07-19-2005, 06:34 PM
oldmandennis,Jul 19 2005, 05:29 PM Wrote:You should probably be careful about going overboard on the comparisons to D2. They were done by completly different teams. Infact, IIRC most of the Diablo team left to do guild wars.
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My impression was that the guys who left were mostly the high-level designer-architect type. I suspect a fair number of the actual programmers are still around working on some Blizzard project. They also have a tendency, regardless of who's working on the project, to reuse their code libraries. Take MoPaQ, for example, which has been used in pretty much every Blizzard product for quite a number of years now. Even if different programmers are working on WoW, I don't think its a stretch to imagine that they are reusing the same fixed-point library as well as the mpq library.
Your point is well taken, though. We really don't have enough information at this point to draw any sort of detailed conclusions about code running on the servers. Its all speculation at this point. I think D2 is still useful as a reference, however, if for no other reason than the fact that many of the techies here are very familiar with the details of D2 from disecting that game, so it serves a common frame of reference if nothing else.
Of course, this all brings up the big question: Does it really matter? Obviously having a model for how the game handles aggro would be helpful for a deeper understanding of the game, but if the model doesn't match the actual server code have we really lost anything? The hacker in me wants to dig in an figure out the details of the system, but the gamer in me would rather settle for "close enough" and get back to actually playing the game ;)