The tank MMO World of Tanks might soon get a beautiful new engine. The developers have been working on an in-house development since 2014, which is set to replace the aging Bigworld engine.
Many free-to-play games like World of Tanks operate as “Game-as-a-Service.” This means that the game runs for a long time and is kept up to date. Instead of replacing it after a short time with a souped-up successor with new features, the same game continues on.
While this has the advantage of always having your familiar favorite game with the known community and keeping your progress, games also age, and eventually, they simply don’t look fresh anymore.
The engine is the bottleneck
In order for a game to still look good over the years, developers continually enhance the graphics. However, there are limits to this. Sooner or later, the underlying game engine, the foundation of every game, simply becomes too weak. You can’t just merrily add new graphic features to a game and expect everything to work.
World of Tanks has reached such a point. The tank game from 2010 has already been graphically revised several times, but you can noticeably see its age. However, it may not be long now, as Wargaming claims to have been working on a new engine since 2014 to replace the Bigworld engine that was purchased back then.
Dynamic water, physics rendering, and dirt – The new WoT engine will be amazing!
In an interview with the website 80.lv, the developers at Wargaming presented their new engine. There were even pictures and videos to see. Tanks drive through beautiful landscapes in the film. The lighting effects are particularly impressive, as well as the physics engine, which makes objects collapse realistically.
In addition, there are spectacular explosions and dynamic water that splashes away as a bow wave in front of a moving tank or is displaced by the shock wave of the muzzle flash.
Further planned features of the engine include:
- Physically Based Rendering (PBR)
- Possibly HDR support
- Global lighting effects like lens flares and god rays in post-processing
- Textures are to be created from photographed and then converted surfaces
- Trees will come into the game with “Speedtree” and have their own physics
- Tanks will get dirty when driving through mud
The new graphics engine is already well advanced and is currently being tested on its own server. Therefore, it shouldn’t be long before the new graphics go live.
The new graphics engine matches a past statement from Wargaming CEO Victor Kislyi: “World of Tanks should last forever!”
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