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Comment by wyldfire

3 days ago

As others have said in this thread, they did.

But to answer your question as if they had not yet: it's never "just" recompiling. It's:

* recompile (and fix any warnings/errors indicated by the compiler)

* re-test ... the entire game

* fix the bugs that are encountered in test

* release/publish the game for Windows ARM64

Whatever this effort is, it's much much more than "just" recompiling. You could imagine motivated individuals on the engineering team chipping away at this list of their own accord. But following through with a product requires significant effort and coordination that often is weighed against the potential revenue that this new market could provide.

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wyldfire

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mort96  3 days ago

A really fun thing is that arm and x86 have different char signedness: char is signed on x86, unsigned on arm. This has tripped me up more than a few times when I try to compile software that's only been tested on x86 for an arm machine.

Now WoW already supports Apple Silicon on macOS so most of that was already taken care of, but I'm betting there's a lot of Windows-specific code in there too.

pdpi  3 days ago

They've supported macOS through all of PowerPC, Intel, and now ARM. I'm sure Windows on ARM should be trivial for them.

  • mort96  2 days ago

    They did the work your parent comment describes for macOS on PowerPC, macOS on Intel, and macOS on arm. They can do the work, but it's still work.

    • jajuuka  2 days ago

      I think it also depends on urgency. When Apple unveiled Intel and Apple Silicon they were very clearly the future of the platforms with large buy in from day 1. Blizzard seems to have a good relationship with Apple since they released the Apple Silicon version of WoW almost the day the first laptops started shipping to customers.

      Windows on ARM isn't really the same ballpark. They were still there early, but the platform is still changing quite a bit.

MangoToupe  3 days ago

> * re-test ... the entire game

That seems a bit absurd. Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways. Especially if you wrote the game in relatively portable code to begin with (as WoW almost certainly was).

I mean idk, maybe windows arm64 is a uniquely nasty target. But i'm skeptical.

  • kergonath  2 days ago

    > Surely many parts of the game won't likely have bits of code that interact with architecture in unique ways.

    I came across a performance-killing bug that made the game unplayable (less than 1fps on a Mac Studio). It happened in a couple of dungeons (I spotted 2). From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance. There was no problem on Intel Macs, AFAICT. My old MBP was terrible but did not get any performance hit.

    This is what can happen any time you don’t test even a tiny corner of the game. Also, bear in mind that this depends on graphics settings and you get a nightmare of a test matrix.

    • MangoToupe  2 days ago

      > From my tests it was caused by a specific texture in the field of view at a certain distance.

      Surely that's a GPU thing and not an CPU thing, yea? Or was something about the texture processing architecture-dependent?

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