Let’s say kalimdor is 1000 miles top to bottom. How big a map can be created without any memory issues? Like if I where to convert google maps into a wow zone that needs no loading, just fly around with smooth transitioning, what would that size limit be?
you’d have to ask the devs… but I would guess that the size is unlimited as the game loads the data in as it goes. you only have to look at the fast travel to each zone in shadowlands, you can see there are no loading screens, so shadowlands is all one map. I don’t know precisely how big it is, but it certainly doesn’t hold that entire map in memory at once.
I imagine there is probably a limit in the software, but I don’t think that is something we can know. that limit would likely be due to coordinates. as coordinates increase the number increases and the memory dedicated to those coordinates can get full. for example, one bit holds 2 values. one byte is 8 bits so it holds 64 potential values. wow is likely using floating point numbers though… so that is an approximation. floating point numbers… when they are small, they are reasonably accurate, but when we get larger numbers the accuracy is reduced. if you have a very large world, then players at the bounds of those worlds will be dealing with lower accuracy of their coordinates, so you’ll see a lot of glitching of their position in the world.
of course, they might have found a way to overcome that. using zones to fix that probably wouldn’t be too difficult for them… so I suppose you could say sky is the limit?
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But doesn’t it basically operate like google maps, without the curvature in each square unit (to form a globe instead a 2D wow flat)?
I can walk around in gmaps forever and it just loads the next step as fast as my pc/internet allows it. But if all this data was on a ssd, you could technically make a 1:1 real world sized globe to play on?
WOW map does not operate like google maps, the game maps operate like a plane map with a limit in north, south, west, and east.
Most videogames maps work like this with the only difference that in some maps west and east are connected without allowing the players to go to the north and south pole, with will equivalent to a cylindric shape and other games, have not only have the west connected to the east, they also have the north connected to the south, which means the shape that the game processed is a donut instead of a globe.
Of course, in all these games no matter if its just a finite map with limits, a cylinder, or a donut, in their respective lores their worlds are usually globes, those other shapes are how they implement a globe world due to technical limitations.
EDIT: By the way, google maps show a flap map, they project the globe over a 2D plane with east and west connected, is a cylinder. Try to navigate through the poles and you will see is not a 3D sphere map. Google Earth instead renders a 3D sphere allowing a more accurate map.
Someone should make a video about this, showing examples and have a wow dev talk about the size limits.
This is actually a really interesting subject.
World of Warcraft’s maps are split into chunks. Each chunk in WoW is actually fairly small.
When loading into a world space, it uses the coordinates of your character to determine which chunks to load based on your view distance.
A chunk consists of some terrain plus all of the objects on it, even if that object’s model reaches into other chunks. Therefore large objects are themselves split into smaller ones to approximately fit into its own chunk by Blizzard.
This means you will never get a loading screen regardless of how big the map size is, except when a lot of chunks must be loaded because of a teleport or map change. You may have noticed it goes very fast - WoW is very well optimised to load chunks very fast.
Chunks out of range consume no memory.
Chunks that are very far away but possible to see will sometimes have their models replaced with lower resolution ones to make the game use less memory, not to mention making it run faster, because you likely won’t be able to see that detail from so far away anyways.
In addition the client will only request and will only receive answers about NPC’s and characters in a certain, and fairly small, range.
So the answer to your question is: the total map size doesn’t matter other than disk space, only the area you can see matters.
How far can you see? Well, how much RAM and VRAM do you have?
Incidentally Minecraft also works this way. How large is that map? Well, it’d be infinitely large if not for the limitations of floating point arithmetic in the generation of chunks. There is no technical limit, really.
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