Posts with tag workshops

Following the pattern held in previous years, Blizzard will again be loaning out some of their top developers for panels at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, CA. WoW's former Lead Producer Jeff Kaplan, a.k.a. Tigole, presented the keynote speech at last year's GDC, and this year two top developers will be on tap to give horribly esoteric panels.

Brian Schwab, Blizzard's Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer, will be presenting a lecture on AI architecture ...

"AI programmers rarely use a pure architecture such as a State Machine, Planner, or Behavior Tree in isolation. Rather, several symbiotic architectures are mashed together, resulting in an overall architecture that is unique and powerful in its own way. This lecture is designed as a series of three mini-lectures where you will hear about several mashed up AI architectures along with intriguing lessons and insights."

... and Erin Catto, Blizzard's Principle Software Engineer, will be presenting a workshop on physics engines.

"This one-day tutorial continues the 10-year tradition of the Math for Programmers and Physics for Programmers tutorials by bringing together some of the best presenters in gaming physics. Over the course of a day they will get programmers up to speed in the latest techniques and deepen their knowledge in the topic of physical simulation."

More information, including panel times and availability, can be seen on BlizzPlanet's writeup of the announcement. This is basically total nerd talk -- it's very unlikely that we'll have any new WoW-related info from these panels, unlike Kaplan's keynote, but anything is possible. We'll keep you posted.

The new Wintergrasp, I am here to tell you, is a lot like the old Wintergrasp. Which isn't a bad thing -- though Blizzard has made a few significant tweaks to the game's big non-instanced battleground, it's still the same match it's been (and a good match it is, if you ask me). The main difference is that all of the workshops outside the keep are now up for grabs, so the defending team can now not only take out the southern towers to knock some time off the clock, but also lock down the workshops to create a vehicle shutout. That's tough to do, in my experience, though -- even if you grab the two lower workshops, it leaves the top two open for attack, and odds are that the lower two workshops will really only be taken if all of the towers are down and the vehicle drives down south need something to do.

So the gameplay hasn't been changed that much, but it is nice that the requirements for the daily quest have been lowered -- we now only need 10 kills of the other side, and there are more NPCs around to count for those kills, so I actually finished both the kill and vehicle quests without even trying. It would be nice for Blizzard to somehow streamline the raid invite/share quests process that happens everytime WG begins, but they're leery of that, given how honor farming was such a problem in the auto-invite AV. And I have one personal request: Blizzard, can you please have me auto-dismount when I try to pick up an RP-GG? I'm fine with not mounting while I have one, but every single time I try to pick one up I get that error message, when all you need to do is auto-dismount me like any other object I use while mounted.

The biggest WG change isn't even in the battleground, it turns out -- most of the players I've talked to are just thrilled that you can now fly over Wintergrasp on the way from Dalaran to Sholazar Basin (and it figured 3.1 would drop a week after I finished the Oracle rep grind). I've even heard you can get credit for winning the BG if you're in the air when your side wins. Though a fix for that will probably have to come during the next round of WG improvements, whenever that will be.