I have a big fat 0 amount of knowledge in programming. It just never appealed to me. But I do have a question. How come WoW loads so fast, yet other games I play take forever? Sometimes when I load other games I sit there for upwards of 30 secs or more. Yet WoW loads in about 3 secs. Why the big difference? Why, why, why?
They have good programmers and the textures aren't that detailed in WoW.
Yeah, I understand they have good programmers. But does that mean that Blizzard's programmers are just eons ahead of the others?
If so, what kind of skill is it that they possess that is making their programs load so quick. I guess I'm trying to get a technical person to give me a really good answer in layman terms. Like a person who is the Michio Kaku of the greasy nerd programming world.
It's a combination of low system requirements and good client optimization. Shadowbane for example, has trashy graphics even compared to WoW but it takes a while to load-up. Blizzard's games also run natively on Mac operating systems so maybe they are just more varied in skill than most developers..
Yes the graphics are lower end, but I doubt you will find a better MMO engine anywhere. Not to mention a better scriptable UI API
I don't like WoW, but I will give them credit for being the best MMO technically wise.
Well, Blizzard aimed low with the graphics for WoW. They figured they could compensate for the low technical quality with high artistic quality. Some don't like it. Some do. Overall, I think it was a calculated move that payed off. More importantly, they simply put a ton of work into the engine. WoW's pretty damn polished. You only ever find bugs or performance issues in a few select places.
Bugs? Shartuul's Transporter and a few Netherwing Dailies spring to mind as having obvious, persistent, and annoying bugs. Other than that, they tend to be exceedingly rare.
Performance? The filter they slapped on the phasing effect for the Sunwell portal daily gives me some issues. Dunno about anybody else.
That's what it really boils down to. Polish. It's not that other studios aren't capable of the same level of polish. It's that the resources simply aren't available to others. Blizzard is larger by a factor of five or six than the biggest independent MMORPG studio. It also has a very high level of operational freedom and a lot of financial resources available. If a studio is willing to invest in scale, it can match that kind of polish. Turbine and LotRO is a good example. If they want to stay small, their results might be less than optimal. If you want to look at some of the potential downsides of small and nimble, look at Funcom and AoC's launch.
I wonder what would happen if you took the WoW graphics engine and loaded some of the textures for a game like say, uhmmmm..., EQ2 or Vanguard or one of the other higher end graphic games.
What I mean is, I wonder if their graphics engine is really all that good, or is it just an average graphics engine running smaller sized textures. I also wonder if it could stand a graphics upgrade later on if Blizzard decided to do so by just increasing the textures but doing nothing with the graphics engine.
I wonder what would happen if you took the WoW graphics engine and loaded some of the textures for a game like say, uhmmmm..., EQ2 or Vanguard or one of the other higher end graphic games. What I mean is, I wonder if their graphics engine is really all that good, or is it just an average graphics engine running smaller sized textures. I also wonder if it could stand a graphics upgrade later on if Blizzard decided to do so by just increasing the textures but doing nothing with the graphics engine.
It's not just the textures or detail.
Their engine is simply very stable and good. They know what they're doing.
Go look at their job listings. Unless you worked for 4 years on an AAA title, or are very very good at what you do, you won't get in.
I have a big fat 0 amount of knowledge in programming. It just never appealed to me. But I do have a question. How come WoW loads so fast, yet other games I play take forever? Sometimes when I load other games I sit there for upwards of 30 secs or more. Yet WoW loads in about 3 secs. Why the big difference? Why, why, why?
They have good programmers and the textures aren't that detailed in WoW.
Yeah, I understand they have good programmers. But does that mean that Blizzard's programmers are just eons ahead of the others?
If so, what kind of skill is it that they possess that is making their programs load so quick. I guess I'm trying to get a technical person to give me a really good answer in layman terms. Like a person who is the Michio Kaku of the greasy nerd programming world.
Well it's a combination of many things. First, the graphics requirements are indeed kept to a minimum, but that's only a start. They also make sure that only what is needed is loaded at startup and things are loaded in the background as you play that you may need. The trick here is trying to anticipate what content may be needed next and loading that into memory just before you need it. That requires a very good design and implementation and Blizzard has done an exceptional job of doing just that. It's not necessarily that their programmers are smarter than others, just that they make it a priority and work on it longer and don't quit till they get it right. This is called polish and it's something that Blizzard is known for.
By the way I am a programmer myself, but I have no clue how this particular bit of wizardry is performed myself. Only someone who's worked on this particular piece of logic could really explain it fully, but then probably only about half of it would make any sense to me let along you. The important thing is not to understand how it works, but rather just be thankful that Blizzard put the time in to make it work.
I believe that the key to fast-loading WoW is the light-weight, highly-optimized Warcraft III engine. WoW also features background loading of the graphics during load up, it intelligently knows what to load when you're walking to a certain direction and load whatever it needs in the background.
I also notice that it (the graphic engine) features built-in garbage collector that seemed to be cleaning allocated resources (memory space) which are not used -- almost like Java's garbage collector. If you'd like to know more about the garbage collector, download and install the mod 'FuBar_PerformanceFu'. In there, you can play around a bit w/ the garbage collector (force it to kick in, etc)
The cartoony looks in WoW is actually what appeals to me~ and thus for the same reason I enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 and quite disappointed to know that Battlefield Heroes couldn't make it to Australia.
Count how many ads/splash screens EQ2 has then count how many WoW has, EQ2 has 5? WoW has 0. Bliizard doesn't money-whore-fvck their fans like SOE does with having you have to press ESC thru 5 ads.
Also, Warhammer Online, brought to you be EA, will have a minimum of at least 5 ads/splash screens - my guess is Intel, Nvidia, EA, Mythic.....etc.
Blizzard also coded WoW with the goal that you would be at your character selection screen with a few mouse clicks as possible.
Blizzard "games for gamers by gamers" EA and SOE - "they put the FU in fun".
Because Blizzard didn't spend 5 years programming the fancy state of the art graphics then realise they had to make the rest of the game at the last minute.
Blizzard knows that it's not all about good graphics, you have to have a good engine running everything too.
It has alot to do with the way they specifically built the game.
The game uses many of the same textures but meshes them to make new textures, in a sense. AoC, however, has 20 billion different meshes just for it's grass. The same can be said about the character's. In AoC you can, literally, make a character you will never be able to have someone replicate perfectly. For WoW, they use presets.
The difference: AoC's grass looks a hell of a lot better than WoW's, if you can even consider it grass. Also, AoC's characters look realistic and unique... while you'll find out your a quintuplet after walking around for 2 minutes in Orgrimmar.
The compensation: AoC takes an ass-load to load, and is not seamless (anything but seamless). While WoW technically doesn't load at all... hell, on my P3 it takes maybe 3 seconds and from then on the game runs perfectly on mid settings.
AoC: better for great and/or super-great computers
WoW: better for low to mid-end systems; in other words, for people who don't own $2000 rigs.
Comments
Blizzard know what they are doing. But still WOW doesn't load in 3 seconds.
there, fixed that for ya.
Huh?
It loads faster because the graphics aren't to his taste?
Are you guys even trying to stay on topic?
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They have good programmers and the textures aren't that detailed in WoW.
Yeah, I understand they have good programmers. But does that mean that Blizzard's programmers are just eons ahead of the others?
If so, what kind of skill is it that they possess that is making their programs load so quick. I guess I'm trying to get a technical person to give me a really good answer in layman terms. Like a person who is the Michio Kaku of the greasy nerd programming world.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All Rights Reversed
It's a combination of low system requirements and good client optimization. Shadowbane for example, has trashy graphics even compared to WoW but it takes a while to load-up. Blizzard's games also run natively on Mac operating systems so maybe they are just more varied in skill than most developers..
Well, Blizzard aimed low with the graphics for WoW. They figured they could compensate for the low technical quality with high artistic quality. Some don't like it. Some do. Overall, I think it was a calculated move that payed off. More importantly, they simply put a ton of work into the engine. WoW's pretty damn polished. You only ever find bugs or performance issues in a few select places.
Bugs? Shartuul's Transporter and a few Netherwing Dailies spring to mind as having obvious, persistent, and annoying bugs. Other than that, they tend to be exceedingly rare.
Performance? The filter they slapped on the phasing effect for the Sunwell portal daily gives me some issues. Dunno about anybody else.
That's what it really boils down to. Polish. It's not that other studios aren't capable of the same level of polish. It's that the resources simply aren't available to others. Blizzard is larger by a factor of five or six than the biggest independent MMORPG studio. It also has a very high level of operational freedom and a lot of financial resources available. If a studio is willing to invest in scale, it can match that kind of polish. Turbine and LotRO is a good example. If they want to stay small, their results might be less than optimal. If you want to look at some of the potential downsides of small and nimble, look at Funcom and AoC's launch.
I wonder what would happen if you took the WoW graphics engine and loaded some of the textures for a game like say, uhmmmm..., EQ2 or Vanguard or one of the other higher end graphic games.
What I mean is, I wonder if their graphics engine is really all that good, or is it just an average graphics engine running smaller sized textures. I also wonder if it could stand a graphics upgrade later on if Blizzard decided to do so by just increasing the textures but doing nothing with the graphics engine.
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All Rights Reversed
Pretty much.
The main designer of WoW went to the guild wars team of ArenaNet.
It's no coincidence guild wars and WoW have the best MMO engines.
Although he's not the programmer, the guild wars and WoW team just have the best people in the industry.
It's not just the textures or detail.
Their engine is simply very stable and good. They know what they're doing.
Go look at their job listings. Unless you worked for 4 years on an AAA title, or are very very good at what you do, you won't get in.
They have good programmers and the textures aren't that detailed in WoW.
Yeah, I understand they have good programmers. But does that mean that Blizzard's programmers are just eons ahead of the others?
If so, what kind of skill is it that they possess that is making their programs load so quick. I guess I'm trying to get a technical person to give me a really good answer in layman terms. Like a person who is the Michio Kaku of the greasy nerd programming world.
Well it's a combination of many things. First, the graphics requirements are indeed kept to a minimum, but that's only a start. They also make sure that only what is needed is loaded at startup and things are loaded in the background as you play that you may need. The trick here is trying to anticipate what content may be needed next and loading that into memory just before you need it. That requires a very good design and implementation and Blizzard has done an exceptional job of doing just that. It's not necessarily that their programmers are smarter than others, just that they make it a priority and work on it longer and don't quit till they get it right. This is called polish and it's something that Blizzard is known for.
By the way I am a programmer myself, but I have no clue how this particular bit of wizardry is performed myself. Only someone who's worked on this particular piece of logic could really explain it fully, but then probably only about half of it would make any sense to me let along you. The important thing is not to understand how it works, but rather just be thankful that Blizzard put the time in to make it work.
No one mentioned Warcraft III.
I believe that the key to fast-loading WoW is the light-weight, highly-optimized Warcraft III engine. WoW also features background loading of the graphics during load up, it intelligently knows what to load when you're walking to a certain direction and load whatever it needs in the background.
I also notice that it (the graphic engine) features built-in garbage collector that seemed to be cleaning allocated resources (memory space) which are not used -- almost like Java's garbage collector. If you'd like to know more about the garbage collector, download and install the mod 'FuBar_PerformanceFu'. In there, you can play around a bit w/ the garbage collector (force it to kick in, etc)
The cartoony looks in WoW is actually what appeals to me~ and thus for the same reason I enjoy playing Team Fortress 2 and quite disappointed to know that Battlefield Heroes couldn't make it to Australia.
Count how many ads/splash screens EQ2 has then count how many WoW has, EQ2 has 5? WoW has 0. Bliizard doesn't money-whore-fvck their fans like SOE does with having you have to press ESC thru 5 ads.
Also, Warhammer Online, brought to you be EA, will have a minimum of at least 5 ads/splash screens - my guess is Intel, Nvidia, EA, Mythic.....etc.
Blizzard also coded WoW with the goal that you would be at your character selection screen with a few mouse clicks as possible.
Blizzard "games for gamers by gamers" EA and SOE - "they put the FU in fun".
Wow is the only MMORPG that uses background graphics loading so well you don't even notice it.
Conan, War, GW all have massive loading windows between zones... killing all seamless worlds.
In TBC Outland you can take your flying mount and fly anywhere without ever seeing a loading screen.
Wow data are being loaded on the fly giving a world of difference in immersion.
The difference is ... 1.2 billion dollars income compared to 12 million dollar income.
Because Blizzard didn't spend 5 years programming the fancy state of the art graphics then realise they had to make the rest of the game at the last minute.
Blizzard knows that it's not all about good graphics, you have to have a good engine running everything too.
This is steam's survey of gamers that they automatically update.....
I would think its probably the most accurate average gamer data.
Own, Mine, Defend, Attack, 24/7
It has alot to do with the way they specifically built the game.
The game uses many of the same textures but meshes them to make new textures, in a sense. AoC, however, has 20 billion different meshes just for it's grass. The same can be said about the character's. In AoC you can, literally, make a character you will never be able to have someone replicate perfectly. For WoW, they use presets.
The difference: AoC's grass looks a hell of a lot better than WoW's, if you can even consider it grass. Also, AoC's characters look realistic and unique... while you'll find out your a quintuplet after walking around for 2 minutes in Orgrimmar.
The compensation: AoC takes an ass-load to load, and is not seamless (anything but seamless). While WoW technically doesn't load at all... hell, on my P3 it takes maybe 3 seconds and from then on the game runs perfectly on mid settings.
AoC: better for great and/or super-great computers
WoW: better for low to mid-end systems; in other words, for people who don't own $2000 rigs.