WoW Source Code Turns One Million

[Stoy]

The New Leveling Experience And Heirlooms in Shadowlands

WoW Source Code Turns One Million

Hello!

The WoW Engineering Team would like to celebrate a special milestone with you.

First, here’s some quick background. Whenever we want to make a change, implement a feature, or fix a bug in the World of Warcraft code, we author the change on our local computer, have it reviewed by our peers, then commit the change to the World of Warcraft code repository. Each commit is given a sequential and unique ID, which allows it to be referenced and tracked as it works its way into an expansion, patch, or hotfix. These IDs have been increasing, from the number 1, since the moment the very first lines of code were committed to the fledgling game project that would eventually become World of Warcraft.

We are excited to share that we recently committed the 1,000,000th change to the WoW codebase! In addition to being an awesome decimal landmark, this puts us within striking distance (only 48,576 commits away) of being able to report WoW’s total code changes in mega-commits *.
(* This is almost certainly a made-up measurement that no one uses for source code repositories.)

As we celebrate our millionth commit, we can’t help but reflect a bit. For all of us, being an engineer on World of Warcraft is the best job on Earth. It combines the challenges of a massive, highly complex, and ever evolving software project with the creativity, whimsy, and magic that is bringing a world to life.

It’s because of you that we’ve had the privilege of calling Azeroth home for over 473 billion milliseconds. We are honored and humbled by your support, your stories, and your feedback, and we can’t wait to see what the next million commits have in store for us.
For Azeroth!

The World of Warcraft Engineering Team

[Easo]

All hail the spaghetti code!

[Unholyground]

That is pretty cool, as a coder my hat is off to them.

[Vampyr78]

That's a lot of commits.

[Vongimi]

"Best job on Earth".... yeah... if you don't mind the low pay lol (though I recognize that the recent complaints about super low pay come from the unskilled positions like GMs, I have also heard their engineers get paid less then average as well).

[XDurionX]

That's a lot of commits.

One could say that...

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...they were very committed.

[Argorwal]

$100k per year is “low pay” for Southern California (I live in San Diego).

[rhorle]

This would have been a perfect opportunity for some weird battle pet.

[DonChalk]

"Best job on Earth".... yeah... if you don't mind the low pay lol (though I recognize that the recent complaints about super low pay come from the unskilled positions like GMs, I have also heard their engineers get paid less then average as well).

Well, no. That isn't what the complaints are about. it's about cost of living vs pay scale and competitive salary along with just stagnant growth rates.

[regardoz]

i heard they are using C++. It must be hell for programming

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I have also heard their engineers get paid less then average as well).

does this have any thing to actually back it up or is it just a rumor with no basis like so many others about the blizzard?

[Adam Jensen]

This would have been a perfect opportunity for some weird battle pet.

Git the Committer? Maybe some weird octocat based pet.

Provided that Blizzard uses Git of course.

[Triggered Fridgekin]

Instead of spending all that time making changes to the code they should fix the game! /s

[Redroniksre]

i heard they are using C++. It must be hell for programming

I would imagine so, AFAIK C++ is still a highly used language since i have heard of people having some problems with C#. Not much of a programmer so i don't know how it is these days.

[Adam Jensen]

I would imagine so, AFAIK C++ is still a highly used language since i have heard of people having some problems with C#. Not much of a programmer so i don't know how it is these days.

They're all highly used, it entirely depends on what you're creating.

I'd imagine the bulk of WoW is written in C++ because it's a fast programming language and it's one of the lowest level languages you can get without directly writing Assembly (which, a game like WoW would be incredibly difficult to write in Assembly.) WoW being, of course, a networked game, relies on having a highly optimized processing speed, because not only does it need to tell your video card to draw your blood elf casting a fireball and updating that fireballs position as it soars across the landscape, it has to send that information to EVERY player who's on the same server and within visual range of that effect so their CPU's send the same graphics information to the video card as well without any noticeable latency or FPS drop. And when the fireball hits its target, damage calculations have to be done and again shared across the network.

C# and Java might not be as suitable for such an endeavor because a lot of memory management done under the hood takes up processing time. And for many applications this is fine, but probably not for a game like WoW. While there many be ways around this for Java and C#, I think C/C++ are probably better suited for a game like WoW.

[EntropyWarrior]

"Best job on Earth".... yeah... if you don't mind the low pay lol (though I recognize that the recent complaints about super low pay come from the unskilled positions like GMs, I have also heard their engineers get paid less then average as well).

Funny how they post this just as that story is gaining traction. Coincidence? Probably not

[Incandio]

tl;dr, Blizzard is a great place to work, despite recent reports to the contrary.

[Daedius]

Would hate to see the Frankenstein nature of the coding after almost 2 decades being built layers upon layers onto.

[schwarzkopf]

Gratz on the Mega Commit mark Blizzard ... looking forward to the Mibi Commit mark celebrations coming up.

[froschhure]

All hail the spaghetti code!

thank you

10char