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

[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