Anybody remember why we have the subzone system?

[tobz]

I'm taking it upon myself to basically scrap the subzone stuff in Zone.cs for a far-more-readable quadtree solution. I'm curious, though, if anyone remembers precisely why WitchKing / Konik wrote the subzone stuff.

From what I can see... there isn't anything particularly noteworthy and the code comments are dry. It seems to be very basic handling of subdivisions of a zone's space to hold objects, and the associated code to go along with searching through those subdivisions to perform radius searches. There's some stuff on player relocation but I haven't really taken a good look at it. Presumably it deals with moving objects from old subdivisions to new subdivisions based on updated positions.

Anybody see a reason not to clean this up with a much simpler version? I tried to do some basic searching but didn't come up with much. The upside is far less brittle and more readable code... the potential downside is possibly a slight speed decrease but I don't see it being all that much slower if at all. Another upside, as well, is being able to finally strongly-type radius searches.

[Tolakram]

I can't read that code, no clue. Areas maybe, since the Area system is backwards reverse polish notation? I do remember some of the getinradius... used to be quite slow, so perhaps sub-zones improves on this by reducing the number of objects that need to be searched?

[tobz]

Hehehe. Yeah, it's slightly unreadable.

I mean, I'll have to test my stuff to make sure it's up to snuff... but it shouldn't be slow by any means. Quadtrees and octrees are used for view frustrum culling so they are optimized, or can be optimized anyways, for efficient culling of objects given a target section of the tree. You can quickly traverse the tree to get smaller and smaller object sets for searching through which makes it more efficient. Since the trees are evenly subdivided and you'll have a power of 2 to search through at any given layer in the subdivision, you can, potentially, parallelize it easily and cleanly as well.

This should really make the code far less brittle since there is no special magic to worry about. A quadtree is easily understood and you can find tons of reference implementations on the internet.

[Graveen]

dunno, really

[Dinberg]

A bit late, but here goes!

I think it could be to do with code mirroring the clients way of doing things. I remember the client splits up areas into zones, perhaps its some quirky thing to do with this. However, I'm sure it would be better to have a quadtree system for sorting objects and if need be mockup zone information if a client needs it (like 'what zone id am i in' etc). By all means go ahead with it

[Ephemeral]

A wild dinberg appeared!

[Dinberg]

I'm around often, just only have time to check staff forums these days