A fast visibility check

Currently, I have a couple of effects that use a per-tick VisibleActors iterator. (Its slow, but there is a 0 fps difference for it running so I really don't care about that). However, I would be able to work out a couple additions to this effect if I stored these items it a dynamic array, and referred to them on a per-tick basis with a quick visibility check. Is there any uscript function fast enough for this purpose, and would be safe to use in a network environment? I'm not 100% sure on the speed / usage of the native function PlayerCanSeeMe(), and I would assume even a FastTrace to a dozen actors would be much slower than the iterator. As for LastRenderTime, what if the object itself is hidden with no mesh? And how do such methods effect other players present in the game; would PlayerCanSeeMe() return true if _any_ player can see the actor, or just the one on which the function was called?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Well, thats only true to a degree: LineOfSight has several instances, one being a uscript trace-pack (very slow) another being an ominous native function within the controller: native is a 95% speed boost, regardless of it being a trace or not... Also, iterators, even the trace iterators, deal with that sort of searching outside of the slow-uscript processes, and thus are faster than if I did a uscript-fasttrace to 100 actors: hence the reason for this thread in the first place; I was wondering if anyone had any hard-ish stats on the the topic.

First, I read the page; good read. Second, the 95% is an actual figure, by Tim Sweeny, somewhere out there about the relative speeds of native code compared to uscript code. A while ago, not a recent doc, but an actual figure none the less (And I would hardly assume it would change much between engine versions, at least without any official statment of).

Also, the wiki page mentions the same speed boost, if not the number

Still, the actors I have to deal with are essentially dummy actors (invisible, with no gameplay functionality) as anchors for the HUD; there are appriximately 50 or so at any given time, and about 12 or so in view on avarage. So visible actors seems to do the trick, as I only want them when a perfect LOS check works for the local camera (VisibleActors does this, if used right). Still, I can't help but feel that with a relatively limited set of these buggers, that I could do more with them if they were in an array (ie, effects when they drop out of view, etc). The only issue with that is the LOS check, and though the iterator was slow, it was only one slow item called, instead of a nested set of Trace like functions, native or otherwise. Still, though my first instinct was to go with PlayerCanSeeMe(), I've had weird returns using this function, and thus if anyone knows the details (on or offline) about it, I would really like to know.

As for the native instance of LineOfSight, this looks like the best bet (reading more into it) as it appears to be just a specialised trace, for controllers (and thus easily accessed in the hud, I hope) but spead up using the low-latency native code method. Neways, I don't have time to implement this right now, but I will try this function out, and get back to you all with how it works out.

Thanks for your intrest, and that link (a good read).