The Azeroth map became larger in Midnight, it's probably just resizing a bigger map into a smaller space in your combine-the-maps step?

I've heard this happens as we age. But yeah, that's a bit of a problem.

A picture of Valdrakken but slightly more correct than the one from the above post

Here it is today, rendering at a glorious 1 FPS, but more accurate in terms of WMO texturing and with bigger view distance/some very basic shading.

A map viewer screenshot of Valdrakken

I've already updated it with Midnight terrain support as well as (mostly) correct WMO rendering, moving it to use more recent community libraries for dealing with WoW stuff, being able to load different maps and being able to fly around in them. A long way since this screenshot from 2 years ago.

The goal is mostly just pushing myself, but it is not impossible this will have a use for something else at some point. I want to get better at this kind of stuff (3D/high performance C#), especially when it has to go on a resume at some point. Lots of obstacles to overcome, but having fun doing it.

Picked this old project back up to see how far I can push it with the knowledge I've gained since I last touched it. Others will always have this beat, but still. The only optimization right now is a view distance limit. FPS drops to a crawl in Midnight parts of the map. The TODO list is huge.

rsync log showing it is failing regularly and needs to reconnect

Blizzard please, I beg, fix some of the faulty nodes on your only CDN in EU or add more providers, this is getting silly.

I'm not counting on it with the new leadership, but one can dream.

Yup, same. I hope they're able to end it on a high note (and close it off properly). Maybe even make it SO good that the haters have no way around accepting it was good and realizing that the hate they gave it was unfounded and led to it being cancelled. Hah, who am I kidding, they won't admit that.

A screencap of the Artemis II stream with the Moon in the foreground and Earth in the background

Guys, everyone is in this picture! Wave to the camera!

(We're the moon-looking thing on the right of the moon.)

There are a bunch of outside editing updates/restrictions coming for exterior lights in 12.0.5 (e.g. not being able to place them too close to another), I assume they'll be enabled for outside use then.

Screenshot of the physics curtain decor outside making somewhat of an awning

Physics curtain made for a good accidental awning.

A WoW screenshot showing the Bel'ameth Interior Wall (outside)

Blizzard pushed a hotfix to live realms ~45 minutes ago that allows 106 previously indoor-only items to now also be placed outdoors!
www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2667...

(NASA stream still got priority today though -- sorry RWF enjoyers.)

And Liquid takes it home, granted I've missed/not cared about most of the race, but this last day has been fun to watch. GG!

Someone on the Artemis comms just dropped a "Amaze amaze amaze" in response to being able to see Earth out of one window and Moon out of the other. I need a few minutes.

Looking at the Moon and realizing there's 4 people closer to it than to Earth is kind of a crazy feeling. In my lifetime, hopefully in a few years, I'll also have the even crazier feeling of realizing there are people walking around on it. That's awesome.

A bunch of things pointing to it were datamined but people mostly shut up/didn't post about it outside of Max saying there were a few datamined spells a few days back. Blizzard did a great job this time around, there were barely any hints.

"do we get rezzed"
"careful, there are animals"

Maximum - Phase 4 Watch Maximum's clip titled

Max's face. Peak. www.twitch.tv/maximum/clip...

a man wearing sunglasses is sitting in the back seat of a car next to another man wearing a baseball cap . Alt: jeff goldblum smiling

They did it. The bastards actually did it. A secret Mythic phase on L'ura.

I've talked about the WoW/spoiler specific angle a lot in previous blog posts/my community council post on datamining and those opinions are largely unchanged, but the SteamDB stuff, even if I haven't worked on it in a while, still sucks and is a far larger problem I have no idea how to tackle.

The same goes back when wow.tools was commonly used to find and complain about spoilers (something WTL still is used for, but I've successfully made it far less accessible for those people). Even if you think the story sucks, if it wasn't accessible on PTR/its encrypted, we shouldn't talk about it.

I hate it so much when something I work/worked on is used to fuel toxicity in any way. There's a lot of advantages to making tools, collecting data and opening it up for wider audiences, but then I see some troll dunk on gamedevs by tweeting an image of SteamDB player charts at them, and that hurts.

The two Artemis graphics guides are also worth a look. Kinda neat to see how these have evolved, but still tie back to the original. nasa-external-ocomm.app.box.com/s/ig7cyneubc...

As long as people stick to official assets when making 3D art, AI thankfully isn't that big of a worry. It's not good enough to make proper scenes yet.

In awe of the environment art winners, especially since they weren't able to do these in-engine. Imagine what cool stuff people could create if given the tools to do so to this detail. Even with the crude and unstable community tools there's been some amazing work already. Maybe one day.

Screenshot of the battle.net gift page with the sturdy portable ice chest claimed

Had to grab it on a separate e-mail, but the Sturdy Portable Ice Chest is redeemable now.

There's a lot of things in the client that don't necessarily make sense to us given what we know and have access to. Some things may be leakage from the server side of things, some might be internal tool stuff, some might be unfinished/scrapped systems and some of it might make sense in the future.

Another example is Map Anima (we only had MANM, not the full name) which first appeared in 8.3 with a lot of (test?) data in old maps before Shadowlands was even announced. That ended up being the anima line system you see in the Shadowlands. Unclear without that context, but still strange today.