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...
Last edited by Szoreny; 21/12/10 04:41 AM.
