just curious. From what I gather, vanilla private servers had to “script” behaviors from scratch. And therefore, there’s some variety out there between the various implementations. With some broken behavior too.
I’m not exactly sure how this all works, but I’m curious if Blizzard has the definitive “scripts” from vanilla or whether there will be debate, after launch, about whether things like mana regen, rage degradation, aggro radius, etc. will occur.
They have the original data, but they’re using modern framework. There may be some systems that need to be tweaked, but they also have a “reference client” that runs the old system with the actual original form of the game on it.
They’re doing their best to make sure that the new, updated client is as close to the reference client as possible.
So, the answer is “They have the original data, but some engineering is still necessary to make it work as it should.”
You make it sound like they are doing soo much lol
Nice, thanks for the info. Very glad to hear there’s a reference client and that it is using original data. I’m sure a lot of folks will be shocked at how slow mana regen is, and it will feel “broken” to a lot of players not familiar with how it was. The reference client will allow Blizzard to resist making a change based on our flawed memories.
They’re basically putting a square peg into a round hole by drilling out the hole. And then trying to clean up the consequences of that…
Personally, I think it probably causes more issues than it solves… but Blizz did want it to work off the modern Bnet App/Social system with modern anti cheat software and that’s potentially the easiest way of doing those things…
The concerns I’d have involve some of the side effects of the modern client…
Sharding is one of the most common ones brought up.
But the larger concern is honestly lag/latency… A modern client has a stroke when you get 40v40 in wpvp… where as the vanilla legacy client, when run on a modern system that is essentially a super computer compared to tech at the time can push 300+ people on screen without issue. I have rather extreme reservations that the game will run nearly as smoothly as it should on such relatively advanced hardware.
Beyond that, there’s a wealth of small things that all now have to be individually weeded out… Spell crit damage being an example that is critical to fix between the old and modern clients. Textures everywhere showing up unskinned in the demo. Even somewhat innocuous things like water graphics do have a legitimate impact (water uses modern graphics on demo… Vanilla water could be used in pvp situations to conceal your movement, since you where unable to see someone swimming beneath the surface. It’s not a major change, and it even makes more sense to have water be transparent… but it still breaks a known vanilla era tactic.
By 1.12, if you had your graphics up (my computer couldn’t really handle it) the water was clear instead of the opaque blue, but it still had the same wave textures.
Even if they didn’t have all the original code and had to remake it based on guess work like private servers it’d still put private servers to shame even with the same code Blizzard has. One reason being Blizzard employees are professionals and not hobbyists. The second being in order for WoW to run on server hardware it wasn’t designed to, it requires emulation software to make the game think it’s running on its intended hardware and due to problems within the emulation software itself it causes game breaking issues on its own. Even if the code had off values, it’s guaranteed to work without any issue since the hardware is running natively again.
If you’ve ever used a game engine, it’s kinda like Blizzard taking a game they made in an old version of Unreal Engine and importing it into the latest version. Your assets will come in fine, but you’ll have issues with anything that has changed in the way it’s coded. For instance say a door opening animation required 6 lines of code, now it only requires two and you gotta now make tweaks to it so it’ll work again.
I had a huge post regarding infrastructure and impacts if you want to look at my post history. It should answer all your questions.
If reverse engineering is “the reproduction of another manufacturer’s product following detailed examination of its construction or composition.”
Then No, Blizzard is not reverse engineering Classic. It’s more like forward engineering. They are taking their own product and reworking it to fit with their modern engineering.
Square peg remodeled to fit into any size hole necessary. Effectively.
it is quite a bit of work. they have to make the old code work on the modern infrastructure. that doesnt happen by accident