» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:33 pm
Oh for crying out loud! How do people think this is a problem?
Look, in a computer game a dragon is just a logical entity. It isn't solid, has no physical existence. You can have two, three, fifty simultaneous and identical instances of the same single dragon.
So, your character is outside a walled city. A dragon flies up and starts 'attacking' the city - which is to say the dragon flies up and starts breathing fire down on the empty area (which you can't see) inside the city walls. You run up to the gate and activate it. Your character is teleported to the city worldspace. Guess what? So is the dragon. Or a new copy of the dragon is created inside the city worldspace, only this version of the dragon has land-and-fight-on-foot AI code active. You and the city guards fight and kill the dragon. You walk up to the gate, activate it and get teleported to the wilderness worldspace. The game detects that the dragon was killed and deletes it from the game's data structures. Lo and behold, no dragon outside.
It works pretty much the same way if you're inside the city when the dragon attack starts - the dragon gets spawned in the city worldspace but beyond view. It flies over the walls into sight, lands and starts attacking stuff. Once you've got it's attention, if you leave the city while it's still alive it will be teleported out along with you so the fight can continue. Or a new copy gets created, or a variant that fights better outside, or whatever. If it was on the ground in the city worldspace, then when you leave it will be placed on the ground in the empty area behind the city walls, ready to take off and fly after you.
The point is there is no problem, just a bunch of coding and data handling - and, y'know, that sort of thing is rather what Bethesda are in the professional business of understanding.