Over the years we have seen improvements in the graphics of World of Warcraft, definitely, Mists of Pandaria It has meant a significant improvement in the graphic aspect. Personally, for me, the continent of Pandaria has offered us a carousel of spectacular landscapes and environments and where many graphic details have been improved in weapons, battle equipment, etc.
Blizzard offers us an article where it shows us the changes in the game engine that it is going to apply in Warlords of Draenor, is a complex and focused article for people who like the graphical aspect of games and want to get the most out of them. The full article is in English, but in GuíaswoW We translate it into Spanish so you can enjoy it.
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Welcome to the first installment of a series of articles focused on programming and engineering and that, over the next few months and years, will cover some of the more technical techniques and techniques of the creation and operation of World of Warcraft.
Before we begin, a quick warning: The following is a fairly technical explanation of a change to a graphical setting in the game. Most of you will probably not notice any change. This is primarily intended for those who like to manipulate hardware and graphics settings.
In short, we are improving World of Warcraft performance and securing the continued growth potential of increased graphics fidelity and our improved support for high-end graphics hardware and CPUs.
For Warlords of Draenor we decided to remove Multisampling Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) and include a new anti-aliasing technology called Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA). This change will allow us to bring some overdue technological advancements to World of Warcraft over the course of the next several years. This change is intended for the long term.
One reason the MSAA remained a viable anti-aliasing solution for the past decade is that the GPU had more time and resources to handle it. For much of its existence, WoW has been a CPU-bound game, but in the Warlords development cycle we strived to change that. Much of that work involved analyzing the flow of information through our code and making sure we only work on what is necessary for each framework. One example is that we now variably reduced the number of bones that needed to be animated based on proximity and perspective (LOD), the primary consumer of CPU time. We also added a workstation that the engine uses to assign animation and scene handling tasks for modes that we already had prototypes of in 5.4, but are expanding in Warlords.
The result is that, now more than ever, World of Warcraft relies heavily on a GPU, which was previously free to handle things like the MSAA. We explored a variety of solutions and made the decision that Warlords of Draenor would adopt CMAA as an anti-aliasing technology. As with anything that could potentially change the look of the game, we consulted with our engineering and art teams on the removal of the MSAA before we concluded on switching to the CMAA. The CMAA offers a robust anti-aliasing solution for a fraction of the cost of memory and performance, integrates well with planned WoW technologies in the future, and allows us to integrate them into the game earlier. We also support FXAA (Rapid Approach Anti-Aliasing in Spanish), an even lighter solution, which is available as an option for our DirectX 9 users.
The CMAA is a post-processing solution that provides high-quality anti-aliasing at a low performance cost, giving us extra space to expand the graphics fidelity of the game. We don't have to make architectural concessions to the engine for the CMAA to work, and for Warlords of Draenor we have already implemented new graphical features, such as: target delineation, smoothed particles, a new shading technique, and refraction. Everything, as a result of the support of the CMAA. Additionally, there are more graphical features on the horizon for future patches and expansions.
For the launch of Warlords of Draenor, CMAA is the higher-level option, but after this we will explore more options for users with high-performance cards and add to the game those that provide quality and that, in turn, fit our future plans for technology.
The graphical future of World of Warcraft is bright, and we believe that the changes we made during the development of Warlords of Draenor have laid the foundation for us to build a better looking game in the future.
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In summary, Blizzard wants to continue improving the graphics of World of Warcraft while this means an improvement in performance for our computer. Curious, don't you think?