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  1. #41
    Pit Lord rogoth's Avatar
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    in terms of raid mechanics, they have pretty much reached the limits on what the engine can do, even if they won't come out publicly and say it, the only new mechanic they have introduced since wrath is the darkness fog on kil'jaeden/portal keeper hasabel, all current mechanics are just reskins of older mechanics that have been around for years, as an example, aggramar in antorus can be summed up as ragnaros heroic 2.0 from firelands mechanically he works in almost the exact same way, there's so many old mechanics being reused it's hard to really pay attention to stuff anymore because it's already known how it will play out.

  2. #42
    Quote Originally Posted by Elfezen View Post
    Blizzard never said that WoW 2 is on their mind, they said that they are never going to make another mmorpg again that's why they scrapped Titan which was a many years project and turned it to Overwatch
    They also said multiple times that they're never going to make legacy servers...
    Quote Originally Posted by Aydinx2
    People who don't buy the deluxe edition should be permanently banned. I'm sick of playing with poor people.

  3. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by Miatog View Post
    Blizzard has said throughout the years that WoW 2 is always on their mind
    What on earth are you on about...

  4. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Voidmaster View Post
    That is not a WoW engine limitation, the WoW engine does extend to multiple cores if one core is on 100% load. This limitation comes from Dx11, Dx11 supports partial multithreading only. With Dx12 you can properly multithread your graphics stack on OS level, but they can't fully implement Dx12 yet cause like 90%+ of the playerbase has a GPU that does not support Dx12 on feature hardware level.
    To allow full multithreading without Dx12 would require rewriting the entire game engine, something that isn't going to happen.

    If you are this bothered about it you can solve it yourself though, just get a CPU with high Single threading performance (e.g. no AMD CPU, but an Intel Kaby Lake CPU).
    I've heard that 8.0 brings DirectX 12 support (with DirectX 9 being removed), which also meas engine will finally utilize more than 1 core for rendering (there's actually more than just rendering happens on that thread right now, whole lua UI also runs on that thread).
    Last edited by TOM_RUS; 2017-11-13 at 04:59 PM.

  5. #45
    What if the new classic is going to use a new engine and it is the wow 2 :O!!

  6. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by makketota View Post
    This. A game engine isn't some static thing. WoW's engine is not a "17 year old engine". Its been in constant change since the games release. Bigger changes might take a lot of time, but in theory they can change anything they'd like if they feel its worth the cost.
    Sure, they work on it. But that doesnt make the engine much better.

    There a reason why theres an Unreal Engine 1, 2, 3 and 4.
    Because: You cant endlessly upgrade an Engine and have backwards compability.

    For example, the "Customization Options" people want is probably something in the core of the Engine. How Models/Assets are handled.
    If they change this, they have to update EVERY model/asset thats in the game. Which in return is a task thats not reasonably possible in a game as large as WoW.

    The "Updated Models" obviously dont fall under that, because the Technical aspects of the Models didn´t really change. Just the quality.

    Quote Originally Posted by makketota View Post
    And how many here actually have background in software engineering ? A game engine isn't some static entity. It's constantly been updated and has no arbirary limits beyond how much time Blizzard are willing to spend on it.
    A House isnt something static. You can also Modify your house. But good luck changing the Foundation of your House without rebuilding the whole house.

    Quote Originally Posted by makketota View Post
    I'm not wrong. Blizzard engineering panel specifically adressed this, so you can go watch that if you want a more authoritative source on this. It's really all about how Blizzard are willing to spend their resources.
    The "Technical Panels" on the Blizzcon, while they are interesting, are not really diving deep into the technical aspects. Sure, they can do alot of things. But there are Limitations.


    Quote Originally Posted by Yuyn View Post
    Many of those are built/rewritten from the previous engine. They're 'separate' because of API and licensing concerns, rather than meaning they're a complete from-zero rewrite. (Some new versions of engines are a complete from-zero rewrite, but that's often not the case, too.) id Tech 4 was based on id Tech 3 which was based on id Tech 2. There were significant rewrites, but they initially started with the previous version.

    This is basically what Blizzard has been constantly doing with WoW. They have no need to worry about licensing concerns, and the API concerns are completely in-company (so they're less of a problem when you control the only codebase using the engine).
    You have it Right and Wrong in the same post.

    Sure, newer engines are "Rewritten" and Expanded from the Previous Engine. But, they dont have to cope with a game thats running on it.
    When Blizzard makes a change to the WoW engine, they need to make sure the game still runs.

    A good example would be Space Engineers, they upgraded their Engine from DX11 to DX12, (iirc) that in return made every Model/asset that uses DX11 incompatible with the DX12 version. That way they need (to maintain support for DX11) DX11 assets, aswell as DX12 Assets. (How such an Upgrade would work in WoW I dont know, I am no software Engineer, thats just an Example where the Engine of a game was expandet)
    Now imagine the workload on a game in the size of WoW.
    While it would be technically possible, it would be an insane amount of work, which is virtually impossible.

    The same goes with GamePlay elements, if something is changed there, it still has to work across the entire game. And if it doesnt, there have to be massive rewrites.

    Its like changing/tweaking the Engine of a Car. Some things just dont fit, without remodelling the car.

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by Voidmaster View Post
    but they can't fully implement Dx12 yet cause like 90%+ of the playerbase has a GPU that does not support Dx12 on feature hardware level.
    Adding a toggle to switch between DX11 and DX12 is just the same as adding a toggle between DX11 and DX9 which they had/have. (Is DX9 still available? I haven't checked recently.) They can fully implement DX12 and they are probably working on it but it's a bigger job than going from DX9 to DX11 so I would expect it to take time. I wouldn't be surprised if we got DX12 sometime during BfA but I'm guessing we get it the expansion after.

  8. #48
    Quote Originally Posted by LanToaster View Post
    Sure, they work on it. But that doesnt make the engine much better.

    There a reason why theres an Unreal Engine 1, 2, 3 and 4.
    Because: You cant endlessly upgrade an Engine and have backwards compability.
    This part right here shows just how much you don't understand about the subject.

    You can keep backwards compatibility while including the newest features for all time (e.g. Windows), but you will constantly be burdened by it. Crappy APIs that you have to work around, adding things get harder and harder due to asset and namespace pollutions unless you want to wrap everything old in a thin new wrapper.

    There reason there are unreal engines 1, 2, 3 and 4 is that every time Epic made a new engine, they realized their mistakes and realized what could have been done better, but expanding the old engine properly was either too time consuming or too resource consuming. When these things compounded, they would rather not be burdened by legacy code base and legacy components, so they "started over".

    Reason why started over is in quotes is that they didn't really start over, UE4 still probably kept 50-70% of UE3 codebase as far as e.g. rendering pipeline was concerned, but due to the new in-house insight, they made it extensible from the get go, whereas making it extensible in UE3 would have required hacking.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by adamzz View Post
    Adding a toggle to switch between DX11 and DX12 is just the same as adding a toggle between DX11 and DX9 which they had/have. (Is DX9 still available? I haven't checked recently.) They can fully implement DX12 and they are probably working on it but it's a bigger job than going from DX9 to DX11 so I would expect it to take time. I wouldn't be surprised if we got DX12 sometime during BfA but I'm guessing we get it the expansion after.
    Honestly, I think they would do well to include Vulkan over DX12. It's portable between Win and Mac and it has the same capabilities, sometimes Vulkan can even be a godsend compared to DX12 (I haven't used it first hand, but I believe the fact that DX12 is heavily developed for Xbox is pretty annoying). It would save them money and headache - so we will see.

  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by TOM_RUS View Post
    I've heard that 8.0 brings DirectX 12 support (with DirectX 9 being removed), which also meas engine will finally utilize more than 1 core for rendering (there's actually more than just rendering happens on that thread right now, whole lua UI also runs on that thread).
    Where did you hear that?
    HolgerDK Stærkodder Shocknorrís
    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke.

  10. #50
    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    This part right here shows just how much you don't understand about the subject.

    You can keep backwards compatibility while including the newest features for all time (e.g. Windows), but you will constantly be burdened by it. Crappy APIs that you have to work around, adding things get harder and harder due to asset and namespace pollutions unless you want to wrap everything old in a thin new wrapper.
    The thing is not about Adding things. The thing is about Changing. And Changing stuff while maintaining Backward compability (which is Important if you have a game running on it) is not a no brainer, or always possible.

    As i said:
    Taking Models for example:
    Changing the Player Models to include more customization options. Is Impossible without changing how Player Models work in itself.
    Which in return makes all the current player models incompatible with the new Changes. Which again is a ton of work.

    And again, this is only for Models, the same goes for GamePlay elements. Adding things -> Easy . Changing Things - Not so much.

  11. #51
    they can always update the source to make it fresh for the current year

  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by LanToaster View Post
    The thing is not about Adding things. The thing is about Changing. And Changing stuff while maintaining Backward compability (which is Important if you have a game running on it) is not a no brainer, or always possible.

    As i said:
    Taking Models for example:
    Changing the Player Models to include more customization options. Is Impossible without changing how Player Models work in itself.
    Which in return makes all the current player models incompatible with the new Changes. Which again is a ton of work.

    And again, this is only for Models, the same goes for GamePlay elements. Adding things -> Easy . Changing Things - Not so much.
    However, player models have nothing to do with the engine, but rather how you use that engine. All the things you are describing are domain specific, what engine does is the underlying stuff - you give it all the things necessary to produce a scene and it does it (graphics engine that is). You give it a player mesh and it incorporates it in a scene. It doesn't give a fuck if the mesh has 20k verts or 2k verts. The customization changes the parts of the mesh - and that is done on top of the engine, so no.

    In that regard, there are many "engines" inside wow, you have graphics engine, which can be extended to heart's desire. Making it draw the prettiest pixels our GPUs can is just a matter of implementing the usage of low level API (as mentioned above, DX11, DX12, Vulkan, whatever), you have the scripting engine for UI, which can be extended just by exposing more functionality from the C side of things, then you obviously have the server, which has it's own engines, the AI engine, server side scripting engine, networking layer..

    Come to think of it, there ISN'T an engine in wow. It's a collection of server side and client side components that are held together by a thin layer. If you wanna call it an engine collectively, then sure (as is in the sense that eg Unity is an engine), but you can't talk about it's limits without specifying the area of interest.

  13. #53
    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    However, player models have nothing to do with the engine, but rather how you use that engine. All the things you are describing are domain specific, what engine does is the underlying stuff - you give it all the things necessary to produce a scene and it does it (graphics engine that is). You give it a player mesh and it incorporates it in a scene. It doesn't give a fuck if the mesh has 20k verts or 2k verts. The customization changes the parts of the mesh - and that is done on top of the engine, so no.
    You dont just plug a Mesh into an Engine and out pops an Image.
    There are specifics what the engine has to do with the Models. Sure, your base model is a bunch of Vertices, which connect to build faces, and these faces can resemble anything you like. Thats how a Model work.

    But again, there are many different ways for example these models can be stored. You cant just plug any 3d model into any 3d Engine.
    And thats not even what I was talking about.

    If you want to have "More" Customization Options, like Body Sliders, or Hand Painted Tatoos, or Placed Deceals on your Character or whatever you want.
    These needs to be written into the Engine. Also you need to tweak the Models, so the Engine knows which Parts of the Models need changing for specific settings. Aswell as into the Character Creation.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    In that regard, there are many "engines" inside wow, you have graphics engine, which can be extended to heart's desire.
    Yea sure. You have different parts of the Game Engine, these are also called Engines. This much you have right.
    But you are still at "Adding" stuff. And no, you cant extend them to your hearts desire. They still need to work with the rest of the game and its underlying engines.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    Making it draw the prettiest pixels our GPUs can is just a matter of implementing the usage of low level API (as mentioned above, DX11, DX12, Vulkan, whatever)
    Having more beautiful Pixels, doesnt really give you the by example mentioned Customization Options.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    , you have the scripting engine for UI, which can be extended just by exposing more functionality from the C side of things
    Which still needs to make calls to the Other Engines. So whatever changes and Additions you make to the other Engines will need to be adjusted here too.

    If you change the Sound Engine, and make it so the sounds can be played Differently by giving more/other variables to the Sound Engine, your UI would need to know these, so they can deliver the Variables the Sound Engine expects, or you have Crashes.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    , then you obviously have the server, which has it's own engines, the AI engine, server side scripting engine, networking layer..
    Which also needs to work with the other Different Engines. Or how would the Server know it needs to send me the new Customization Options on my New Half Dwarf, Half Elve you created.


    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    Come to think of it, there ISN'T an engine in wow. It's a collection of server side and client side components that are held together by a thin layer. If you wanna call it an engine collectively, then sure (as is in the sense that eg Unity is an engine), but you can't talk about it's limits without specifying the area of interest.
    And that all together is the "Game Engine", which is used to run the game.

    And you can talk about its limitations. Because you even though you can theoreticly just change/add things to one part. You still need to make sure it works across the Board with ALL gears of the game.

    And if the more changes you do, the more work it becomes, and at a certain point its nonsensical.

    Edit:
    Again the Car Example:
    You have Many parts in your Car, you can in theory change them all out. But they still need to work together to move your Car.
    Last edited by LanToaster; 2017-11-13 at 05:47 PM.

  14. #54
    Quote Originally Posted by thilicen View Post
    About that, I missed Blizzcon this year. Did they mention any specific changes / upgrades to the engine?
    The only specific change I remember is new lighting engine they'll implement which will allow more dynamic lights and will alow them to do some adjustments to the lighting at night. So maybe we'll get darker nights.

  15. #55
    Quote Originally Posted by LanToaster View Post
    And you can talk about its limitations. Because you even though you can theoreticly just change/add things to one part. You still need to make sure it works across the Board with ALL gears of the game.

    And if the more changes you do, the more work it becomes, and at a certain point its nonsensical.
    That's the whole point of modern program design, changing stuff is as easy as adding stuff, because you have layers of abstraction and separation. Ultimately, to change from normal player models to "slider customizable" models, all you need to do is provide a way for the program to convert the slider settings into the mesh.

    What exactly are you changing? Yes, the server now has to store your settings (as if it already didn't, like hair color), so you have to modify a few database tables to store new values. You need to change the Character creating UI, but that's just rewriting a blizzard addon (well, basically. if you are interested in that more, read the exported lua files), exposing those sliders to players, changing the player object protocol (changes every patch almost btw).

    One thing where I'm willing to say that it could be difficult (although not necessarily - depends on implementation) is that if you make a slider for fatter player model, suddenly you need to make all armor conform to fatter models, so shoulders could be clipping model, etc - but this can usually be solved by a simple multiplicator.

    The hardest part is converting the slider values to the mesh visual appearance, but that's something entirely new, you aren't "changing" anything.

  16. #56
    Haven't Blizzard themselves even that there are some things they can't do due to engine limitations for exampla facial customization and height/width sliders etc?
    I can't remember any other specific points than those where they've said they can't do it due to engine limitations and I'm sure there are more things that could cause limits based on the original engine.
    However as long as they can continue to make new things with it I don't really see a point in making a new engine as they've also said making a whole new engine for the game would be an expansions worth of work without adding anything new into the game.

  17. #57
    The current Wow game engine greatly limits what they can do and what they want to do. If you read the Dev notes, particularly during the WOD and Legion betas, they rinse and repeat the same things over and over again - "upgrade and update." The time they put into improving the game engine greatly takes away from their time to develop new features and content. Plus, the competition are miles ahead of Blizzard.

  18. #58
    Immortal Stormspark's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Nymrohd View Post
    Just because they have not reached those limits yet, does not mean they do not exist.

    But I'd rather they just stop improving the game than making a new engine. Making a new engine means scrapping editing tools that have been customized and refined for over a decade.
    It's only limited by how much work they want to put into it. WOW itself is just an SQL database (talking about server here). The engine is all client side and the only limit for changing/upgrading it is how much effort they want to put into that endeavour. The problem is 10+ years of legacy code buildup, streamlining a program of this size is not easy work.

  19. #59
    Quote Originally Posted by Miatog View Post
    A friend and I were talking and I'm curious. How close do you think we are to the limits of WoW's engine? Blizzard has said throughout the years that WoW 2 is always on their mind, but it won't happen until they reach the very limits of the current engine. I barely know enough to understand what they mean by that. It makes me curious though, how close are we to that limit? Is there some way for us to tell?
    Graphically, I doubt there is a limit they have reach or will reach in the near future.

    AI, again limited since it is an MMO, so smart and complex AI is not a major limit.

    The main concern is object replication and synchronization. If there are 100 players on screen, then that is 99 motions that needs to be replicated to 99 others machines. I think that would be one of the major limit.

    Just my opinion.

  20. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Cracked View Post
    That's the whole point of modern program design, changing stuff is as easy as adding stuff, because you have layers of abstraction and separation. Ultimately, to change from normal player models to "slider customizable" models, all you need to do is provide a way for the program to convert the slider settings into the mesh.
    Thing is, we're talking about double trouble in this case, first of all, it's a project that's started in early 00s, secondly, it's a game.

    In early 00s, just like in 90s, not so many people really cared about good practices, not so many people cared about projects' modularity, extensibility, and so on.

    Moreover, gamedev industry is notorious for not so good quality of code because of various reason. Devs may not being as skilled because salaries are much lower in gamedev than in other fields, so there's no point for a really good SE to go there unless one REALLY loves games. Then you have really poor working conditions in many companies. The amount of code programmers tend to write for games is absurd, if you ask me. So basically one has to do more work for less money, kinda meh, imho.

    These two things drastically increase difficulty of adding and more importantly changing stuff.

    P.S. If you're a game dev, sorrynotsorry, it's a sad state of your industry, at least in bigger companies.
    Last edited by ls-; 2017-11-13 at 06:13 PM.

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