Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Technical problems Corpse Fade ::

Hey community, just purchased DKS via steam and it looks promising. Haven't even seen Morgana yet but smashed a few chickens and was dismayed when their corpses faded away and sparkling loot bags appeared with a game-show esque 'ding.'

Does this happen for all enemies and if so has anyone found a .ini switch to keep corpses from fading away so quickly?

Corpses fade and some leave a lootbag. We can't have the corpses stick around forever, or the game would be littered, and in short they'd just add to the drawcall count, slowing your game down.

Yes I understand the practical reasons for corpse fade,

but considering the games that do allow corpses to persist, even some other game-bryo titles come to mind (Oblivion, Fallout: New Vegas) or games like Dragon Age where corpse fade can be modded out completely with no FPS consequences, its simply something to keep in mind for the future.

I have the impression that Divinity II features larger crowds of foes then games like Risen which do not feature fading corpses while the player is present, but perhaps an adaptable system that allows a fixed number of corpses to stick around and waits to completely clean a cell until the player leaves the area could be an option for future titles.

A tweak-able .ini variable is the ideal, letting players experiment knowing full well that there may be FPS consequences for the settings they desire, the more options you guys can give your players - the better.

Cheers, big fan of Larian's work btw.

Szoreny I gave some thought to this as well. It would be cool, but there are many cases where this would be undesirable. If they uses the kept models the corpses would certain impede looting of certain quest items, collision issues, and other game dynamics.

The effect can definitely be accomplished with almost no resource impact. You could add surface appended decals, but alone I don't think the look would be very convincing. You can also wrap it over a generic no physics low poly model to give it a little depth. Overall, yes it can be done. But if I were in their shoes fixing this wouldn't be tops on my list.

Also speaking of gamebyro, I wouldn't put anymore time into an engine with its maker currently in limbo.

Well, I'd say the bog-standard persistent corpse has no collision with the player, in many cases like in Oblivion/FO3 corpses collide with the environment and themselves but not with the player.

I'd say the ideal is found in the source engine which lets the player set a max corpse limit via .ini (any over this limit are culled as soon as they leave the player's view) and also lets the player choose varying levels of collision ranging from ground/environment only to corpse self-collisions to full collisions with everything including the player, all selectable via .ini variables...

Cysis and Far Cry also deserve a mention as they let the player set a time limit before a corpse evaporates. In both games setting a limit of 999 seconds essentially made the corpses permanent since the player was always on the move...again if there was a performance hit for this it wasn't apparent.

It may also be of interest that both Mass Effects have featured disappearing corpses by default, but in Mass Effect 1's case there was a .ini switch which kept corpses both persistent and fully rag-dolled with no performance hit far as I could tell...

Dragon Age's corpse clearing habits were modded out early on and later included in an official patch - I don't think DA had ragdolls period and the corpses that stayed (in the mod they stayed FOREVER which was actually too much in the other direction) had no collision with anything which was fine, and also had a negligible impact on performance.

but comparing engines or even games that share an engine is maybe not productive, these things are complicated and the devs likely know what they are doing...

Certainly I'd say there are a myriad of ways features can be implemented. I think we are both on the same page here to illustrate that it is not a system resource limitation, but likely a function of available dev time and project resources.

Anyway to continue this discussion... I don't see corpse counts as a large issue on a PC platform but console resources are at a premium and any title that wants to support this feature would likely be devoting extra dev time to give a bonus to PC players.

I'd say exclusion from the tree the best way to treat corpses while maintaining available resources. With HW accelerated physics more items can be populated into the tree with less impact, but when using SW its best to keep the extra items static. Of course you can go to the extreme as you mentioned and maintain proper IK on all models and ragdoll. But that just more eye candy to encourage players to perform lewd hot beverage based acts with.

As for collision between the corpses-- additional exclusion of items from the AABB tree would required to keep body physics separate from gameplay items. In my previous statement I noted certain items required for quests may be obscured by corpses; while the corpses themselves may not collide with the player. That something that needs to tackled separately. If corpses are excluded you can make them semi-transparent allow interaction between players and objects below them.

Exposing user selectable collision types is likely unproductive, and may result in unforeseen exploits and support issue. A setting for limits, both time and count, could be exposed without much issue though.