Talk:Npc crow

How expensive is the "Think outside PVS" flag?

I've got a bunch of birds flapping around my level (on path_corner routes), but I'm pretty sure some of them are set to fly in and out of the PVS throughout. If this is going to work, I think I'm correct in believing that I need to set the "Think outside PVS" flag, right? Otherwise, as soon as they try and fly outside the PVS they will stop calculating their route and well, who knows what happens (they just go into a kind of stasis, I guess?).

My query is: how expensive is it to use the "Think outside PVS" flag on NPCs? I'm not familiar with the code, so I'm unsure whether the extra calculation is trivial for just a few birds, or whether it's actually quite complex (e.g. keeping lots of extra collision hull info in memory to allow it to keep pathfinding). If it's too expensive, then I'd obviously have to rework the birds' flightpaths, but if the performance cost is negligible, then it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Is anyone able to help? Thanks. --Giles 08:56, 12 Jul 2006 (PDT)