Demo 2018 has been made on SC2/HOTS engine!

General Discussion
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Watch this video and compare… Warcraft III: Reforged | СРАВНЕНИЕ ГРАФИКИ BETA 2019 VS DEMO 2018 (Очищение Стратхольма) - YouTube

Pay attention to the play of light, metal details, the folds of fabric on the armor of Artes and Uther, the rendering of shadows, the overall smoothness of movements, the environment … and understand the difference between the Havok engine (Demo 2018 (and SC2, Heroes of the Storm)) and the Warcraft 3 Reforged engine (Beta 2019). The joke is that people paid for the first, but they will be given the second. Blizzard is nonsense, no one has come up with more arrogant and treacherous marketing, ahah!

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The gameplay footage of the 2018 beta is clearly the Warcraft III engine. One can tell by how the units move around.

The giveaway is the unit on unit collisions. In StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm a unit colliding into another unit results in that unit trying to slide around the unit it collided with. In Warcraft III a unit colliding into another unit results in the unit immediately stopping and trying to calculate rectangular path around the unit it collided with. The demo footage clearly shows the Warcraft III approach to unit on unit collision handling in actions.

The cutscenes could have well been made in SC2. They may even have been pre-rendered in a model editor like blender. All the effects shown are common place now so not necessarily limited to StarCraft II.

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They could change this system in order to hide the origin of the engine …

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Good point, thanks for share.

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Why bother? If they are changing so much to try an imitate Warcraft III, they might as well start changing Warcraft III to do what they want, which is what happened.

They had to overhaul the graphic code to use D3D11 anyway. This means using programmable shaders and other modern real time graphic techniques. Since using modern stuff anyway, they might as well throw in modern shaders, since practically every game has them now.

The reason the demo looked so good was that it was made from the ground up to look good. Every asset used was made new for that mission as that mission was made specifically for Reforged. They likely spent a lot of QA making sure it looked good. They might also have purposely tried to show off engine features, features now that are underused in the Reforged beta.

This is not the first time Blizzard made content to showcase engine features. StarCraft II did exactly this with the early intermissions in Wings of Liberty. Showing off reflections, fluid shaders, skin shaders, etc.

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If they upgrade the engine to the Havok level, then the claims will disappear … But Blizzard programmers cannot do their job, they give out the desired (Demo 2018 on Havok) as valid (Beta 2019 on Warcraft), they are deceiving us. This is a reason for “bother”.

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I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I know is the 2018 demo (not your video but the actual video on the home page of the official Warcraft 3 Reforged site) looks better than what we are getting. Arthas, Jaina, many models look downgraded from 2018.

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What are you talking about? There is no indication that the 2018 demo was made in a different engine. A good cinematic doesn’t require a new game engine. Just look at the original Arthas vs Illidan fight in Warcraft 3: it is made in the Warcraft 3 engine, yet it doesn’t look like the normal gameplay at all. Cinematic could easily just have unique more detailed models made for them (just like Arthas and Illidan have unique models in the Arthas vs Illidan fight).

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A competent Warcraft III world editor user can open the Reforged Beta installation and find the 2018 demo UI files in the game assets using the CASC viewer. The constant spewing of this idea that the Demo 2018 was a different game is so ridiculous that it is funny to me.

I think we should probably start a new meme that the 2019 Beta is actually running on the Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness engine so that we can beg for it to use the Warcraft III engine instead.

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Graphic in demo 2018 using depth of field effect, it can’t be done with old 2003 game engine. There is no magic or handsome developers can turn legacy engine to modern engine in a moment.

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Why use Havok engine of all things?

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What is the “Havok engine”? As far as I am aware Havok Engine refers to a physics middleware and not an actual game engine. I cannot find any references to blizzard calling their StarCraft II engine “Havok”.

The original engine was made in 2003 but the entire point of Reforged is that they are rewriting the graphics component of it. Effects like depths of field are easy to implement with shaders, which are being added to the game engine.

Currently no map is taking advantage of these newly added Warcraft III engine features since only Reforged maps can. The 2018 beta was one such map since it was a mission specifically designed to showcase the new Reforged features. Loading up SWAT Aftermath or some other third party custom map designed for classic will not use these features.

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if the new interface exists in the game`s files, then it should be possible to access it by typing in the path. what is the path for that?

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Models did not change, the visual changed. The reason is the differences in the engines.

There is no indication that the 2018 demo was made in a Warcraft 3 engine.

There are not visual things that I already wrote about. Warcraft 3 engine can’t do it.

Another thing they could not add (without problems and bugs) to the Warcrtaft 3 engine

Use google “hawok starcraft 2” or “engine starcraft 2” → Search

Where is it all now? I don’t see it in the game, and I won’t see it.

I’m sure it will not work correctly.

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this discussion is stuff for quadruple headaches if you’re an actual game developer. stop saying “this is engine xy because the metal is more shiny”, or “color grading” or “effects”.

first off: havok is a widely adopted physics engine used in the sc2 engine - its not a game engine on its own, its a “standalone component” that just handles the physics.

now on to the “different engine” thing.

wc3 and world of warcraft share the same engine. half life 2 and apex legends share the same engine. fortnite and hellblade: senuas sacrifice share the same engine.

the differences you describe come down to literal single digit number changes in the code or shader setup. maybe you dont even need to change anything at engine level, just the art assets and BOOM ppl will call this a “different engine”.

its impossible to eyeball the engine, except for you are an expert for working with these exact engines, knowing its quirks and very special, hard to spot characteristics of handling certain things - and this gets even harder if the developers actually know what they’re doing to mask these effects. i know the 2004/2007 version of source engine alot (since i spent roughly a decade working with it), and it is impossible for me to look at apex legends and say “yes, certainly, this is source engine”. usual giveaways for the source engine is the way cubemaps are handled, the phong and fresnel lighting effects, the animated textures, the fact that certain shader effects cannot occur simultaniously, the special way source engine usually renders this “half dynamic” lighting and shadows. in left 4 dead 2 or even CS:GO this is dead (haha) obvious, but apex doesnt show anything of this in any apparent fashion except for the animated textures - this goes hand in hand with a different art style; i couldnt go ahead and pin point the source engine here by looking at a video - heck, i’d probably have a really hard time telling whether its source or not by actually playing it - and im a 10 year veteran working with that engine full pipeline, that means from scratch to animated, textured model ingame. since i already know its the source engine, some attributes strike through, like the snappy responsiveness, some visuals are somewhat typical for source - but still it could be anything without looking at the game files.

so the whole “this compressed youtube video of a streamed pre alpha gameplay clearly shows its a different engine” statement seems a lil bit ridiculous. im not saying its the same engine, im saying you wouldnt be able to tell by compressed video material in the first place.

from a developer standpoint the 2018 demo probably is a work in progress testbuild of the updated wc3 engine to test and showcase the new graphics pipeline of the engine. it would not make any sense at all to port over all the quirky gameplay mechanics from wc3 in a different engine to have a slightly different look to it. you’d spend months doing just that. for what? theres no use. the final game will be the wc3 engine anyway.

blizzard probably decided some parts of the 2018 demo werent the direction they wanted it to look, or certain effects werent viable in certain aspects aaaaand they’re gone. like the occlusion effects that constantly crashed the game in the 2019 beta. maybe its not worth fixing it and it gets thrown out aswell.

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We can’t tell anything about graphics until th release - Cause we don’t actually know how the game look like. What if Release version is different?

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Oh, come on.

There are very clear signs, that have been pointed out already.

So you’re saying the Arthas vs Illidan cinematic was not made in WC3 engine? Please… You clearly have no idea what game engines even are and how programming works, so just stop arguing and read what you are told here.

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We will be happy, but these are only our hopes.

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There’s no reason why 2018 Demo is a different engine - It’s the same as WC3,and it’s obvious

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There are no shaders in the cinematic … and beautiful shadows, high-quality lighting. I dont deny that the cinematic was created on Warcraft 3 engine … You literally mean special models and animations that were created for the cinematic , but I don’t understand why you wrote it, I discuss other things in this thread.

Have you seen the first post? I described the reasons.