Hey guys, I’m trying to learn more about workflow and optimization techniques for large-scale games and MMOs. Think something like World of Warcraft. I’m a growing 3D artist and I feel like having that kind of knowledge is extremely important. I get the need for low poly count (WoW seems to have anywhere between 5k and 15k for each character) but I can’t find much about shaders and textures. Generally, when I make a character I’ll pack into three textures; Diffuse + alpha, AO/Roughness/Metallic, and Normal map. Does anyone know the workflow games like WoW use? How many textures and how they’re packed? They also seem to use a few different resolutions, usually 512 and 1024.
Basically, I’m just looking for more info on this sort of thing. I know lighting can also be a big deal, so info on that would be cool to know, too. Obviously static lighting that I assume is baked, and they seem to use some form of level streaming with each large land mass being on its own server?
WoW is probably a terrible model to go by. It’s a very old engine, built on top of Warcraft 3. We can do so much more now than they could.
Ashes of Creation is using Unreal Engine 5.
I’m sure they’re using at least 2k textures if not 4k.
I believe they eventually combined character parts into one material to reduce draw calls, allowing many more characters visible at once. I feel like this is an important one.
They’re using dynamic lighting + Lumen.
Server-wise, you can look at OWS by SabreDart. It handles server/player instancing. Areas are defined with a limit on how many players can be in it. If you hit the limit others go on another server instance. An area could be a whole town or parts of a town, depending on what you need.
In WoW we can assume every time you hit a loading screen you’re loading into another server, that being when you get on a blimp or a boat.
Ah that helps a lot, thank you. I’m not trying to make an MMO or anything, just understand from an artist’s perspective on how it all works. I’ll look into more stuff from Ashes of Creation. I’ve vaguely heard of the title, but I know nothing about it.