Designers working on scenery and dungeons had the option of ray tracing every time they placed a lighting source in the game. Once Blizzard chose to support ray tracing, it gave its artists the tools to turn that feature on for every light in the game. How WoW’s engineers chose which lights would give ray-traced shadows More lights in the game can throw shadows than ever before, so standing in the right place will throw realistic multi-shadows. Some shadows cast from far-away lights will be realistically softer, mimicking the behavior of light in the real world. Players cast shadows from their own characters by moving, and those are more detailed as a result of ray tracing. You’ll see the impact of Warcraft’s ray tracing in its shadows, and in general, they’ll be refined, not brand-new. This is a great way for us to support enthusiasts now while paving the way for more widespread availability of ray tracing in the future.” Plus, he said, Blizzard could see the (illuminated) writing on the wall: “Ray tracing is a technology we see as becoming more mainstream over time, meaning we expect most players to eventually be playing on systems that support ray tracing. “Ray tracing felt like a great way to help improve the graphics and at the same time make our worlds more immersive.” “We’re always looking for ways to improve the visual quality of World of Warcraft while maintaining the game’s iconic art style,” Anderson said. Including support for ray tracing is part of Blizzard’s balancing act between new tech and a hardware friendly approach.
#WORLD OF WARCRAFT RAY TRACING MAC#
So why build such a complex, heavy-load system into a venerated old game like Warcraft at all? WoW is famous for supporting older and limited-power PCs it’ll run on a Mac laptop with integrated graphics.
We use features like draw distance, buffer resolution, and rays per pixel to scale the impact for various levels of hardware.” Why World of Warcraft: Shadowlands includes ray tracing
“Lights marked as ray-traced shadow casters have the additional impact of calculating whether a pixel is shadowed from that light. There can be thousands of lights in a map, and each can have an impact on performance,” Anderson said, and developers cheat a little to try and keep the processor load down. “Given the breadth of content that’s been created for WoW over the years, and the fact that we support that older content as well as new ray-traced lights, you can imagine there’s quite a lot of variation in our lighting model. Traveling from vanilla zones through each expansion into Shadowlands gives you a 16-year tour of lighting technology in Warcraft. Lighting is generally baked in at the time an expansion is built – so the zones included in each new expansion include the new lighting features available at that time. Which of those you see may depend on the area where you’re standing. “Light can be both baked into vertices and added at run time from dynamic lights.” “It can vary depending on time of day, weather, world location, interior or exterior locations, map phases, local lights, and so forth,” Anderson said.
Lighting in WoW is created by layering effects, ranging from broad ambient daylight or dusk to specific spotlights cast by individual objects – a torch, say, or a light fixture, or even an NPC.
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