0.5 - certain monsters accumulate lingering particles
Posted: 24 May 2011, 04:47
Specifically, the family of sprites belonging to poltergeists, wisps, and spectres normally have a few wandering sparkles surrounding them. When they take hits, though, it can get to be a lot more than a few of them. Let's observe:
Here we see a wisp in one of its natural habitats (as natural as that map can be considered, anyway). The Atmospheric Particle Index(tm) gives a fairly sane 42, just before I'm about to sneak up on it...
Now the wisp is on its last legs, or whatever it uses to stand on anyway. It's picked up quite a collection of fireflies or some such thing, not that they're helping it much, except by giving it the faint glimmer of hope that the result might cause so much lag as to cause me to leave. Clearly that glimmer doesn't shine nearly as bright as I do. Note that the second nearby wisp heard its distress call immediately and has been attacking me the whole time, yet its aura looks completely normal, demonstrating that it's the act of taking hits--not dishing them out--which triggers the particle accumulation.
Just one more hit after the above snapshot caused the wisp to disappear. It does properly clean up all the stray particles over the course of a few seconds, and now the particle count is back to normal (considering that the second wisp is in the middle of its attack animation). So it's not a permanent memory leak kind of thing, but it can potentially cause slowdown on older machines until the monsters are disposed of.
Here we see a wisp in one of its natural habitats (as natural as that map can be considered, anyway). The Atmospheric Particle Index(tm) gives a fairly sane 42, just before I'm about to sneak up on it...
Now the wisp is on its last legs, or whatever it uses to stand on anyway. It's picked up quite a collection of fireflies or some such thing, not that they're helping it much, except by giving it the faint glimmer of hope that the result might cause so much lag as to cause me to leave. Clearly that glimmer doesn't shine nearly as bright as I do. Note that the second nearby wisp heard its distress call immediately and has been attacking me the whole time, yet its aura looks completely normal, demonstrating that it's the act of taking hits--not dishing them out--which triggers the particle accumulation.
Just one more hit after the above snapshot caused the wisp to disappear. It does properly clean up all the stray particles over the course of a few seconds, and now the particle count is back to normal (considering that the second wisp is in the middle of its attack animation). So it's not a permanent memory leak kind of thing, but it can potentially cause slowdown on older machines until the monsters are disposed of.