Ohhh… so you’re not suggesting an ACTUAL drop-down menu, just a list (with a tinier font size for neatness maybe) that appears underneath the realm’s name when you select it? …That actually does sound like you wouldn’t need a patch after it’s gone.
erm, i guess thats what i mean lol i dunno. i’m confused now but that’s not unusual. i get confused easy. haha
Yeah it’d be helpful if any of us were UI designers and had permission to share mockup images. lol
Most of the advancements would be in other functionality like the social features.
Assuming that their news is more or less the same glorified internet browser the old launcher was, the biggest advancement is probably using Ajax.
The client still has its own code for how to handle information that it’s getting from the servers, and Blizzard can’t issue an update to that particular code without doing a patch.
Showing a dropdown on the realm selection menu would require some client specific code that they couldn’t just do a quick update of on their end.
Well, not technically “require” but it would be a really bad idea to make that a server-side function =P
'xplain?
/ten characters dancing on the head of a pin
She probably means it opens doors to security threats or something.
UI elements are done within the client by taking information from the server. In this case it gets a list of realms and their status from Blizzard’s server and then runs code on your computer to display a list for you and let you select one. After you select one, it sends a connection request to that server.
If that code were on Blizzard’s server, then every time you loaded up the reamlist it would need to go to the server to get that code so it could run it on your computer. It would be really inefficient, and on Blizzard’s end it would waste a TON of bandwidth(which is not cheap =P).
Instead since that code is on our computers, they need to issue a patch to update it.
Recently there has been the idea of “streaming” an entire game from a server to a computer(thus removing the need for powerful gaming PCs), but that’s an entirely different discussion that Blizzard hasn’t even begun to develop the technology for =P
…I do NOT like that idea at all.
Making games, even single-player ones, even more dependent on internet access is no bueno.
yeah no doubt.
It’s an interesting idea in concept.
The problem is that internet connections aren’t up to par to handle that kind of thing just yet, and it would be hell on input lag if your latency was high.
I’m running on a fairly fast connection right now and I’d still hesitate to use such a service. Nevermind people who don’t have access to the high speed networks of a major city.
i started to make an in browser game. the idea was to try to make it using codes available for building normal websites, so an engine isn’t even necessary and it could be played in your browser over the net or from your desktop if you downloaded it instead. but it has no cloud server functionality. no real time updates. it only mimics 3d and isn’t real 3d. i dont like the idea of everything being on the cloud. thats a baaaaaaaad idea.
Is that what Google’s doing?
Not saying that. I’m saying that it’s not going to be anywhere near the percentage of players in a starting area. Why would you assume a whole server is going to be online at one time during AQ event, and even if they are, why do you assume it’s going to be anywhere near the percentage of players in a starting area at launch?
On top of that, there’s going to be a less amount of people on the server overall, so it’s going to be a lower percentage of a lower number of players in that area. So why would it need sharding? Hmm…
Never said that. If you took the time to read what I wrote you would see that I said I don’t think it’s needed and even if it WAS that it shouldn’t matter because people can CHOOSE to leave the silithus area if they want and do something else, during launch they do not have that option.
Are you suggesting that there will possibly be 1000 players in a starting area like there could be at launch? You are actually dreaming if you think that’s the case. And once again, even if there WAS people can choose to leave if the lag is too bad. You can’t do this at launch.
It’s what’s been suggested a lot is that they want to get into this.
We should know more tomorrow when they do their GDC livestream about it.
Oh dear Lord, please tell me this is not how it works…
its still only for the starting areas for the beginning rush. they aren’t doing sharding in the whole game forever
Are you advocating sharding be used throughout the game in perpetuity?
It’s not. I remember ghostcralwer back in the day mentioning that they take some topics in the forums with a grain of salt because they’re potentially the “vocal minority”.
And for as many posts as people keep making about it, there’s so few people actually posting in them against sharding. It’s all the same people going back and forth with a spattering of random lowbie alts. You’d think for as many youtubers have made videos about the end of the world (of warcraft) with sharding there would be a lot more uproar by a wider variety of players if it was actually that much of an issue.
I think they would probably use sharding for the AQ event.
And why not?
Back in Vanilla events like that were characterized by glacially slow framerate, loot lag, and server crashes. All caused by overcrowding as a majority of the online playerbase crowded into just one zone. The game couldn’t handle it.
And even when the game was actually playable it wasn’t very fun with so many people around. Mobs were tagged instantly and quest items snapped up. It was virtually impossible to actually get the quests done. It was downright frustrating.
Sometimes Blizzard tried to fix this by speeding up mob respawn. At its peak it was rather comical. literally the instant you killed a mob it respawned. This sometimes made it very difficult to loot since you couldn’t exit combat.
And was that a great gaming experience just because it was all on the server? … absolutely not. It was frustrating. It was painful. Many players logged out in disgust. People were not having fun and there were tons of complaints from angry players on the forums.
Sharding would fix all that.
not using alts here on classic. at least, i havent been on alt here for a very long time. usually only get on alts for mog threads anyway, which isnt applicable for classic.