what programming language is wow written in?

[the game]

I'm playing wow and it occured to me that I don't know what language it's written in. It comes to mind because I notice on things like flight paths or quest mobs that you have to ride sometimes they automatically dismount or unshapeshift you and other times it makes you do it. I'm curious why it's so inconsistant? is it an oversight by blizzard? I'm quite an amateur about programming but could they not just include an if then else statement in cases like these? I mean couldn't they just make the if then else statement to auto dismount or unshapeshift you?

[Deleted]

As far as I know C/C++ for the core game engine with LUA, perl and PHP in other areas

[omglaserzpewpew]

I have heard C++ for the back end and Lua for the front end (the GUI). Whether that is accurate or not...

[IRunSoFarAway]

Software Engineer, User Interface

Senior Software Engineer, Server

Senior Software Engineer, Engine

[Deleted]

I'm playing wow and it occured to me that I don't know what language it's written in. It comes to mind because I notice on things like flight paths or quest mobs that you have to ride sometimes they automatically dismount or unshapeshift you and other times it makes you do it. I'm curious why it's so inconsistant? is it an oversight by blizzard? I'm quite an amateur about programming but could they not just include an if then else statement in cases like these? I mean couldn't they just make the if then else statement to auto dismount or unshapeshift you?

The language question has already been answered (C/C++).

However the observed behavior is not really connected to the programming language used but the result of the networking involved.

Some of the stuff is calculated on the client side other on the server side and depending on what you do, what client and server think should be happening and latency you might see (mostly) minor inconsistencies.

[Stormspark]

The game itself is written in C/C++. The UI and all scripting (scripting for game events, quests, etc) is Lua.

[yurano]

However the observed behavior is not really connected to the programming language used but the result of the networking involved.

There are many people working on abilities/quests, not all of them follow the same "protocol". Plus, WoW has gone through a lot revisions (including one for auto-shapeshift), a lot of old abilities may not have been grandfathered in properly.

[Polarthief]

a lot of old abilities may not have been grandfathered in properly.

I'd pretty much guarantee that a lot of them weren't

[rakhimishra]

i think its tottaly depends upon individual capabilty and interest.
But personally i go with java programming as i am working on it.

[Infracted]

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

I'm playing wow and it occured to me that I don't know what language it's written in. It comes to mind because I notice on things like flight paths or quest mobs that you have to ride sometimes they automatically dismount or unshapeshift you and other times it makes you do it. I'm curious why it's so inconsistant? is it an oversight by blizzard? I'm quite an amateur about programming but could they not just include an if then else statement in cases like these? I mean couldn't they just make the if then else statement to auto dismount or unshapeshift you?

Probably I mean mmos are one of the hardest things to produce and the pay off gets worse each year.

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i think its tottaly depends upon individual capabilty and interest.
But personally i go withjava programming as i am working on it.

Why is c++ better than java for example. I've never bothered to look this up. I also don't like java just doesn't click with me. Json is pretty awesome though its faster than xml.

[oxyzz]

The game engine is written in c/c++. This was the go-to and only available and true way for game development back in the 90's. It holds true to this day.
The GUI is written in Lua.
World of Warcraft as many other online games is built as a distributed system. This mean there is no central hub for business logic. The logic is calculated as a process on the host machine and the data is communicated to other hosts that depends on that information.

The networking is also probably built with c/c++ or some other language that supports low-latency, concurrency and parallelism, like (Erlang, Clojure, Java, Haskell, Scala)

What it is not built in and never will be is PHP..

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Probably I mean mmos are one of the hardest things to produce and the pay off gets worse each year.

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Why is c++ better than java for example. I've never bothered to look this up. I also don't like java just doesn't click with me. Json is pretty awesome though its faster than xml.

Java has a garbage collector that collects and throws memory away automatically.

c/c++ you do memory managment manually. It makes sofware well written incredibly fast. Thats wahy c/c++ is the go to in most circitcal software areas.

[Kuntantee]

Why is c++ better than java for example. I've never bothered to look this up. I also don't like java just doesn't click with me. Json is pretty awesome though its faster than xml.

C++ gives you ability to write abstractions (class, module, sub-system, routines, etc.), similar to Java, with little to no overhead. This isn't achievable with Java. By overhead, it is often meant memory and speed.

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It comes to mind because I notice on things like flight paths or quest mobs that you have to ride sometimes they automatically dismount or unshapeshift you and other times it makes you do it. I'm curious why it's so inconsistant? is it an oversight by blizzard? I'm quite an amateur about programming but could they not just include an if then else statement in cases like these? I mean couldn't they just make the if then else statement to auto dismount or unshapeshift you?

Could be an expected behavior, could be a minor bug that they do not care to solve. You can't solve every problem by handling specific cases, it's not a scalable solution. Some problems arise due to poor handling of resources, some due to failing to handle a specific case, some due to arithmetic operations (wrong calculation, overflow) and some due to logic errors. From outside, even for programmers, it's impossible to speculate the source of that behavior within the code.

[Cilraaz]

Thread is from 5 years ago. Locking.