The Dev has spoken! Where to put WoW folder! Acard wins!

[Clanked]

The world never changes, the ground will always be the same texture, the building will always have the same textures. There isn't much variation, and going into it, you know exactly what textures need to be loaded to display the zone. Therefore a sequential load is a good idea. I'm sure when you are sitting at the loading screen after hearthing to orgimmar, there is lots of sequential loading going on for the geography.

Players on the other hand can be wearing any of the thousands of different pieces of armor/weapons/shirts/etc. So they require random fetches from the hard drive for each different model/texture they are wearing.

So, in short. You will always know what geography textures will be needed, because they are static. You will never know what player textures are needed.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Well there is a 2G limit to any application under 32 bit windows ... but its dosn't seem wow is using that 2G limit, maybe on the assumpiton that computers dont have 2G, an assumption made when wow was first disigned but not a very valid one today.

Ya as KvdM says the issue is not so dry and "obvious" as some would make it seem.

You know you do not need textures of players that are not currently in the zone with you.

At any rate this is a dead horse, the Dev stated that the data is randomly read and that good enough for me. Buy stuffs with lower access times vs. items with higher bandwidth but also higher access times.

[KvdM]

You will never know what player textures are needed.

And that's exactly why you don't load them one by one. In fact, one of the tricks that I've seen our tech coders use is to place game data onto the hard drive several times. Why? Because loading extra data (even when not needed) is so much faster then seeking for the data when you do need it. [edit] (note that this does depend on the size of the extra data)[/edit]

As for why the game doesn't use 2GB, that's also simple. The more memory you reserve, the more resources you need to keep track of it, which can also slow down the game. So you don't want to reserve more memory then is actually needed.

[weeep]

Ya you can play well in a low populated zone with a single normal hard drive. But go into a big city in WotLk and see 200 new people and see what happens.

Nothing happens. People load up in a second or two and there is no HDD activity after their initial load. And there should NOT be any HDD activity. If you experience constant HDD activity in crowded place, something is wrong with your software setup or you have insufficient RAM.

[combhua]

At any rate this is a dead horse, the Dev stated that the data is randomly read and that good enough for me. Buy stuffs with lower access times vs. items with higher bandwidth but also higher access times.

First, that probably was not an actual developer. I'm a software developer and I think it's presumptive to assume we might know what hundreds of other factors surround the specific decisions related to their loading algorithms. The differences between the two strategies are small enough that we would need intimate knowledge of the industry as well as specific Blizzard approaches to solving that problem. And remember, it's not an either/or. It's a spectrum of possibilities. To continue on the example being used, when encountering a rogue wearing t7 helm, the devs could load just the specific helm, the rogue t7 set, all t7 sets, all rogue sets, all ilvl 213 rogue items, all leather items, all items in the zone, all items on the continent, all items in the game. Some possibilities are obviously more likely, but you get the idea.

[Tonuss]

You think that when you zone they only load zone textures for the area that is currently visible? No they load ALL the world textures for the WHOLE zone. Why do it different with character textures?

Wouldn't that place a significant load on systems that are closer to the recommended specs for WoW? Wouldn't it also mean that lag in a place like Dalaran would be about the same regardless of how many players were actually there (once you crossed a specific threshold, anyway)?

Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Nothing happens. People load up in a second or two and there is no HDD activity after their initial load. And there should NOT be any HDD activity. If you experience constant HDD activity in crowded place, something is wrong with your software setup or you have insufficient RAM.

Is that in fact true? My computers are far from me so I cant see the HDD light. When you go to Org or some heavy populater area does the hard drive churn constantly or not? For an issue that is "obvious" and "clear" we sure are getting different opinions on both sides.

Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO

That is sure a fact, and I was hopeing the Blue would clear that up. Maybe someone else should ask also, I mean we are going to be spending $1000's on equipment, it might be to our advantage to spend it in a manner that gets us the best results.


Acard is best but not best for the buck (Sandisk wins there). I7/X58 is better then Acard though.


I think I ll get an Sandisk and compare it to 4Xraptors in Raid0 and see what the result is, I have the raptors already and the Sandisk is only $170, just waiting on others to get solid infos is taking to long. What happened with that guy that was supposed to post his benchmarks? And don't like 3 or 4 people have Acards yet, and X-25's?

[KvdM]

The differences between the two strategies are small enough that we would need intimate knowledge of the industry as well as specific Blizzard approaches to solving that problem.

I've got years of experience working as an online gameplay programmer on some of the bigger tripple A titles. Of course I can't tell you the exact implementation of the loading system that Blizzard is using, but based on my experience I can tell you what type of loading system they're using. This is because loading content isn't something that only affects Blizzard. Other developers have to build similar solutions as well and there are already well-known algorithms available for doing this.

And remember, it's not an either/or. It's a spectrum of possibilities. To continue on the example being used, when encountering a rogue wearing t7 helm, the devs could load just the specific helm, the rogue t7 set, all t7 sets, all rogue sets, all ilvl 213 rogue items, all leather items, all items in the zone, all items on the continent, all items in the game. Some possibilities are obviously more likely, but you get the idea.

Their developers probably know what they're doing, so I don't think they'd make the beginners mistake of only loading an item or a group of items. Its not only inefficient for loading data from the HD to main memory, but it is also too slow for rendering hundreds of characters. Having to upload items seperately to a video card's memory and swapping between too many rendering contexts will simply ruïn a game's framerate.

The normal way for handling your game content is to split it up into one or more static blocks of data that are always in memory (like all players items and player character data) and multiple streaming blocks that are loaded when needed (while switching zones). I've also worked on a game that only loaded data just before it is needed, but such systems simply are not fast enough for a typical MMO.

Wouldn't that place a significant load on systems that are closer to the recommended specs for WoW?

Well, how do you think the minimal specs of a game are calculated? Its calculated by adding up the size of the static blocks with size of the largest streaming blocks (and of course heap memory, etc)

Without knowing how much space is required by model/texture data, we're really just making wild guesses at this stuff, IMO.

It's an educated guess based on experience, knowing the limitations of the hardware that the game runs on and knowing the available solutions to the problem. Having said that, there is of course always the chance that someone at Blizz headquarters will now think to himself "so that's what we've been doing wrong all these years", but I highly doubt that

[Tonuss]

I don't know if anyone posted about this before, but at Storage Review they apparently run a simple I/O access test with WoW whenever they test a new hard drive, and they've got a relatively small database of results. As expected, two SSDs are far and away the fastest, but one comparison caught my eye. The following lists the model and some specs, along with the I/O-per-second scores (for reference, the two MTRON SSDs scored 3,333 and 3,030):

Samsung Spinpoint F1 with NCQ (1000 GB SATA) - 787

Samsung SpinPoint T166 with NCQ (500 GB SATA) - 515

Aside from price (~$100 for the 1TB vs ~$60 for the 500GB) and size, the primary difference between the two drives is the size of the cache buffer. 32MB for the 1TB drive, 16MB for the 500GB drive. Doubling the cache size meant the difference between a drive that posted one of the highest scores (the second-highest for a 7,200 RPM drive) and a drive that languished much farther down on the list. The only 7,200 RPM SATA drive that beat it was the Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000... which has a 32MB buffer.

It makes sense, if access times are so important to WoW. The memory buffers on a hard drive are much, much faster than accessing data directly from the platters (which is the whole reason for the cache in the first place) and thus bigger works out better for a game moving so much data at a moment's notice. Consider that you are looking at a cost of $100 per drive for performance rivaling 10k/15k Ultra320 SCSI drives. On the other hand, if you have money to burn then you are looking at possibly a 3.5x to 4.5x performance increase from using an SSD (or even bigger, depending on how well other brands perform).

EDIT: Hmm, looking further into the list, Seagate's ES.2 1TB drive with a 32MB buffer places pretty low on the chart. It uses 250GB platters versus 334GB platters on the Samsung Spinpoint. Very curious...

[Tonuss]

Well, how do you think the minimal specs of a game are calculated? Its calculated by adding up the size of the static blocks with size of the largest streaming blocks (and of course heap memory, etc)

I was thinking about Sam's statement about character textures. I can see the idea behind loading the data for the zone map when you enter the zone, but the data for all classes/gear? If that were the case, then systems that are well ahead of the minimal requirements wouldn't lag so badly in highly-populated areas, wouldn't they?