I might reproduce these in blender for the lulz.
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That would take a major rewrite. As it is now, Quel’thalas is actually located in a separate area on the same data structure as Outland. The data structures are used to generate the map. I believe Exodar is on that structure as well.
It would take one major effort to go fill in the blanks to make Quel’Thalas not look like Swiss Cheese from the air, another to move it to the main Azeroth data structure.
They know how to fix this as they’ve done it before way back on a PTR for 4.2. They ported Quel’Thalas to the Eastern Kingdoms map and placed it to line up with where the portal is now. I remember you could just walk in with no load screen. I also remember when you crossed from Ghostlands to Eversong Woods it was an instant dismount with no parachute. I ate a death from that since I was flying high in the air.
I guess they found this to be too much work since they gave up and left Quel’Thalas in the Outland map on live sadly.
Yes, Azuremyst and Bloodmyst are both on the Outland map.
No doubt they could fix Quel’Thalas if they wanted to but at what cost? I use to work in software engineering and I’ve talked about the meetings we would have where the product manager would come in with a list a mile long of things he and the customers wanted.
And of course they wanted us to do it with the resources we had and they wanted it all done in six months.
Oh how we would laugh and I mean side splitting. It wasn’t going to happen, something had to be cut, or the time extended, or maybe we could do a little more by adding a few programmers.
In the end we would prioritize the list and a line would be drawn. What ever was above the line got done, what ever was below the line did not.
Fact is, if Quel’Thalas gets done, something in DF would move below the line and not get done.
Yep, that’s true.
This is entirely because of the cardboard Swiss cheese design though. Moving it to the map isn’t a big issue. They’ve done it before.
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I believe that originally it was all Swiss Cheese except for Outland and Northend which were designed for flight but they went back and fixed the main continents. Cataclysm came next so they probably thought they needed those areas
They have said they are not going to go fix Quel’Thalas. They’ve made that pretty clear. Being a big Blood Elf fan I’d love it if they did but I understand the costs and how we would lose something somewhere else if they did.
I thought that I read somewhere that they had started the process in the code at some point and then stopped. It might be some slow, long process.
The assets found with DF do not have to mean they are doing this during DF. Assets sometimes sit in files for years. Obviously some of the assets will be used for the reliquary, but others will probably be kept for other things. It could be something they work at slowly to eventually unveil in the future.
The development team is usually pretty busy all the time. During development time we would design the system, code the system and run tests to make sure it worked. Then we would send it out to beta test.
Once it was released we had two things going. One, we would fix bugs as they came in and two we would be working on the next release. That pretty much took all our development time.
Sometimes there would be what people called “midnight projects” where a few guys would work overtime to get something else done but that was usually something new the management would not sign off on. It never involved going back to put new features into legacy code.
It likely is someone’s pet project or at least a few people, because they are doing assets for general world updates and putting them in the files.
Ok well if they have a good reason to update Quel’Thalas then fine. Maybe it will be part of the DF release. Of course that will still stick in the craw of people who think the Blood Elves are getting too much compared to everyone else.
I don’t know if it’ll be part of DF release, just that there are assets in the files for the Horde zeppelin tower and other things. The Horde stuff seems to be going back to a softer, less metal look. More Frostwolf inspired. There is an update to human houses just in general. Some night elf stuff, Dwarf stuff and Belf, so far.
Some of them could be assets for Dragon Isles, but other things seem just for general world. And they could have planned something for after DF, but just started here and there on assets for those things while working on things related to them.
Like for instance maybe the Belves we see on DI have bookshelves and stuff there, so they work on updates for stuff that was seen in Belf settlements and Silvermoon while working on that stuff.
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My usual reaction to that complaint is to just holler, “More for everyone!”
Though I really hope something nice happens for pandaren down the line. 2 hairstyles and no heritage armor, lol.
But at least they finally got death knights.
ANYWAY, my point is that there’s a lot of assets in this game that desperately need some love. Including blood elves’ criminal lack of the BC box art scarification, to pick my personal favorite thing I DON’T HAVE YET.
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One thing I will say about Quel’Thalas, having been through that many times, is that you really don’t need flying. It’s almost all flat ground and the flight masters take care of getting you from one end to the other.
For me it’s not just a matter of “need” (though I would appreciate being able to get directly to where I wanna go and not corralled through those dividing halls), but there are some spectacular views that I’d enjoy being able to see without needing to rely on Farsight.
(I posted this image a while back when we were discussing just how easy it would be to make Silvermoon “fly worthy” since the city itself already has many 3d assets and only really needs to cover gaps like the above)
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This! I don’t want velf stuff, I want hairstyles made for belves.
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Someone posted a video about this a while back. Turns out that in addition to the gaps below there are also invisible walls that have to be removed.
Also, while it’s possible that these problems are things left out of the data structure or things that shouldn’t be there, it it could be something else.
It could be a situation where it’s an old data structure supported by old code and a new map would have to be developed from scratch. Hard to say without having access to the source.
Absolutely true. There’s only so much info we can garner with the level of access we have to the game’s structure. Still I don’t think it would be too difficult code-wise to make Silvermoon flyable, even if it has to stay on the Outland server. The primary things needed that I can see are model and texture work. That alone is by no means insignificant either.
Blizzard can’t just fix all the gaps and invisible walls in Silvermoon. They basically have to do the whole of Eversong, Ghostlands (which includes the exterior of Zul’aman), and the isle of Quel’danas (which also includes the exterior of Sunwell Plateau) to cover all the places a flying player could see and traverse. That’s a lot of work to do for sure and I wouldn’t undersell it as anything less than a major undertaking.
Even still, it’s something I’d like to see happen. It might never, but I hope that it will some day. The main incentive I could see for it to happen is if Blizzard ever decides to do something major with Silvermoon and the surrounding areas. I’ll be disappointed if it never happens but not surprised.
I’d like to see it too but as I said before, there is an entire note around here somewhere about Blood Elves getting too much. Since that is pretty much exclusively a Blood Elf are it would probably not go over very well with a number of people.
Well that number of people can go pound salt as far as I’m concerned 
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