Build a Panel - World Creation in World of Warcraft
Warcraft 3: Reforged was announced! Submit your questions now for the developer Q & A! Restoring History: Creating WoW Classic Panel
- What's Under the Hood?
- Database Data
- Art Assets
- Source Code
- They kept track of everything in a repository that kept track of all changes made to the game.
- This repository has been keeping track of changes since 1997.
- First bug fix tracked - April 25, 1997.
- Two versions of the game in database - live and development.
- The development data was created over the live version. Eventually they changed it so that the team could work on multiple patches at a time.
- Art Assets include 3D models and textures which combine to in-game models.
- In digging back into the database, they discovered that they only had art assets from recent expansions.
- They found a backup with another backup folder that housed some old art assets.
- The old WoW didn't -
- Run in the Blizzard Cloud
- No battle.net desktop app
- No login servers
- No customer support access
- Every bug, exploit and hack re-activated.
- The team decided to layer the old version on the modern tech to solve this issue.
- However, the new source code didn't know how to load the old data.
- They eventually created a prototype that used the 7.3.5 client with the old data implemented. Combat wasn't quite there but you could still learn abilities from trainers and other long lost parts of vanilla.
- When you ventured outside of areas unaffected by the Cataclysm and into zones that were affected you saw weird things like missing water, aquatic creatures on land and terrestial creatures underwater. There was also armor that was untextured and so on.
- Feeding the modern engine the 1.12 engine doesn't read perfectly. Certain object placements are off which leads to trees flying in the air and stuff like the shattered Loch Modan damn still holding back water.
- The team had technology that could take the 1.12 engine and allow the modern engine to read it and place things correctly.
- Classic has the full devotion of the Warcraft team.
- The team was able to use reference data to find models in Classic that were not correct, such as colors of lanterns.
- Purple was used as a color to recognize wrong model colors.
- The team set out to recreate the game as authentic to the original as possible.
- Things like pet happiness and training was not able to be restored with this method. They had the data to restore them, however, and managed to re-code them back into the game.
- Rogue combo points being on the target, weapon skills, and critical blows all had to be re-coded back to how they were in vanilla.
- They were able to find and fix model errors that caused corpses to stand.
- The team even went back and restored the old character customization screen, including art.
- They are not promising pixel perfect perfection, but they use their references side by side to get as close to the original as possible.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/81 ... ssic-Panel
