Confirmed by Devs: No flying until late in the expansion

Community General Discussion
383

Sounds like you don’t know much about the technology of the game itself. Like you haven’t been here for almost 2 decades, and have a professional background in the software development and support field to bolster your understanding of the game technology?

It’s called an “external actor”. It’s a programming term for the actual reason for why the vehicles in this game, are the way they are.

It’s the reason why your own character toolbar can’t just turn into the abilities, but you turn into an entire new user interface, with the vehicle buttons on the completely separate from your character, Vehicle Action Bar, when you enter ANY vehicle in the entire game.

Give me a single example of a vehicle in this game, and by vehicle, I mean ANYTHING where you use the model/abilities of ANYTHING besides your own character.

EVERYTHING turns into the Vehicle Action Bar. Give me ONE example of where that is not the case? Even the Rocket Launcher item that you pick up from wintergrasp, turns into a Vehicle Action Bar, because of the external actor. The turrets in Wintergrasp. The bird running and squishing the birds in Zereth Mortis uses a Vehicle Action bar tied to an External actor. The dragon you ride during the Malygos fight = VAB/EA
The vehicle you pick in Ulduar VAB-EA
Every single aerial assault quest to drop bombs crowds of NPC. VAB-EA

Even the special abilities tied to the special action bar slot, are just new vehicle action bars tied to external actors. Like the Nzoth fight, or the BFA World Quest to “Heal Azeroth’s Wounds” from the Azerite Fissures.

Vehicle Action Bars = External Actor Dillemma.

That’s because of the “external actor” dilemma. Which I already explained to you, but you don’t care that you are wrong or right, you’re literally just speaking from your chest, and not your brain.

It’s literally not possible to be anything else. Otherwise it would have been done in the game already. It’s a literal excuse for many issues and reasons why Blizzard can’t do things we want them to in the game, starting with Wintergrasp.

These are facts. This is not some magical voodoo, this is a limitation of the technology. I know you can’t fly in real life. Because of gravity, and science. Just because you don’t understand the details behind gravity and science, doesn’t mean that you can just fly.

The same goes with “external actors” and “Vehicles” in WoW.

We saw a Vehicle Action Bar… tied to an external actor.

Just because you don’t understand the complexity of the details of the technology, doesn’t mean that no one else on the planet besides Blizzard does. Blizzard is not using some alien device that they found in the Arizona desert from a crashed alien ufo. This is technology that exists already. The limitations they face are an expected outcome based on the choices they made in the design and implementation of the engine itself, over the years.

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384

That’s not an answer to what I said.

Which… We still haven’t been told if we’re getting vehicle action bars or extra action buttons. I could see either happening.

I actually didn’t see that in any of the material I was watching. Now, if you’d like to actually present a video or other source of information displaying that, I’ll happily agree that it’s working as you’re saying it’s working.

Again, if you link me anything actually showing the vehicle action bar, I’ll be more than happy to agree with you on that point. This moronic condescension bit isn’t exactly doing either of us any favors. Stop speaking from your rear, and start speaking from your mouth. (Or, more accurately, start presenting anything at all to show what you’re saying, rather than just telling me to take what you’re saying at face value when I have no information other than what I saw in the little mini tech demo to go off of.)

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385

I know. It’s a statement, based on what you said.

Being that you can only bind a single Extra Action Button, I certainly hope they aren’t extra action bars. That would be the worst experience in the game ever, to manually click each ability while trying to maneuver mid flight.

That’s because when you press alt + z in the game, it hides your user interface.

Are you aware of what the current flight model is, with current mounts? It’s the mount is literally painted on your character. Your character is tied to the animation of the mount, that’s why when they add a new mount, they have to animate it for every single race/sex combination, just for simple animation, not even taking into account collision from armor/weapons (they usually don’t actually).

When you jump to fly, you actually are swimming. The air, is water… Literally, as far as the game engine code goes, you are swimming. Once you disengage your mount, you are no longer swimming, the sky is no longer computed as water, and you fall.

With that being said, the only possible way for them to introduce “flight abilities” would be, through a Vehicle Action Bar. Simply because you can not associate abilities to a character because of the external actor dilemma.

The only other option would be to have a regular mount, with no flight abilities, but still retain the customization features. With the customization being similar to artifact appearances, where you can only change them at the Artifact Shrine in your Class Sanctum. I imagine you would have to change your appearance at the “Dragon Sanctum” and the next time you call your Dragon Mount, the appearance will have changed.

With a Vehicle Action Bar, you could probably just click a button on the Vehicle Action Bar that leads to a dynamic window where you can change your appearance on the fly.

Just like I can’t link the source of thought for Albert Einstein coming up with the theory of relativity for you to peruse quickly and come to an understanding, I can’t do that here.

You simply just have to have the knowledge required in order to understand.

386

I am sure you could still fly with your mounts in older zones. Dragonriding is exclusive to Dragon Isles. Not a big deal to me, to be honest.

387

OP needs a ‘Jump To Conclusions’ mat.

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388

Sone of you are getting all worked up, and sincerely abusive (“moronic” and all that nonsense, please stop that) for a lot of hypotheses.
I don’t really agree with many of you, and will try to explain my ideas.

  1. Normal flying is NOT boring. Like many other things, it’s as boring as you make it so. It’s boring if you use simply it as a very slow teleporter, without doing the cool things you can do while flying (for example, aquaplaning). One of the problems with Ion is that he likes only mythic dungeons and raids, so he has probably no idea how to use normal flight to have fun.
  2. Said that, I think dragonflying, after some implementation issues are solved, has indeed the potentiality to be way more fun. I love the idea of diving down a cliff, then open the wings and soar using the momentum gathered, with a tactile sensation of the gravity used for that. If it works, I could buy Dragonflight even as a standalone game. A big caveat: that it is accessible for people like me (i.e. elderly and some reflex and hand mobility issues). I don’t want to be able to do extraordinary acrobatics, but I need to be able to use dragonflight to do the normal content. I want to have fun, not to be stressed up and/or unable to do normal content. AND THAT’S A POTENTIAL DEAL BREAKER FOR ME. Not that I will leave the game, the game will have left me.
  3. So, what do I want? This:
    10.0: dragonflight (with caveat).
    10.1: upgraded dragonflight (with caveat).
    10.2: normal flight unlocked also in the Dragon Isles and you can use both, and have your awesome array of flying mounts back. It’s not rocket science, as they say.

If you don’t agree, as surely wil be the case, please keep “moron” and all those pleasantries to yourselves.
The 9.2.5 “social contract” is excellent. Make sure you really adhere to it, else you will be abusing the game and its players.

P.S.
I have played Guild Wars 2 these days and have seen some of their flying/gliding mounts in action. My sensation is that they are extremely maneuverable. I said griffins hover in place, land and take off again, apparently effortlessly. And of course I saw some fancy acrobatics.

389

So… Short answer is, no, you don’t actually know exactly how the implementation is going to work. Thanks, that’s all you had to say. :slight_smile:

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390

You’re right. They found a black floating sphere in the desert outside Area 51. This is how everything Blizzard was created. Nobody knows who or what makes this stuff. It just kinda uploads itself to whatever hard drive is nearby.

You got me.

Everything we know about technology, and programming, is a lie. It’s all just getting pooped out of alien orbs.

391

You seem to operate under the mistaken belief that I ever disagreed with your explanations of how certain core aspects of the game work. I never did, and to do so would be foolish. I’ve got a pretty solid understanding of how the game works and why key parts function (and don’t, to an extent) the way they do. Didn’t need a rant from you to get that part.

I did, however, specifically ask if you had anything to show me precisely one aspect of what you’re saying- that it’s going to be controlled with a separate mount interface. That’s all I asked, brother. It was a simple question, and you decided to make it into something it wasn’t. I never asked to see anything more than exactly that.

392

Or they could, you know, add IsDragonriding or whatever to their movement state enum, and call a new function during update ticks. :rofl:

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393

Yes this is a hard pass on the next expansion. Heck buying SL was a big mistake as I’ve only played 4 months of the slog. Glad I upgraded my gpu and can try other games too.

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394

The movement state enum for actual current flying in wow?

Swimming.

It’s true.

Hence, the “Vehicle Action Bar” and using external actors, or, overhaul of the entire engine in regards to any type of movement from the ground up, for not only players but npc’s and probably all world objects to be honest. Down to the visual effects of every single quest trigger.

395

Right. With current flying mounts, the character state is set to swimming after jump/ledge events, as opposed to falling when on foot or a ground mount. With a bool var for mounts to flag them compatible with dragonriding, said jump events can change to the new flying state instead of swimming.

This state could then be used by switch statements/branches to point at new code without touching a vehicle. It’s not rocket surgery lol.

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396

Make all mounts dragonfly you mean?

397

Only mounts that have the flag set.

If they’ve given any consideration to expanding this to other mounts later, basically adding a check box to the mount database would make their lives easier in the future.

Defining the new Dragons as separate “vehicles,” and having to manually convert every potential future mount to same would be madness.

398

It is though.

Because in the sky, the environment, all the code for “the world”.

There is no “flying state”. It would have to be created. within the environments, from the ground up. There is no other state of flying with characters, outside of swimming state.

The only flying state they can come up with, is external actors. But they haven’t ever been able to figure it out with flying, in regards to controlling flight. All vehicle action bar objects in the game that are based in the air, are on rails. Every bombing quest or “Press Soothe to calm your Two Headed Maldraxxus Skeleton Drake”.

So I’m positive, it’s not flying. It’s gliding… with a speed boost that gets applied based on your “dive bomb” distance, which is actually based on a calulcation of the distance travelled while in the “falling” state. Which then switches back to “glider” state.

The whole engine doesn’t have a flying state. They built the entire coding around swimming, in every zone and every expansion, for character flight.

They have never had a controllable flying vehicle. Only on rails. All controllable vehicles, are ground based.

The only thing they have been able to do is glide, float, etc.

I imagine this is the same exact code for gliders. But with speedboosts and being able to change out of glider state into a falling state to gain “momentum” then based on your distance, you get a speed buff applied for a certain amount of time, which allows you to actually aim your glider upwards, which also explains the “gravity” component.

It’s a vehicle action bar, using the glider movement code, state switching for dive bomb, and back to glide mode, to gain “momentum” as they discussed.

There are limitations in the core game engine itself that prevents them from attaching new abilities to character bars, and from attaching characters to moving objects that they can control, with abilities, in the air. They are all on rails.

They also can’t attach characters to objects that they can control on the ground, without the vehicle action bar. The only way you can control an object’s movement is with the vehicle action bar, in anything that exists in the game whatsoever, all the way back to WOTLK.

I imagine you will never be able to just “hover” above the summoning stone in front of a raid. Not unless they add a literal “Hover” button to the Vehicle Action Bar, that you have to press once again, to go back to the ground, and you won’t be able to directly transition from hover to flight.

Also, I imagine there will be some sort of “Launch” ability to get you in the air.

Potentially, they might even add little area’s where the dragons do fly with a flight model similar to the current model, maybe even all the zones in the expansion. But that means, you won’t be able to use your dragon in any previous areas, and that they have built a new rendition of the engine that they don’t want to go through the work of applying to the rest of the game.

I feel that is highly unlikely considering the fact of a large content drought after a mostly disastrous COVID, PR, Legal, Expansion Post-Release Fallout, being bought out by another company, couple of years.

399

Obviously it would have to be created. But half the point of using states in the first place is that more can be added later.

The environment has nothing to do with a state itself. It’s a completely arbitrary concept that has no meaning until defined and called.

They could create a new IsGeneralDiscussion state if they wanted, which switches to a new function that consumes any and all input, then causes us to run in circles and ignores gravity/collision/etc… Said state could be applied to our characters by any button, some gameplay event, or totally at random.

Likewise, a flying state, once set-- be it by the mount “spell,” or a dev debug command during testing --could trigger a case switch just as it does swimming. Only instead of calling a HandleSwimming or whatever function with simple “add input to X/Y/Z” stuff, it calls a new function with fancy vector maths.

The last part might be minor rocket surgery. Getting there isn’t.

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400

Then remove the flying mounts from the store. Sounds fair to me.

Can’t fly in new expansion zone?
Don’t market new flying mounts.

Good deal. (but we all know that would never happen)

401

Ya know, you’re probably right. It’s probably as easy as that one Visual Basic Program you created in Junior College. These industry professionals just have no clue what the heck they are doing.

For the past how many, going on 18 years now, they haven’t been able to accomplish this simple thing you have highlighted, because everyone who works at Blizzard is an incompetent hack, probably googling code from other games and just copy pasting it into world of warcraft.

I hope they hire you. You could probably turn this game into Elden Ring of Warcraft in like, 5 minutes.

402

They will just replace them with Dragon Cosmetics and Abilities.

Don’t worry, it’s not player power! And you can always get the baby poop green version for free after farming it for 287 days. Each.

:wink: