Diablo III is for real

[Jarulf]

It's a question of processor speed and the load-hit-store. Because of the tile based gameplay and the filter lighting design they chose, each tile requires a value to be addressed to it to associate it with a certain lighting filter. As should be obvious, the faster a character moves the faster the computer has to go through the load-hit-store function for the tile lighting. What happens when the character moves too fast is that the engine will begin calling for data which hasn't had enough time to be written yet and it creates a stall. This leads to dead tiles or even possibly a complete game freeze.

I beg to differ! I can't support this idea at all (including those presented in earlier posts on this topic in this thread). If we start looking at issues such as loading graphics there is no such issue. As Nystul allready mentioned each level in Diablo 1 was loaded completely when you entered it (there is a loading screen as you do). The full dungeon level you are in is created in full at the same time (with all content placed and so on). There is thus no problem of you walking or teleporting into as of yet unknown teritory or an area with data not yet written since no such area of a dungeon exists!

Looking at the lighing issue, it is a non issue. Diablo 1 had a very simplistic such system were each tile has a light value based on the distance to your character (i don't recall if anything else in the dungeon had light arround it not related to your character, I think some unqiue monsters created light on a tile it stood on). Calculating or updating this is a non issue and requires such minimal processor power that it is neglectable. If memory is not completely off, the game had a lightmatrix were each tile had a value (so some 80x80 entries or whatever was the size of dungeons) and the game updated this based on your characters position once when you entered a new tile. Processing this was again, compared to the rest of the game, neglectable. Even done on each frame, it would be at most a few cylces per tile per frame.

Thinking of it, I can tell a few other things that also created light, spells and spell effects!!!! The game is updating the light matrix for each such spell effect going on as well. Try casting lots of lightning spells (chain lightning or charged bolts). THAT will tell in part some of how processing intensive it can be (done on a per bolt basis). Do note though that for each spell effect, the part that would relate to updating the light is still not the major factor compared to everything else being done to the spell efect.

Thus, moving the character arround a bit faster will hav e absolutely no impact. Even assuming we move the character so fast so that it changes tile each frame (remember it works at 20 frames per second so that would be an insane speed faster than actually teleporting arround) it would not affect the over all game speed at all. This would be comparable to casting a very low level chain lightning.

I would say the walk speed is actually an issue of what is handable and usable by the player and what creates a good game experience. Simply, it works well. The "problem" only exists when you want to move longer distances without actual combat in-between. Such as in town or when you have cleared an area of the dungeon and wants to go back to the stair or an not yet visited part. IN the dungeon it is a non issue since you can teleport so the problem mostly exists in the town.

Sure, one could argue that one could have an added dimension of tactics if a character in the dunbgeon could have moved faster to go arround monsters and such, but it would in my opinion also create so much other game play issues that it would be a much worse situation. Having the player move in about the same speed as monsters works out to be a good solution for good game play and difficulty and if you need to move at a faster speed in combat, that is provided to you through the teleport skill.

So absolutely nothing to do with the power of computers "back then".

Teleport was probably a bad argument for me to pursue because it isn't relevant to the discussion. When you teleport it acts as a total lighting whipe.

That happens any time you move to a new tile, be it walking or teleporting.

The game doesn't have to rewrite lighting values for the tiles, it just starts fresh.

This makes no sense. Either it recalculates all the values or it does not. Starting fresh would be the most time consuming anyway but if I recall correctly it is the only way it is done. Thinking about spells and such (see above), it might even be possible that the game recalculate the light matrix on each frame regardless, I don't recall seeing any flag indicating if anything that creates light has entered a new tile or not.