[Flynn]

Originally Posted by Peoples Army If you don't care about how efficient the plugin is then by all means listen to Flynn

Oh oh! Personal attack! Poisoning the well, and Ad Hominem.

Personal attacks on credibility only work if you know the person. Which you don't...

2 years studying a Degree in Computer Games Programming (into my third year, nicely set for a first). The engineering AI lecturer (who happens to be a psychologist) said to me when going over my code that I was 'obsessed with efficiency'. I still disagree with his comment of making code less efficient simply to make it more readable.

Wrote a functional 2D game from scratch within 2 days (visuals, sounds, etc), wrote another one within 2 days also from scratch (visuals, sounds, animation, etc), and finally, pulling another's arse out of a fire, built a basic one in under half a day with no notice whatsoever.

Now that I have extinguished your little credibility flame (I'm used to that, used to moderate forums), allow me to retort;

You misread, so allow me to lay out the points;
One, the server performs far more taxing operations per frame than simple mathematic calculations
Two, if it couldn't handle the OTHER more taxing operations per frame (player position, areabox/hit-detection, physics etc), it wouldn't run
Three, It runs, ergo it can handle simple mathematics per frame
Four, it would only lag if you were stupid enough to put in REALLY complex OR slow access functions (like read/writing to disk etc)
Five, I've already used it for HP operations (where no OTHER alternative exists) and it does not lag
Six, it cannot logically lag, has not lagged during usage, ergo, your argument of it being laggy is flawed
Seven, people are desperate enough for functional ideas, this idea is already functional, ergo, it's still a useful suggestion

The point is, the other practical ideas have seemingly run out. You need an every frame check as the HP degeneration (if you have even played TF2) is pretty much 'every second'. Skip a beat and the HP will oddly change making it look weird to the user.

Besides, I had highlighted other suggestions BESIDES OnGameFrame on the bottom (all three far better than a 'simple shaving' of a frame or two). Pessimists versus Optimists I guess.

And finally, don't... DON'T ever exaggerate. It's not '100,000' operations. At worst it would be 64*X (assuming setclienthealth only does 5 operations, 64*5). Don't play to the 'public panic' simply because it says 'avoid costly executions' - it's meant to run some; if it can't even run some simple mathematics calculation then what is the point?

Sheesh.