Nostalrius Begins - Quality wow vanilla realm (1.12)

okie yea this has nothing to do with legacy realms BUT.. did anyone see this on the blizz forums?

Zeraphiel wrote:Duskwood and Elwynn Forest: Unreal 4..

...and they look AMAZING. I didn't know how badly I needed these in my life until I saw them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5elh0aaIIz0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNAJJt ... 1562226299

Edit: Here's Westfall also. Seriously, these are awesome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJfLvMU ... _980658849

Holy Shizz that be PURDY!! XD

A bit too realistic for me. Looks fantastic no doubt, however I think WoW looks better with it's cartoony style.

If I ever do happen to work on a fantasy RPG game I'll be using Unreal for fucking sure. Or atleast the world design and story behind it will be from me. Someone else is gonna have to put up with the coding and all that.

First of all, kudos to the maker of this. Always nice to see such projects, and they did quite well for "unprofessional" fan work.

However, in my opinion these videos show quite well why visuals are not just the sum of shader complexity + polygon count + lighting system.
WoW is 10 years old, but still looks fairly nice to this day imho - not because its engine was so fantastic, but rather because the models/art was just done absolutely flawlessly. The color palettes, the shapes, all of it fit together like puzzle pieces of one big artwork. Such visual consistency is incredibly hard to achieve, and even fewest professional companies manage to.

These videos look completely sterile to me. Like a duskwood-themed hospital. It seems like a weird mix of "realistic" proportions mixed with a non very well matching cartoon color palette.
Sharper edges and textures make all the objects seem very disconnected to the world to me (i.e. say the fountain; in reality, the stone pattern of the ground would probably vary around the location where the fountain was built to accomodate it, fountain and floor would could of become one unit; in the video, the fountain just looks like what it is - an individual 3d asset just popped onto the floor without these having any connection).

Again, appreciate the hard work of whoever created this video, its very hard to pull stuff like this off. But for me personally, the visual in this video look absolutely terrible; much more like any generic free to play MMO, but it has lost all of WoW's visual charm.

WoW's art style makes it timeless. Unreal 4 looks nice and purdy but would probably melt my GPU

Hernia wrote:WoW's art style makes it timeless.

This.

VeloxBanks wrote:A bit too realistic for me. Looks fantastic no doubt, however I think WoW looks better with it's cartoony style.

If I ever do happen to work on a fantasy RPG game I'll be using Unreal for fucking sure. Or atleast the world design and story behind it will be from me. Someone else is gonna have to put up with the coding and all that.

Agreed

I love the realistic look and I wish more MMO's would take after FF14 with regards to art, except the terribly overcluttered interface. Immersion is ruined for me unless it looks more realistic. It makes me feel like i'm playing an "app" instead of a character in a world.

Forcerius wrote:I love the realistic look and I wish more MMO's would take after FF14 with regards to art, except the terribly overcluttered interface. Immersion is ruined for me unless it looks more realistic. It makes me feel like i'm playing an "app" instead of a character in a world.

What? Don't you like bland and flat-colored korean MMOs with no originality in style whatsoever?

Done right, you could choose which client you use, and have the original cartoony look (my preference) or the leading edge max-realism look.

The work done here isn't meaningful. A long while back I asked him a couple questions and the result indicates that this is in no way a step in the direction for a custom HD client.

These are the reasons why:

1. He does not utilize the original heightmaps or terrain from WoW. These can be extracted from ADT files and can be used, I've used them in Unity3D before, and therefore there is no parity with official clients in that sense.

2. He also does not use the WMO/M2 location data which I also believe is available insde of ADT files. This data indicates where certain static world objects should be located. Without doing so would require hand placing and wouldn't provide parity with the official client.


An actual HD client could be made if someone which better knowledge of the ADT fileformat were able to produce 3 important things

1. Height data or mesh for tiles in the world from ADT files

2. Relative WMO/M2 placements for each ADT file and WMO/M2 filenames (this would allow you to generate the objects in a scene editor such as Unity3D, Unreal Engine or otherwise.

3. Knowledge enough of ADT files to be able to generate splatmaps for the terrain files. (Tools I've used before produce alpha maps which I had to write a merge tool for and had to be manually cleaned up)

HD Vanilla client is possible if people of varying skillsets came together such as reverse engineering, WoW protocol JAM/Mangos stuff and Unity3D/Unreal knowledge.

I'm up for an opensource implementation. I've dabbled abit =) things like Northshire Abbey can look pretty dandy: https://i.gyazo.com/8d3f312c47b85bdb4d9 ... dec938.mp4

This project, while cool and also for some reason reported often by Polygon, doesn't really help or do anything for anyone.