to have them last longer has been in for a while. Pretty much how it's working is that there's an allowed number of physics "actors" that are allowed to remain at a time. These actors could be corpses, but they can also be pieces of destroyed tables, or railings, etc. anything that relies on physics. These are corpses and destructables generally. As you 'create' physics actors the oldest ones disappear. So as you're fighting there are always a number of actors remaining in the world, and it works out pretty well. Obviously how many of them can remain at one time will come down to final performance tweaking, but right now I believe it's around twenty.
On to blood and fading; the "cost" of decals, which include the blood stains, are fairly high. Cost being the relative strain put on the machine running the game. Decals account for blood, but they also account for quite a few other effects, most of which haven't yet been revealed. In the potential case of a full party creating these decals, blood flowing from creatures, skills that create them, as well as monsters themselves using skills that create them (Wretched vomiting all over the place is a good example), there is the potential to have a large number of decals on screen at any one time. So again, it's going to come down to final performance tweaks as to how many of them will remain on screen and for how long.
Source: Battle.net
having them stay like that waiting to use a certain skill to remove its physics could very much make the game impossible to play in middle-class computers. The direction they're taking now with a certain amount of corpses on the screen that despawns after we move out of the screen sounds best so far.
Come on Blizzard... You can do it!!
But I'm all for seeing the aftermath of a battle and I think it's better if the aftermath of a battle is something you cant mess with. something dies, it stays dead there on that spot and cant be moved.
personally I think that having 100 bodies that stay where they dropped dead makes for a much more satisfying gameplay than being able to beat up 20 corpses like a sadistic looser.
if there wasnt the problem with the physics there wouldnt be a corpse issue. But since the corpses arent pinned on the ground, are in complete 3D and will keep moving physically correct if you keep bashing them does create a performance issue.
None of the games that uses physics has so many enemies showing at once. Think of the amount of ghouls in the demo video. It would be literally impossible for that game to run on a middle-class pc. Thats the main reason why Crysis was such a failure. None bothered buying it cause it would be unplayable on their system.
Blizzard isnt going to make the same mistake. All of their games so far ran smooth on middle-class computers and thats something they're going to keep doing.
Gore is a pretty vital part in the Diablo universe. But it isnt measured in the amount of corpses on the floor. I never saw a bloodier Diablo game so far, not even something similar to Diablo. The game is evolving and thank god its becoming something better.
I never thought about that. Why doesn't people anyway?
Maybe there's a way so that when a character stays in the frame of the corpse, that the corpse can still be affected by the physics and whatnot. Then when the character leaves the frame, they become a static mesh.
As for the physics of the tables/chairs/etc... you could just have it to where you can break them down more after you already break them and after a while, they just break down into nothing. Maybe after 2 hits they just dissipate.
I think it'd be cooler if the bodies rapidly decomposed or turned into a black smoky material that fades.
I like how the Assault Beast disappears though.
Yeah, I see what you mean by the distance and whatnot. As someone said, sorry for not remembering, that the bodies should have a timer on how long the physics would last, that would make it a lot easier. Maybe like 3-5 seconds depending on how populated the area is.
The tables idea mainly came from Half-life 2, physics and realism (to a point ^_^) were amazing.
I am liking that idea, it should leave a black spot on the ground for, lets say, 3 minutes or something. The bigger the beast the bigger the spot. Or, even leave a part of the monsters body. Say you kill a giant beast with a horn(s), after the beast fades from the game, one of the horns could be left.