- Some sort of visual cue that someone is carrying a corpse.
Years ago. Like years and years ago before the EE when even the stars were different, I was making... Er, not really making. More like looking in to making a corpse system where when picked up, the corpse would, as a cursed item, jump to your cloak slot.
It would have (had) an actual visual corpse you would carry according to race and gender and to some extend colors they were wearing.
But I wasn't finished.
Or even started, really.
Mostly because someone would have had to animate the 3d model carrying a corpse and that wasn't within my skill set.
And possibly some other technical issue I forget.
I haven't read through this thread but I will comment on the initial post.
There was always meant to be a 6 second period where a character could not be killed after going unconscious. This mechanic was bugged, so I fixed it.
Initially, I made an exception to this rule and set the grace period for PvP to only 2 seconds. Mechanically, this is because this is the amount of time between flurries (waves of attacks). So if someone was in a fight and did not want to corpse the target, it would give a small amount of time to back off without accidentally killing the target.
In testing, it turned out that knocking a character unconscious actually breaks combat, so the earliest you can attack a character after reducing them to 0 hit points is roughly 6 seconds, though this may be slightly variable depending on which part of the attack round you are in when the combat action gets canceled.
Since a smaller window for PvP seemed to bear no practical benefit, it was removed, and the grace period was left at 6 seconds for everything. As a result, this also means a wizard can, for instance, use Isaac's Greater Missile Storm on a target without instantly corpsing them (previously this would almost always corpse a target), which I think is a huge benefit and provides room for more roleplay in PvP for spellcasters without feeling like they've reached for the nuclear option.
The only instance of PvP this effects on paper is when a player would corpse another target in a single round, which wasn't even guaranteed before, and the only way to remove this would be to have no grace period for PvP at all. Even then, if you happened to hit a target unconscious to within 0 to -9 hp, it would still break the combat round and you would still be waiting 6 seconds to kill them. The benefits of having a grace period for PvP vastly outweigh the edge cases where someone might corpse another person in a single round, so I don't see any reason to change the way it works right now.
So is it was 2 ( 1.8 ) seconds before and now is 6?