Profile: War_Eagle
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• • Women Comprise 40 Percent of U.S. Gamers

  • Yeah, but what do they consider a video game?

    My mom plays those little browser games like on MSN, but I would not call her a "gamer" by any stretch of my imagination.

  • Posted: 7/21/08 4:32 PM
    General Discussion
• • Why Does WoW Load Up So Fast???

  • Originally posted by Kurush
    

    Originally posted by GreenChaos
    

    Yes the graphics are lower end, but I doubt you will find a better MMO engine anywhere.  Not to mention a better scriptable UI API
    
    I don't like WoW, but I will give them credit for being the best MMO technically wise.

     

    Well, Blizzard aimed low with the graphics for WoW.  They figured they could compensate for the low technical quality with high artistic quality.  Some don't like it.  Some do.  Overall, I think it was a calculated move that payed off.  More importantly, they simply put a ton of work into the engine.  WoW's pretty damn polished.  You only ever find bugs or performance issues in a few select places.

    Bugs?  Shartuul's Transporter and a few Netherwing Dailies spring to mind as having obvious, persistent, and annoying bugs.  Other than that, they tend to be exceedingly rare.

    Performance?  The filter they slapped on the phasing effect for the Sunwell portal daily gives me some issues.  Dunno about anybody else.

    That's what it really boils down to.  Polish.  It's not that other studios aren't capable of the same level of polish.  It's that the resources simply aren't available to others.  Blizzard is larger by a factor of five or six than the biggest independent MMORPG studio.  It also has a very high level of operational freedom and a lot of financial resources available.  If a studio is willing to invest in scale, it can match that kind of polish.  Turbine and LotRO is a good example.  If they want to stay small, their results might be less than optimal.  If you want to look at some of the potential downsides of small and nimble, look at Funcom and AoC's launch.

     

    I wonder what would happen if you took the WoW graphics engine and loaded some of the textures for a game like say, uhmmmm...,  EQ2 or Vanguard or one of the other higher end graphic games.

    What I mean is, I wonder if their graphics engine is really all that good, or is it just an average graphics engine running smaller sized textures.  I also wonder if it could stand a graphics upgrade later on if Blizzard decided to do so by just increasing the textures but doing nothing with the graphics engine.

  • Posted: 7/21/08 11:45 AM
    World of Warcraft
• • Why Does WoW Load Up So Fast???

  • Originally posted by Waterlily
    

    Originally posted by War_Eagle
    

    I have a big fat 0 amount of knowledge in programming.  It just never appealed to me.

    But I do have a question.  How come WoW loads so fast, yet other games I play take forever?  Sometimes when I load other games I sit there for upwards of 30 secs or more.  Yet WoW loads in about 3 secs.

    Why the big difference?  Why, why, why? 

    They have good programmers and the textures aren't that detailed in WoW.

    Yeah, I  understand they have good programmers.  But does that mean that Blizzard's programmers are just eons ahead of the others?

    If so, what kind of skill is it that they possess that is making their programs load so quick.  I guess I'm trying to get a technical person to give me a really good answer in layman terms.  Like a person who is the Michio Kaku of the greasy nerd programming world.

  • Posted: 7/21/08 11:40 AM
    World of Warcraft
• • Why Does WoW Load Up So Fast???

  • Originally posted by Majinash
    

    Originally posted by bluealien1
    

    It's because the graphics aren't to my taste.

     

     

    there, fixed that for ya.

     

    Huh?

    It loads faster because the graphics aren't to his taste?

    Are you guys even trying to stay on topic?

  • Posted: 7/21/08 11:37 AM
    World of Warcraft
• • "Black Hole" as racist remark - Video

  • Wait a minute.

    Did I see the video and hear it right?  I got the impression he and another black council member were in agreement on this.  It sounded like two of them were calling the poor guy a racist.

    They should be kicked out of office by the voters.  Oh wait, I bet they keep running in a predominately black district that votes for them because they throw pep rally's talking about how bad whitey is to get their voters pumped up.  Just my guess...

  • Posted: 7/21/08 11:31 AM
    General Discussion