WoW's Engine is NOT old or outdated!

[Gothicshark]

That is one of the biggest lacks of common sense on the thread. It makes just as much sense to claim that "WoW uses WC3 engine" as claiming "Rage uses Quake engine", as there is roughly same 15 years between those games made with newer revision of same engine.

Just because id Software sells their engine and has yearly revisions does not mean that internally Blizzard would do any less work on their engine. The only difference is that one of them does not sell their technology outside so the less technologically inclined people have no good way to gauge how many things have changed when Blizzard doesn't release dumbed-down advertising brochures listing all the new engine features.

First, at the heart of WOW is the Warcraft 3 engine, just like the heart of Windows 95 was DOS, and XP was NT. Yes, they constantly update the code, and the WC3 engine inside wow is no longer the same as it was in 2004 when WOW released, however the engine is still there. And you can play with a few settings and make it all look like WC3 if you know how. To include point and click to move. This said, each expansion, and many important content updates change and modify the WC3 engine inside WOW.

However each time they add new technology to the game they are limited by the original code. Which is why they did develop the new engine for SC2.

So relax, just because WOW has an Old Soul doesn't mean the game is out dated, it just means it has an old soul from the 90s.

[fixx]

First, at the heart of WOW is the Warcraft 3 engine, just like the heart of Windows 95 was DOS, and XP was NT. Yes, they constantly update the code, and the WC3 engine inside wow is no longer the same as it was in 2004 when WOW released, however the engine is still there. And you can play with a few settings and make it all look like WC3 if you know how. To include point and click to move. This said, each expansion, and many important content updates change and modify the WC3 engine inside WOW.

So according to you it would make just as much sense to say Doom3 runs the same engine as the original Quake did, deep inside?

You can be pretty damn sure that the changes and additions can be counted in hundreds of thousands in both of those game engines, and somebody who did programming on those 15 years ago would not be able to find a single unchanged full page (standard printed sheet) of code from either.


Also DOS was used on Win95 only for 16bit software downward compatibility, nothing more. Multitasking, hardware drivers and all new 32bit programs ran on the new kernel.

[ldev]

Someone compared WoW to Rift.

WoW's engine could be old (well Rift's cutting edge engine without DX-11 or 64bit support is.. strange), but WoW looks so much better. And with new player models, WoW will dominate poor Rift.

Like two months ago I leveled a mage to 38 in Rift. Shield absorb effects - WHAT. THE. FUCK. Whenever I had an absorb effect, the game looked like it's from 2006. Compare that to Ice Barrier and such. Next - strongest fire nuke. God damn it looked so awful. Nothing like Soulfire or Chaos Bolt in WoW...

Rift looks like crap, come on.

[SodiumChloride]

So according to you it would make just as much sense to say Doom3 runs the same engine as the original Quake did, deep inside?

You can be pretty damn sure that the changes and additions can be counted in hundreds of thousands in both of those game engines, and somebody who did programming on those 15 years ago would not be able to find a single unchanged full page (standard printed sheet) of code from either.


Also DOS was used on Win95 only for 16bit software downward compatibility, nothing more. Multitasking, hardware drivers and all new 32bit programs ran on the new kernel.

Quake uses pre-computed PVS to handle VSD. Doom 3 uses portals.

There are many more differences. id software rewrote/replaced the entire Quake code based.

[Farora]

It's still an old ass engine. The physics are crap, the lighting is non existent, the gameplay mechanics are rusty and outdated. Starting Wow from scratch with a new engine would do wonders for the game, but I doubt it will happen.

[Xisa]

That's terribly obtuse.

Engines DO age. New engines become more efficient at the things that they do, and have the ability to add/do new things that the older engines did not. If that wasn't the case, they'd never update.

Good engines ARE flexible, but they can only handle so many/certain incremental increases before they go kaput.

[Deleted]

I don't understand how this is a thread.
It's quite obvious the engine is old, there is no doubt about this. Games have progressed a lot since WoW came out, so in term of game engines, WoW's engine is old, there is no discussion about this.

Now, is it outdated? Here there is some discussion, unlike the first issue. Old engines can still perform well if they were built well. And I do believe WoW's engine is still performing well. That said, signs of its age are starting to show, so, while it is not outdated, it shows signs of falling behind. Even the devs said that it takes a lot of time to implement newer things because the engine is starting to be hard to work with.

So, is the engine old? Yes, there's no discussion about this.
Is it outdated? Not yet, since it was built well, but it's starting to fall behind.

[Strakha]

You don't know what you are talking about do you. Just throwing names around.

CliffB "came up with" volumetric lighting? That's a load of bullshit, because,

a) CliffB is a game designer, not a 3d graphics engine programmer

b) Just about everything you see, the vast majority, in real-time 3D graphics have their roots in the research labs of universities and companies like ILM and SGI. For the longest time vendors like AMD and nVidia are more or less walking in their footsteps. Volumetric lighting, that is only now becoming feasible for widespread use (e.g. KZ:SF) I'm quite sure was thought of, worked out and implemented (non-real-time of course) long before Quake hit the scene.

cliffb was one of the lead devs for the unreal engine, volumetric lighting was a feature of that engine, not quake 1 engine, or gl quake.

[Damedrius]

Dumbest interpretation of an engine EVER!

An engine doesn't create things like models, but it requires a powerful engine to take modern and detailed models. Same goes for EVERYTHING.

[SodiumChloride]

cliffb was one of the lead devs for the unreal engine, volumetric lighting was a feature of that engine, not quake 1 engine, or gl quake.

Unreal 1 was most Tim Sweeney's work.

Clifford Michael Bleszinski (born February 12, 1975), popularly known as CliffyB, is a video game designer, and former design director for the game development company Epic Games. He is most famous for his role in the development of the Unreal franchise, especially 1999's Unreal Tournament, and the Gears of War franchise. He cites Shigeru Miyamoto as his biggest influence.[2]

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Bleszinski

The guy can't program for shit. He is a gameplay guy.

The concept of "volumetric lighting" is well known in the graphics field. I got a bridge to sell you if you believe Epic invented it.

Anyhow, doing "volumetric lighting" is only possible with modern GPUs. In the day's of software renderers, i.e. Quake 1 and Unreal 1, the best you could do was fake it with a transparent texture floating in middle air.

[Slakkers]

Nice post OP.

- Games engines and created by coders,
- Game engines performance are affected by coders skills / languages limits,
- Engines can be updated / upgraded till a certain limit,
- WOW engine is at its limits, Blizzard is trying to keep it updated as much as possible till their next game (Titan) using a new game engine build from scratch,
- If WOW is still popular (and sure it will be), they will give us a WOW 2.0 based on this new engine.

Do you really think an engine is one big pile of code mashed together? An engine usually consist of several modules, dependent on one another, but not to a point you can't change anything at all. Surely Blizzard have a nice modular engine, where for instance the rendering module can be updated, or even rewritten without too many changes affecting other parts of the engine.

[fixx]

There are many more differences. id software rewrote/replaced the entire Quake code based.

So an old engine will have a lot of limitations. An old engine can -never- take advantage of hardware and new software functionality that was developed after it's time.

DirectX11 mode that was added in Cataclysm improves my framerate by 15-20% compared to DX9 mode. Do you explain that with magic, or perhaps it's possible, very likely and actually commonplace to take advantage of new hardware in old code?

Back when WC3 launched the latest DirectX version was still 8 without even hardware lighting support. Codebase of WoW has been redone many times, biggest would've been the multicore optimizations that happened with TBC and WLK launches, as well as the audio hardware acceleration, and most recently DX11 renderer.

[SodiumChloride]

DirectX11 mode that was added in Cataclysm improves my framerate by 15-20% compared to DX9 mode. Do you explain that with magic, or perhaps it's possible, very likely and actually commonplace to take advantage of new hardware in old code?

Back when WC3 launched the latest DirectX version was still 8 without even hardware lighting support. Codebase of WoW has been redone many times, biggest would've been the multicore optimizations that happened with TBC and WLK launches, as well as the audio hardware acceleration, and most recently DX11 renderer.

The core way data is manage and drawn changed a lot from Quake to Doom 3. This kind of change is not made lightly.

If Blizzard is moving over to a "new" engine, with massive under the hood changes, I'm quite sure we will hear about it.