WoW Source Code Turns One Million

Community General Discussion
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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!

:gear: The World of Warcraft Engineering Team

120 Likes
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Good job! I can’t imagine being the guy who has to keep track of that.

You should celebrate with some kind of Paco Rabanne mount.

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Most repository systems provide a count.

I wonder if this means they are still on their original source code management system, though.

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Wow, Congrats! Makes you wonder how many commits caused other commits >.<

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Someone don’t literally count all the changes. Once they push a change they would be able to see all the changes made.

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Congrats! A million … yikes … I knew there was a reason I hadn’t written my own MMO.

(any hint on what the milestone commit was for?)

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That’s fantastic. Hopefully you’re all on liveable wages too. That’s a ton of commits.

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I hope the millionth involved pulling that ripcord

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Not to be a debbie downer, and this is nothing against you specifically Kaivax (much love to the CMs), but it doesn’t feel that way sometimes.

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Time for a Stat squish :rofl:

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How many of those were “fixing lint”

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This rather begs the question, “What was number one?”

It’s been a long time, surely it won’t be a trade secret at this point.

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Grats!
Did you guys committed some commented jokes in the code just to hit the number? :slight_smile:

What is the software used to support such a massive amount of versions?

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Propaganda because they just got caught not paying their workers.

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They don’t have to be; they could have migrated from one to the other at some point and kept the commit IDs.

The fact that they said “sequential” commit IDs implies that they’re not using git, at least. Subversion has sequential commit IDs but, dear god, I hope they’re not using Subversion.

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You mean mebi-commits. :slight_smile:

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That is quite a bit. I hope none of my programming projects ever hit that mark.

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I can say as a Lead Devops Engineer… it really shouldn’t be, but certain management organizations make it one.

Also get your butts off of SVN… or at least consider git if you’re on Perforce… just please… you’ll thank me later.

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You guys have to deal with so much spaghetti code and a really old engine, yet keep pumping new things out. I can’t believe this old game is still running with updates and keeps drawing new people in, some younger than when the game was even conceived.

Thank you.

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Congratulations! Next stop 1,771,561!