WORLD OF WARCRAFT: BURNING CRUSADE CLASSIC DEEP DIVE

Posted by freemexy on February 25th, 2021

WORLD OF WARCRAFT: BURNING CRUSADE CLASSIC DEEP DIVE



Join WoW Classic lead producer Holly Longdale, production director Patrick Dawson, and lead software engineer Brian Birmingham for a deeper look into the Burning Crusade Classic in this BlizzConline panel.To get more news about fast wow gold, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

Much like WoW Classic, we faced a lot of challenges in bringing Burning Crusade 13 years forward to today. One of these challenges was translating all of the expansion data—the content, the gameplay rules, how enemies behave, and so on—into the modern code, with all of the under-the-hood technical improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes we’ve made over the years.

To do this, we need to convert over 750,000 rows of data from the format we used around 2007 to the format we use today. Thankfully, we have dedicated and talented engineers who can utilize scripts that help make these conversions go a bit easier—but that doesn’t mean that we can solely rely on those automated conversions. Running the old client, we look at how things actually worked in the original Burning Crusade and compare it against the conversion in Burning Crusade Classic to verify it’s all working as intended.

We also wanted to make sure that as we made these conversions, we retained any bug fixes that we had made previously so to provide a cohesive experience between WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic.

We spend a lot of time looking at the old reference code to make sure we get things right and bug fixes are retained. Because it’s been 13 years since the launch of Burning Crusade, we also have to take the time to make sure that what we remember matches up with how things really were. It’s easy for time to change perceptions and what we might have thought of as a bug, might actually be how it played originally in Burning Crusade. Having a reliable resource to check makes a big difference.

Our modern code also provides additional stability for the client. Servers used to be much more siloed, but now have the ability to harness the benefits of cloud infrastructure. This allows us to avoid issues like “instance not found” errors when players are trying to access things like dungeons or raids.

Sometimes bringing this data over results in unintended consequences. When doing early tests, we found things like the blood elf male missing his clothes, despite the client believing he had some on. We soon figured out that textures weren’t assigned properly, even though the geometry from his clothes was still apparent.

With the Draenei, they initially appeared that they were too tall on the character creation screen—but the real problem was that Draenei were being shown in the Dun Morogh character creation screen, which has a camera height appropriate for dwarves and gnomes.

We also ended up with water showing up in Hellfire Peninsula where no water was meant to be. Outland doesn’t have oceans like Azeroth does, but this was something we were able to address.