Floating mobs

[____________Harammer]

I know the mobs don't abide by any of the same rules that PCs do, but for goodness sake, can they at least obey the laws of gravity?

If you look closely, mobs in most missions seem to float several inches above the ground, as well as chests.

I really noticed this when I was running around in leet form with my young adventurer. It just looks silly when I'm looking up at the bottoms of their shoes.

[Inyuendo]

Yeah, MOBs seem to have major collision detection issues vs. the environment, especially in the vertical axis. They either float, as you point out here, or they sink into the ground if the ground is not perfectly flat (see my post in this forum about MOBs sinking below the terrain after they are killed).

My only educated guess as to the reason that it's set up this way is that it provides some guarantee that the MOB won't spawn underground or that it won't attack you from below terrain level. I remember that in EQ you would also see MOBs that had just spawned sometimes 'floating' above the terrain.

Why these games seem unable to handle collision detection properly, or at least as elegantly as standard FPS'es do, is open to debate. The only hypothetical explanation that I can provide is that MOBs that are not 'active', i.e., engaged in combat or in their roaming modes, don't 'need' to be detecting collisions against the environment. It is a well-known fact in the game industry that collision detection is usually CPU-intensive, so by making the MOBs float, they improve the server's efficiency. This may not seem like a big gain in the case of that one mission you're in where you see 2 floating chests or whatever, but multiply that by 1000 simultaneous missions that other people are doing...