If wows engine has been the same since release

why were armor sets so bad and pixelated when they released from 2004-2013 when they put out high quality 3d ones since legion? if its the same engine, they couldve been designing 2023 level sets in 2004

It hasn’t been the same since release. It gets updated every single expansion. The Blizzard team does not go back and re-render old models and textures.

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compare tier 3 with an aberrus set. that level of detail in wows engine coulve been done 20 years ago but idk why it was like it was. so bad and pixelated

An odd analogy, but the turboprop engine (PT6 from Pratt & Whitney) has been in continuous production in one form or another since the early 60’s. They’ve tweaked air flow, cowling design, added additional internal parts for efficiency and power output. So, I wonder if the WoW engine is still powering similar functions but with the improvement to all the other components of a computer, and small improvements in the game engine itself, the end graphical display is better.

The engine has been updated every expansion. This isn’t something that needed to be explained.

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i doubt graphical fidelity of sets is based on engine

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Ding Ding Ding

The image resolution on older armor is lower.

Very basic explanation of what happens is 3D engines take a picture and wraps it around a 3D shape. If that picture is small then it has to be scaled up.

In 2004 people still used 800x600 monitors and video cards where dealing with megabytes, not gigabytes of memory. Most people still had 30k a second internet speeds.

So the images were much smaller.

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They could probably re-do the game with 8k textures if they wanted, but who would want to download a game that size?

That’s what AI is going to be used for.

wow a proper explanation thanks

i was too young to have a block computer

At the internet speeds of the day ( 56k modem, 56,000 bits per second, 7000 bytes, 6.8k per second ) this forum page ( 11.6 MB ) would have taken 29 minutes to download.

So big chunky graphics files in a update could be a problem.

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I don’t know where else to point it out, but since one of these new patches rain comes through the roof of buildings. It’s the smallest thing in the world but for some reason it bugs me a lot.

They’ve likely progressively updated the engine.

Majority of the old sets were designed for humans, those sets also look stretched and blurry on other races that aren’t thin. Plus aspect ratio changed bit over the years, and resolutions got even bigger and that also stretches everything, but you can sharpen it through little bit of SetCVar “ResampleAlwaysSharpen” something-something. Think of it as setting the scale to lower than 100% as something that will activates the fidelity sharpness stuff as a fallback of sorts to artificially improve image quality. But that is too much CPU intensive I don’t do that for wow, but it doesn’t make sense for me to put such heavy workload on the CPU just for wow.