Why is it that every time this issue comes up someone speaks up about how corpses murder performance.
There are just as many games that don't aggressively clean up corpses as those that do. Some clean them up based on a population cap which is an excellent compromise between visuals and performance concerns, especially in games that may feature endless enemy respawns in some sections.
Games that can be tweaked to keep corpses universally suffer little performance impact when corpses are increased. Go into your crysis cfg's sometime and set corpse-fade time to 999 seconds. If the game could draw all those enemies while running combat AI and collision for them at decent FPS's it can CERTAINLY draw their lifeless corpses without falling to its knees. That's what LOD's are for. It's not like the things are at full detail when the player is several meters away.
I can think of a few titles where corpses stay FOREVER, with no performance impact. Bethesda's gamebryo based games come to mind, as does Dragon Age when corpse-fade is tweaked via .ini. STALKER is right there, so is Mass Effect where corpses can be tweaked to never fade and maintain full collision, with no performance impact!
How bout Half life 2 where corpse fade is emminently tweakable with a bevy of distance, population cap and duration based .ini switches.
There are so many options available to suit every taste and piece of hardware, not making this a tweakable variable is a poor choice indeed.
A population cap of say, 20 corpses would be perfect for Witcher 2, with those 20 disappearing into loot bags or monster remains after the player hits a major area transition or 24 in-game hours pass, whatever comes first.
Post edited July 06, 2011 by Szoreny