WoW really need a new engine

[Biggles Worth]

I'd rather them make classes, specs fun first since visually WoW is in its own place.

[La]

I mean Black Desert Online looks absolutely amazing and runs smooth as butter, so I can definitely say that an MMO with the same type of content as WoW in those graphics would be amazing.

It'll never look like it does here for an MMO, though

[Redroniksre]

WoW's engine is fine for the most part. The problem with that Unreal Engine 4 video is that you lose all the art style from the game. WoW isn't meant to be realistic looking, it has a cartoony/comic style for a reason, and one of those is that it ages a lot better. When you make a game look realistic, after a few years it starts to look like shit, while games with more alternative art styles can hold up well.

[kaminaris]

Well that's my point. Of course all performance problems are identifiable and resolvable, but the original point is that addons ARE in fact the big reason people have poor performance. And yes, weakauras didn't help this state a big deal, with people frequently running dozens of weakauras that use onupdate. Also, if your hardware is pretty good and your function has tail performance of 0.8ms, that's quite a big deal if it runs sufficiently often. That's 5% of frame time allocation for a frame (target 60 FPS) JUST to run your addon function. Imagine someone having 3 such addons that decide to coincide such functions and bam, that's how you get a stutter.

Thats why you have the chart to see what is going on. Most addons are fine. Only the combat ones can deal some performance issues. And no 0.8ms was peak, usual was 2.9us = 0.0029 milliseconds. And it is the most expensive one. 0.8ms is not going to cause performance drop as it usually affects just one frame. And it usually happens when other code is doing something as well = thus we have a difference between low and high execution time.

If code can execute fully in between frames = so a within a maximum of 16.6ms, it will simply stay within boundary. Problem with FPS drops are when code takes more than one frame to execute and delays every other code that also runs every frame.

Thus biggest issues comes from weakauras and addons that does something "every frame" or just "OnUpdate". My addon simply executes each 150ms, takes 0.5ms and does nothing for another 150ms (its configurable). Also you need to note that GPU is used to render 3D world while CPU handles interface code, so its not fully 1:1 conversion between frames and interface code execution time.

[GMZohar1]

Yes it needs a new engine and turn the already low fan base into an even lower fan base cause a very very high % of players can't afford a computer good enough to handle the new engine. How genius

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

Creating an new engine is several years of work and using UE4 means royalties/licenses. Why do that when they can work their employees like dogs instead. Unity just requires a pro license though but that's 1500 per employee also a different language with auto memory management. Is there any reason the current engine isn't capable of better graphics with better coding. Also is there any well optimized mmo, I've heard there better but not perfect.

[kaminaris]

Yes it needs a new engine and turn the already low fan base into an even lower fan base cause a very very high % of players can't afford a computer good enough to handle the new engine. How genius

You do realize newer engines can outperform wow old amalgam engine right?

[Relapses]

WoW's graphics are plenty adequate for the space in the MMO market it occupies. There are a million ways they could make the game prettier but nearly every one of them would require so much development time that they might as well just create a whole new game. And that's before you take into account the very real possibility said graphics updates completely change the tone and feel of the game.

Gonna be a hard no from me, dawg.

[hulkgor]

People still don't realize WoW is a mmo, and this sort of graphics (op clip) work on SINGLE PLAYER GAMES, not in a setting with hundreds of players.

That said, WoW still looks great, and every expansion they improve textures, models, spell details, etc.

A new, completely fresh engine would be the death of WoW, completely, since it would no longer play as it does, which is one of its biggest qualities.

Oh, and finally, completely changing WoW's cartoonish look to a 'realistic' setting would also be a big fucking no-no. It wouldn't be WoW anymore.

[Cracked]

If code can execute fully in between frames = so a within a maximum of 16.6ms, it will simply stay within boundary. Problem with FPS drops are when code takes more than one frame to execute and delays every other code that also runs every frame.

This is simply not true. ~16.6ms is the ENTIRE time allocation for a frame. If you addon takes 16.6ms to execute without yielding, you will see a 16.6ms stutter or in other words, you will drop 1 entire frame. 16.6ms is the time the engine has to execute everything to be able to draw the next frame if you want to see steady 60 FPS. Rendering is done on GPU, but it can still cause issues, depending on how UX is rendered and if the rendering engine needs to know all addon frame objects before finalizing rendering or if it's done as a composition on CPU, but in both cases, you still need to wait for the addon to yield.

(or have it killed by the execution engine for taking too long to finish)

[kaminaris]

Creating an new engine is several years of work and using UE4 means royalties/licenses. Why do that when they can work their employees like dogs instead. Unity just requires a pro license though but that's 1500 per employee also a different language with auto memory management. Is there any reason the current engine isn't capable of better graphics with better coding. Also is there any well optimized mmo, I've heard there better but not perfect.

Hearthstone is built on Unity. And that is a blizzard game. You think maintaining your own engine would be cheaper than paying fees for stable, portable, ready to go engine? Have you ever wondered why so many new games are using ready engines? Because it's not cheaper to develop your own, not to mention maintain it as far as blizzard did.

Using Unity or other engine could open their path for porting WoW to consoles. And before people scream about "console casuals", modern console do support keyboard and mouse. There are even games that supports ONLY keyboard on consoles as well.

Now try to imagine work needed to port whole engine to for example PS4.

[Adam Jensen]

That's a ton of effort for very little reward.

You're asking them to overhaul levels, models, textures, animations for a 15 year old game, so the graphics can be a bit improved? Not going to happen. They can add on to the current engine, but ripping out the current engine for something better you may as well be making a new game.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

Hearthstone is built on Unity. And that is a blizzard game. You think maintaining your own engine would be cheaper than paying fees for stable, portable, ready to go engine? Have you ever wondered why so many new games are using ready engines? Because it's not cheaper to develop your own, not to mention maintain it as far as blizzard did.

Using Unity or other engine could open their path for porting WoW to consoles. And before people scream about "console casuals", modern console do support keyboard and mouse. There are even games that supports ONLY keyboard on consoles as well.

Now try to imagine work needed to port whole engine to for example PS4.

Hearthstone is much smaller than wow and a lot of those new games teams are really small. Blizzard has several hundred employees for example. How big is the hearthstone team because I bet it's much smaller than wow. Hearthstone started with a team of 15 members and grew to 60 eventually but it was a much smaller project than an mmo which requires hundreds of developers. Unreal also has royalties and unity uses c# which has auto memory management which is less ideal for an mmo.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Engines are much more than graphic quality.

Exactly.
This article helps to explain the differences a bit more https://kotaku.com/the-controversy-o...ded-1830435351
But the point is that the look and feel are just one piece of the game's 'engine.' If you want better graphics, ask for better graphics - and if you look between Classic and today's WoW, that part of the engine has DEFINITELY changed.
The OP is asking for what he/she thinks is a graphics upgrade. Blizzard reads that as changing the artstyle of WoW itself.

[THEORACLE64]

Smeared textures that have not aged well at all.
Nonexistent lip sync (not even close, you can see this far back, like Warcraft 3).
Collision boxes are horrible. You get stuck on everything. From chairs to tiny roots.
For its visuals, the game is extremely demanding and I believe it's because of the grass which Blizzard went batshit crazy on so the game can still look good.

On the positive sides, the style has aged well, but the game is so old that it should change. 2020 is around the corner, why are we still on 2005 engine?



Imagine something like this (I believe this would be as demanding as current WoW considering the current engine is outdated)
Although don't get me wrong, I do prefer WoW cartoonish style.

I honestly don't see the appeal. Part of WoW for me is the unique style it has - it doesn't need to become a flashy graphics kind of game. People still have the misconception that a graphically intense game equals a good game, when it doesn't. Most graphically intense games usually have pretty dire game play, and that's been the case with most MMO's that have "good" graphics. The Overwatch engine is what i'd like to see in terms of graphical upgrades, but loosing the style of WoW for flashy graphics with a generic engine would be enough to quit tbh. Although WoW's engine is essentially a modded WC3 engine from the 90's they've stretched it pretty far and done a lot of improvements with it - a totally new engine would mean them needing to create a totally different game, which won't happen unless we get a second version of WoW.

[kaminaris]

This is simply not true. ~16.6ms is the ENTIRE time allocation for a frame. If you addon takes 16.6ms to execute without yielding, you will see a 16.6ms stutter or in other words, you will drop 1 entire frame. 16.6ms is the time the engine has to execute everything to be able to draw the next frame if you want to see steady 60 FPS. Rendering is done on GPU, but it can still cause issues, depending on how UX is rendered and if the rendering engine needs to know all addon frame objects before finalizing rendering or if it's done as a composition on CPU, but in both cases, you still need to wait for the addon to yield.

I'm not sure if you understood me. Problem is not how long your code executes but how often it happens. What you say is only true if full code executes EVERY FRAME. If you have a code that takes 1ms to execute but it only happens once a second, then one frame will be delayed by 1ms = 17.6ms. So from 60FPS you will have 59.94 FPS.

And that is only a possibility in badly written weakauras or crap addons. While normal addons simply works on events, with the exception of checking CLEU which does happen really often.

- - - Updated - - -

Exactly.
This article helps to explain the differences a bit more https://kotaku.com/the-controversy-o...ded-1830435351
But the point is that the look and feel are just one piece of the game's 'engine.' If you want better graphics, ask for better graphics - and if you look between Classic and today's WoW, that part of the engine has DEFINITELY changed.
The OP is asking for what he/she thinks is a graphics upgrade. Blizzard reads that as changing the artstyle of WoW itself.

As for me, it's completely not about graphics, its about overall look & feel. Thats why it needs a new engine. Don't need to change artstyle of WoW. Maybe OP wants it but my opinion is simple - look & feel is important, graphics, doesn't matter much. I would be fine with both.

[melodramocracy]

While a spruce up is nice, aging graphics isn't even in the top 20 of design issues plaguing this game right now.

[Pigglix]

I mean, if people want update the graphics of wow, the dont make like unreal, that wont look like WoW at all, instead, make it to look like Wildstar/Overwatch imo.

[Tech614]

The engine is fine. The engine they are using now is completely unrecognizable from what it was in 2004. It has been upgraded and changed so many times over you basically have already got a new engine a few times over. The reason the game is not and will never be a graphical show case is because it's an MMO meant to be accessible, which means people need to be able to run 20 man raids on main stream laptops and what not.

Hell the last terrible thing about the engine in the fact it couldn't multi thread worth a shit was literally fixed this xpac.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Question. How would the draw distance look and how much would it lag if hundreds of people swarmed the latest expansion hub. I agree the WoW engine has to die, but MMOs generally can't have too demanding engines. ARR actually had to downgrade the graphics of FFXIV to make it accessible.

I want to follow up on this by also saying FFXIV, and most modern graphics MMOs, get away with it by having each individual zone on a seperate world server.

Do you want to have a loading screen between Elwynn and Westfall so WoW can look like a bad ripoff of Skyrim and then look horribly outdated by the following expansion?