[mockery]

A user from Battle.net recently inquired about whether or not blood from battles could be kept on the ground indefinitely in Diablo 3. Bashiok was quick to respond with an initial explanation:

Quote

"Even decals, which are textures, impact performance. So there has to be some limit on how many of them are allowed to linger and for how long. We have to try to strike a balance somewhere. Also, a ground literally covered with corpses or blood becomes less and less interesting, more and more confusing, and can actually create some frustration.

Regarding visible markers, we put a lot of effort into building rooms and areas to ensure that the randomly generated dungeons are indeed random, but also not confusing and maze-like. We don't want everything to look the same. So in that respect a visual marker of a blood spot or corpse really shouldn't be necessary."

After some Battle.net users pushed for more details, Bashiok brought in Lead Tech Artist, Julian Love, to give a more detailed answer to their questions:

Quote

"Every independent thing that we show in the game has to be put into a special package that we call a "draw call," which is then delivered to the 3D card to be rendered on screen. It's not too different from preparing xmas gifts in that everything you want your relatives to receive must be packaged up in some way and then driven across the country in order to arrive there on time. Your CPU does this packaging and delivery and it takes a lot of bandwidth, so it ends up being one of the most crucial expenses to manage. Now, the truly horrible thing is that from a draw call cost perspective, each individual splattering of blood on the floor is every bit as expensive as a character or a dead body: they both cost one draw call. Beyond that, the differences tend to be somewhat trivial.

So, that's a lot of words just to say that blood splats can be every bit as expensive as, and in some ways, more expensive than dead bodies. It's counter intuitive, but this is the way it actually works."

Hopefully that clears things up a bit in regards to the issue of having graphics lingering on the screen indefinitely.

[Kenzai]

First!!!


Aww man, and i thought that blood stains would cause no hardware strain and was hoping to see a bit more of it. :(

[Chemedeiros]

ya... i had read this on bluetracker... but thanks mockery :)

besides this... corpses will stay a little longer that they where in the gameplayvideo, so that's already a good improvment for me.

but blood would be cool ya :P

[JNM-illiquid]

mm if i remember correctly d2 didnt have blood stay on the ground indefinetly. It stayed there but went away once you left the level / area or whatever you call it. as long as d3 is the same as that then im happy :)

[milanv]

the blood doesn't need to stay down all the time, they can have some areas where the bloody floor is a texture.

[Credge]

Sounds like they don't want blood to muck up the world they've created more than anything else. You know, instead of giving players the option to have different amounts of blood decal and corpse time like other games have.

How about just having them disappear after they move off screen?

I really think they're not thinking outside the box on this. There are ways around it. There's always a away around it.

Edit: It's really as simple as having "Corpse decay time: Slow/Medium/Fast/None" and "Blood decal decay time: Slow/Medium/Fast/None". Leave it up to the user so those with high end computers can enjoy the extra money we spent (on a computer) while playing a game we waited eons to play.

This post has been edited by Credge: 18 June 2009 - 04:58 PM

[Letyuk]

all i care about is a diccent action,blood isn't that importent if its effects the performence in a bad way,but it would be cool to have some:)

[Illuvatar]

I think that Julian Love is basically saying that they'd rather have more dead bodies than blood. They will still have some blood, otherwise the game will look ridiculous, and if by more dead bodies they put in more monsters to supply those dead bodies, then I'm happy. If they had the option to keep the blood there then I think that would be best, because some people have better computers and would enjoy it. I think they underestimate the quality of the computers people have nowadays.

[naksucow]

JNM-illiquid said:

mm if i remember correctly d2 didnt have blood stay on the ground indefinetly. It stayed there but went away once you left the level / area or whatever you call it. as long as d3 is the same as that then im happy :)

i agree with this. I don't care if they can't stay there permanently.

[Kenzai]

JNM-illiquid said:

mm if i remember correctly d2 didnt have blood stay on the ground indefinetly. It stayed there but went away once you left the level / area or whatever you call it. as long as d3 is the same as that then im happy :)

naksucow said:

i agree with this. I don't care if they can't stay there permanently.

If im not mistaken, the issue is that they wont even stay there untill you leave. Stay there near the blood for a few minuts (or shorter (or longer)) and you will see them disappear...

[Irrational]

I like how they're going to make it less confusing, which will be a definite improvement on Diablo 2. I just hope they still have some cool mazes.

[italofoca]

Yeah. One thing i hated in D2 is, when playing a necro, after killing the enemies with corpse explosion the ground were just like a dirty pizza. Very uggly and confusing, i allways hated that.
I totally agreee with bashiok = to much blood and corpse just make the game more confusing.

[SFJake]

The blood splats in D2 all looks exactly the same, copied over a thousand times. Of course, that looked bad.

And that whole discussion is futile. Make it an option, end of the line, Decals Stay or something like that. You can choose various different settings, from OFF to ALWAYS. I've seen this in plenty, plenty of games. There is absolutely no reason for them to create any kind of barriers. Its always a stupid things to do.

Let the player decide. He will change all he wants to his liking depending on his computer or his personal taste.

[VegasRage]

All I have to say is...

sO_QntXc-c4

[Muridias]

They could use model instancing.

Games often need to render many copies of the same model, for instance covering a landscape with trees, filling a room with crates or dead bodies. The calls needed to render a model are relatively expensive, and can quickly add up if you are drawing hundreds or thousands of models in a row.

Instancing is the re-use of model data across a map in order to save memory and improve performance. When a model is placed several times in a map, its triangle data is saved for each occurrence. However if the model is instanced, its data is saved out just once and shared between each instance in the map. This results in a smaller map file and less data to manage.

This is how Gears of War 2 was able to create tons of enemies on the screen.

If blood spats isn't a model then maybe they should look into making the blood into a particle effect using shaders.

This post has been edited by Muridias: 19 June 2009 - 09:24 AM

[Jinky Williams]

Man, I'm feeling the negativity on this thread. Seems like some people (not all, mind you) just have this burr in their saddle whenever something doesn't make immediate sense to them, and they automatically go the "Blizzard must be holding out on us / they don't care about what their fans want / they are so stupid for doing x/not doing x" route.

'Cause it's not like they haven't been spending the better part of a decade making this game and polishing it to a nice, shiny Charlie Sheen, right?

Give Blizzard some credit, meng. If they say there will be no permanent blood splats, it's not because they don't care if you want it, or won't have it in because they know you want it. They have a good reason for doing what they do.

[Jordan_L]

Most action RPG's I've played, such as Titan Quest (which offers physics and vivid 3D graphics) were able to keep every weapon and creature on the ground with no slow downs.

I hope they at least come up with a neat effect for disappearing creatures rather than simply having them fade away. They could even individualize the vanishing effect for certain creature groups and sub-groups.

[Ar.Pi]

Like some have said here, decals and body dissapearence can always be given as an option to tweak in settings. Its the same thing as draw distance, its not hard to implement.

ffs, i hate it when developers start bsing (*cough EA *cough) about that they want all computer to run the game smoothly so they working to hit the perfect middle, bla bla bla. look at the state of FIFA for PC - abosultely ridiculous, and what the excuse? "not every1 has gaming pc". I'm not saying that games need to be like Crysis, but this is too much.

Optimization is one thing, crying about not making more or less of something as an option is, imo, just lazy. From the "explanation" they gave.

[naksucow]

Quote:
Originally Posted by JNM-illiquid
mm if i remember correctly d2 didnt have blood stay on the ground indefinetly. It stayed there but went away once you left the level / area or whatever you call it. as long as d3 is the same as that then im happy :)

Quote:
Originally Posted by naksucow
i agree with this. I don't care if they can't stay there permanently.

Kenzai said:

If im not mistaken, the issue is that they wont even stay there untill you leave. Stay there near the blood for a few minuts (or shorter (or longer)) and you will see them disappear...

And if I'm not mistaken your mistaken, i still agree with JNM-illiquid, and would like them to stay there until I left.

[kefka666333abc123]

Jinky Williams said:

Man, I'm feeling the negativity on this thread. Seems like some people (not all, mind you) just have this burr in their saddle whenever something doesn't make immediate sense to them, and they automatically go the "Blizzard must be holding out on us / they don't care about what their fans want / they are so stupid for doing x/not doing x" route.

'Cause it's not like they haven't been spending the better part of a decade making this game and polishing it to a nice, shiny Charlie Sheen, right?

Give Blizzard some credit, meng. If they say there will be no permanent blood splats, it's not because they don't care if you want it, or won't have it in because they know you want it. They have a good reason for doing what they do.

So true but unfortunately this is the internet and most ppl nvr use logic here :(