Originally Posted by
rda
I just couldn't help myself looking at this laughable exchange:
Why do you even care?
If you want a seamless world with no loading screens, state that you want that directly. This is entirely possible with parts of the world running on different servers.
What? "The engine"? What does "the engine" have to do with it? You mean "the server part of WoW".
OK. I don't think this is true, just isn't necessary / irrelevant, but fine, this is the least laughable post in the entire exchange.
Damn, "the engine" now starts migrating to the client. No, the downside that you describe does not exist. Some changes in "the engine" (or "the server part of WoW", which you need if you want to talk about the hypothetical - and unnecessary - case of all continents running on the same server) do reflect on the client, but not all, and the reflection is absolutely not going to be "since the server started processing actions for all continents, the client has to keep them all in memory as well". There will be changes to the client to support a seamless world, but they absolutely don't have to require more memory or more of anything. In fact, they might easily require less, this is a common goal when you are moving from loading screens to a seamless world - to *limit* the amount of resources consumed by the client and get rid of issues with big maps (and allow the designers to create arbitrarily complex maps because they no longer have to care about any limits, these limits are enforced dynamically and automatically).
What??? Marlamin repeating the BS regarding "the engine"? What does this have to do with "the engine"? You seem to be calling everything that lives on the server "the engine", like one of the guys above does.
And why the heck discuss the limit on the number of tiles in a map? Because that's the only pair of numbers you can see? There are other limits which you don't see that are way more important and way harder to change, guaranteed. You are like the media who report what they can understand instead of what matters.
I realize that you are surrounded by folks who can't tell a MAC from a HMAC, so there is little reason to go into technical matters too deep, but this "technical rant" of yours was just amateurish.
Frankly, this isn't the first time. Recently, when I posted something about classic that goes a little deeper than this laughable level of discussing some limit in an intermediate data structure and inserting "the engine" where it doesn't belong, you haven't been able to say anything coherent either. I am beginning to think that maybe I was giving you too much credit and in fact your experience and knowledge arent't too high above those of students / wannabe devs who storm these "talk with the dev" panels at Blizzcon. Where the hosts are relaxing, sipping colas and telling random stories from their dev life, and the audience is not getting any wiser about the actual development (for that you'd need a normal session centered on a technical topic - who needs that, right? that's too complex and boring, better "hang out with the cool guys" and hear anecdotes) but feeling damn privileged regardless.
This was the post that broke me up.
Buddy, this is a non-sequitur. What you were discussing before has no bearing on it.
And yes, WoW does use occlusion culling. It did since the beginning. You are asking about a staple without which nearly nothing is possible, you just immediately die perf-wise. It's like asking if WoW runs on systems with color monitors. Yeah, it does.
---
There is nothing wrong with discussing the technical side of things which you don't fully understand. But I would have thought that at least someone would have some clue. Apparently not, nobody left.