Died to Strongbox lag and suggestions so this never happens again

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N0Lif3 wrote:

All of this lag from spawning enemies could be avoided completely if monsters were spawned and rendered far off the level as soon as you enter that area and then as soon as you click the strongbox they simply get teleported from into position. There would be zero lag if that happened.

This would not, in fact, be any different in the general case. Monsters (and other game objects) don't exist on the client until they're close enough to the player to potentially matter - this prevents several easily abusable client hacks that would otherwise be possible. There's no difference to the client between the monsters teleporting in from a long distance away or just spawning on the spot - in both cases the monsters did not exists and have now been created on the client.
Strongboxes spawn monsters based on types that are already in the instance so that they're already preloaded, meaning in both cases the client would react exactly the same.
The only potential benefit is in the case of rogue exiles, for which the base models are preloaded (character models) but may include some nonloaded cosmetic effects.

If you're actually experiencing this on all boxes, and not only ones with exiles, then this isn't something that can be fixed, or even affected, by your proposed solution, as the lag must be related to creating the monster objects on the client, not the loading of their data.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

That unique map where the final boss raises everything in the final room demonstrated that raising/spawning lots of enemies simultaneously was a bad idea, it caused a huge lag spike for most players. That encounter has since been changed to progressively resurrecting monsters which resolved the issue quite nicely.

That spell has always, from the very first implementation, raised them over time, starting with the ones closest to the necromancer and working outwards -that wasn't changed, it's always done that. The change that was made was so that it wouldn't raise monsters that didn't have room to stand up, causing them to overlap, which had a bunch of negative consequences all over the place, including AI and pathing, and also served to reduce the total number of living monsters which was making the fight difficult.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

Strong Boxes spawn large groups of monsters instantly and similarly produce lag spikes for the same reasons.

There is absolutely no spawning happening when that mass revive spell is used - a dead monster and a living one are the same gameobject and have all the same data - nothing new is loaded when a monster is raised from death - any lag caused in this case is not due to loading monsters, because they're all already loaded. This is not equivalent to a strongbox.

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Nicholas_Steel wrote:

The reason you don't notice performance issues as enemies load in to existence while you walk around is because they are presumably progressively loaded. Entire groups of enemies aren't loaded when you get near them, instead the individual members of the group spawn in as you near them one-by-one so the potential performance impact is quite small.

This is partially true - the area around your character where things are active isn't continuous, but discrete, in terms of "tiles" that are each a square a bit wider than cleave's base radius. When you move, you'll unload monsters on one set of tiles you're moving away from and load them in on those you're moving towards, all at once. In general, this would involve loading fewer things than a strongbox, but this depends to some extent on how the monsters happen to be laid out.

We are continually making improvements to how things are preloaded and preventing on-the-fly loading where we can.