Dungeons & Dragons Online Dev Diary

Animated life. This one was a tough one. To make the city feel alive it needs living things (human, creature, or otherwise). The hurdle here is this: As soon as something animates, it needs to have a skeleton. As soon as it has a skeleton, its cost to performance more than quadruples. As soon as that skeleton begins to move around the city, the cost is almost the same as if an extra person were running around the city. As you can imagine, we'd rather have 20 extra real people running around than 20 rats or tumbleweeds, but we tried to get movement in wherever we could. Blowing paper, moving cranes, animated water, flocks of birds--anything we could squeeze in.