[Opentnl-general] Persistant ghosts and bullets

[Benjamin D. <be...@fi...>]

Hello list,

I'm currently trying to find my way around OpenTNL. It seems perfect for 
my game project, but I've basically got two questions:

1) If I understand correctly, gosts are created "on demand" on the 
clients. If an object falls out of scope, however, it is possible that 
the client-side version is deleted, right? In my game, however, each 
client basically knows of all the ghostable objects anyway, so deleting 
and reallocating seems kind of like a waste. Is there a way to avoid 
this, and just tell a ghost "you've fallen out of scope (at this
timestamp), so forget about getting updates for now"?.

Incidently, what's with the "GhostAlways" methods? They're not really 
documented.

2) There will be bullets / shots from one player to another, which are 
created at one point in the world, travel in real time, and then are 
destroyed. The server takes care of these, and informs the clients about 
creation and destruction. Since the state of each shot (time created, 
direction and speed of travel) don't change, I assume a NetObject / 
ghost is overkill. My idea wold be to implement these in a NetEvent, as 
a list of current create/destroy sub-events, and send them 
GuaranteedOnly. I may have to add my own scoping, but that's not so 
important now.

My question is: how are other people handling such "linear unchanging 
objects"? Is the use of ghosts fast/convenient enough that I should 
consider them? Or is there another, even better way?

Thanks for everyone's input!

   Benjamin