Sandbox: Test HD Maps Starting October 11
It’s almost a year since we first saw glimpses of HD maps. Now WG have decided to put testing into the wild to see how real world hardware copes with the changes. If you want to join the test click the link APPLY NOW .
From Wargaming:
Although we kept key gameplay-defining elements where they are, our enhancements made a huge difference to the look and feel of gameplay. That’s why the graphical overhaul begins on Sandbox. It gives us time to read your feedback, identify places where further tweaks make sense, and implement them to ultimately deliver a fine-tuned experience to production servers.
The second (but no less important) priority for us is performance. Changes this massive demand a lot from your graphics cards. So we put extra work into optimising stability and frame rate on medium settings and older PCs, while maintaining the improved visuals. The Sandbox allows us to test graphical changes in the wild, see how they perform on different configurations, and further optimize the system.
Map changes and new Graphics Engine
World of Tanks was a bit of a looker for its time back in a day, but it soon lost much of its visual appeal. We pumped up the game’s looks several times by simply tweaking its engine. However, it proved to be a mad race against the technology that was moving a lot faster than we possibly could. The BigWorld engine simply couldn’t keep up with it. By 2014, we realized that reworking all in-game content to deliver better visuals was like shooting ourselves in the foot as it would have caused severe performance issues. We went the other way, and brought client engine development in-house to best tailor it to the game’s needs. It took our graphics programmers three years to bring it to the cutting edge of technology with no adverse effect on performance.
We’re excited to walk you through the improvements that took this long to implement and explain how each new technology redefines the game’s looks. However, as we’re still at the testing phase, let’s start by outlining its agenda and the areas we’ll be focusing on.
Agenda
Right now, we’re in the process of redesigning all in-game maps for greater visual fidelity. You’ve seen a few reworked arenas over the year, but we all know that simply looking at them on a big screen is nothing compared to a true field test. Are you eager to take a stroll? As of now, we’ve got 12 overhauled maps waiting for you:
Testing Priorities
We decided to deploy maps to the Sandbox first, as it allows us the most flexibility in terms of hot fixes and other adjustments. As we test the HD maps together, our priorities are polishing overall gameplay and performance optimization. The main intention is to ensure visual improvements have an overall positive impact on the experience and don’t damage gameplay. Plus, we want to check how new maps run on your gaming stations, test a variety of presets, and ensure their release has no adverse effect on framerate and game stability.
Gameplay
When exploring reworked maps, you’ll find new objects here and there, and notice that some familiar areas got a solid makeover. Each map now tells a story of its own and doesn’t feel lifeless and abandoned. The mountain on the Mines was replaced with the ruins of a medieval castle. You’ll see a turned over tanker spilling oil on Al Halluf. There’s an ancient Greek temple overlooking the Cliff, and a giant artillery piece on the Steppes.
We injected maps with extra detail to give each battlefield a unique, distinguished flare and provide even deeper immersion. If you find yourself driving through the village on Westfield, for example, you’ll notice how much livelier it looks now, thanks to smaller, newly-added objects. They create a feeling that the battle you’re fighting is part of a much larger conflict with its traces seen everywhere.
We kept gameplay-defining elements where they are for the first 12 maps. Routes along with main gameplay themes and overall focus remain the same. If you look at the improved Malinovka, for example, the wide open field, hill, and houses are right where they were. Although the sheer number of new graphical content makes it appear unfamiliar and a little overwhelming, go ahead and do what you always do on Malinovka. Rush to the hill, use a house for cover, and scout the field in the first seconds of the battle. These time-proven tactics will work just fine.
NOTE: Further down the road, other maps might undergo a more solid makeover with sensible changes to gameplay. The graphics overhaul gives us a chance to fix long-standing gameplay issues you reported to us over the years, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
You’ll also notice that your tank causes ripples and waves rolling through a river and its tracks crush the grass, leaving traces. Worry not; these effects won’t give away your position as they’ll only visible to you and are there for the purpose of adding extra realism.
New elements, effects, and graphical improvements won’t change core gameplay on the 12 maps being tested, but seeing them for the first time might leave you confused for a second. Luckily, these are exactly the things we’re going to dive into today, in as much detail as possible, to get you battle-ready.
Visual Enhancements
Unlike vehicle models that we reworked for HD in batches over the last few years, applying the same approach to maps is virtually impossible. There’s more to the process than just creating realistic trees and terrain—we had to completely overhaul the underlying technological base— because enhanced visuals weren’t the only goal. This time round, we wanted to lay the groundwork for future improvements, which would let us advance graphics in tandem with technology.
Lighting, water, terrain, flora, sky—every single element you get on a map went through a proper makeover to meet modern graphical standards. These enhancements lead to a far greater boost in image fidelity than a simple resolution increase. Space is more realistically illuminated, battlefields feel more dynamic and active, and everything looks much clearer and nicer. It’s a staggering difference from the game as you know it. World of Tanks looks and feels differently now, but at its core remains the same game we all love so much. To deliver this level of visual fidelity, we used the latest Physically-Based Rendering technology for graphical content processing and rendering.
Revamped Terrain
Vast outland: Remember how scenery would morph into foggy nothingness several hundred meters beyond battlefield borders? Well, it doesn’t now. We added space by increasing the terrain to 32 km2. Each arena actually is a vast expanse of land now, and although it’s the same 1 km2 battlefield, you can see beyond its borders like you would in the real world. We used Outland technology to let you look into the distance and created unique terrain for every map, designing miles upon miles of outland.
Realistic textures: The old graphic engine limited texture blending to four layers, giving the land a somewhat artificial look that fell dramatically short of real 3D. The new graphics engine lets us blend 16 textures so that terrain looks truly volumetric, detailed down to the smallest blades of grass. There’s also a special procedural virtual texture that now delivers realistic landscapes with no added pressure on performance.
Terrain deformation: Let’s talk magic tricks. The one that most of you must have seen is the so-called ghost shell, when the damage the first shell caused to terrain disappears upon firing eleven times. We fixed it so you can fire as many as you want and still see where each went, and it’s now more vivid as the new effect deforms both grass and terrain.
Soaking: Have you noticed how a tank would come out of water completely dry? It must have raised about as many eyebrows as disappearing shell traces. With the new graphic engine, tanks do get wet, just like any other environmental object that interacts with water.
Responsive Water
A completely reworked water rendering system delivers greater visual fidelity and support physically-based shading. Effectively, there’s volume and depth to rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. Each of these water types looks different and naturally reacts to what is happening around it. As wind rushes along the water, you see ripples and waves.
As we step up to the new graphics engine, we also visualized interaction effects between water and in-game objects, introducing deformation, sea foam, and underwater effects. So when you’re crossing a river to close on an enemy, your tank disrupts water as it moves, while firing a shell creates circularly spreading 3D waves over its surface.
Diverse Volumetric Flora
The greenery you get on maps is getting a lot more diverse with over a hundred unique trees and ten variations for each ecotype recreated from the ground up. Along with adding diversity, we put extra work in to create trees that have a nice amount of volume and look realistic close up. They no longer seem as if they were made up of several flat images.
Flora doesn’t just align with the overall map setting; it comes in different shapes and sizes. Painted in various colors, foliage reflects the seasons, giving you bright yellow and red for autumn arenas, lustrous dark green on summer maps, and snow sprinkles down from the branches on winter battlefields.
The work on greenery didn’t end with ramping up their looks. To breathe life into the maps, we introduced special interaction effects between vehicles and flora and light transmission.
Photorealistic Skies
To improve your immersion into a realistic world, we fully reworked all content and created photorealistic skyboxes for every map. In addition, we added moving clouds just to give arenas a bit more of a dynamic feel.
Advanced Lighting
A completely reworked lighting system with realistic shading/lighting models and environments introduces more accurate shadows, reflections and global illumination, enhancing the look and realism of everything you see.
To ensure battlefields are illuminated realistically, we created a model that follows the natural lighting laws of physics. With it, all we have to do is choose a light source for in-game objects (e.g. daylight, sunset or, let’s say, light coming from a campfire). The technology takes care of the rest, calculating and creating lighting and shading according to the set criteria, while artists and special effects specialists, who did it back in the day, apply their skills to create other effects.
Global illumination technology adds harmony to the picture, accurately simulating how light reflects and refracts between different surfaces, creating an array of indirect lighting sources. In technical terms, it computes the way that light is bounced from, or absorbed by, materials in a scene and ensures that highlights come from the same place and shadows are cast in the same direction, even across multiple objects and layers. For example, when sunlight comes through a colored translucent surface, it casts a shadow on the surfaces it reaches, transforming their color scheme.
Just look at the two images below: one of them seems more realistic thanks to global illumination, with the orange canvas casting a shadow on the tank’s side armor and cobbled road.
Improved Shadows
Shadowing in environments looks nicer than ever before, adding greater depth, beauty and realism to battlefields. The new Adaptive Shadow Maps technology calculates shadows from static objects (houses, stones, trees, etc.) and saves them in a special reusable shadow texture, reducing the load on the graphics card and processor. As for dynamic objects like tanks or falling trees, they receive improved dynamic shadows. Most visibly, particle effects interact with shadows in the new graphics engine. Fumes, dust, and smoke now receive and cast semi-transparent shadows. For example, when a tank is moving in the shadow cast by a mountain, the dust from its tracks doesn’t glow unnaturally (as it used to). Instead, it takes the mountain’s shadow and is lit with consistency, in harmony with the tank and nearby objects. Lastly, material shadow effects are there to accurately reproduce the depth of various materials.
Destructible Objects
The reworked maps get long-awaited Havok® Destruction technology. Its introduction begins with smaller destructible props like stone hedges, wooden poles, barrels, and brick.
NOTE: We’re far from done fine-tuning destruction, but decided to show it to you regardless, to collect your feedback. That’s why you might run into some odd-looking bugs. For example, pieces of wood and other small destructible objects sometimes become stuck in a vehicle upon destroying them. It’s a rather common issue for games that use Havok® Destruction, and the dev team is working to get rid of it. If you come across any other bugs, go ahead and report them on the Sandbox forum.
Post-Effects
As we move to the new graphics engine, we introduce a variety of new and improved post-processing effects. Bloom, god rays, chromatic aberration, and screen space reflection all help improve image quality and clarity of detail to ultimately deliver sleek modern visuals.
Performance
Graphical advances naturally up the pressure on your graphics card. We worked a lot on performance optimization, reducing the overall memory footprint of graphics, using streaming technology to rework graphical sub-systems from the ground up. Now, all graphics elements that don’t change frame-to-frame don’t get rendered and are reproduced from the cache. Along with caching, we optimized graphic elements to reduce the memory load even further and give you the headroom to enable extra effects.
- Terrain: The new graphics engine adds a virtual texture with 16 layers, blended using a complex formula that works faster than the four-layer textures used in the older graphics engine
- Water: The heavy-on-performance reflection generation process was replaced with the cutting-edge Screen Space Reflection algorithm, significantly lowering the load on the graphics card
- Adaptive shadows considerably cut down the pressure on performance
- The battle UI logic was optimized to reduce the load on memory
- 3D scene and post-effects aren’t rendered behind static UI elements (e.g. minimap, damage panel, etc.), which saves FPS
- Multi resolution particles were implemented to smooth out FPS drops when multiple particle effects are being rendered on screen at the same time (e.g. explosions and fumes)
Following a great deal of internal playtesting that showed no drop in FPS on older rigs, we’re now readying to release 12 reimagined maps in Sandbox to gather game data, feedback, and smooth out performance going forward.
Maps now look completely different with enhanced graphics, and you might not recognize an arena as you once knew it. It’s a lot to take in, so please be patient. Let it sink in before you rush to share your first impressions and keep in mind that none of this is final. If you think any of the improvements are heading in the wrong direction, or believe we should be looking at something that isn’t on this list, please let us know. With so many changes, it’s difficult to predict all the outcomes, but with your help and feedback, we believe we can continue to head in the right direction.
Sounds dope.
very good work WG, everything to come looks great!
One thing I have to say about WG is they have always been really good at optimising World of Tanks for older systems, and good on them.
Dem russians and their potato pcs are the main consumers after all
Yah it sucks! I spent good cash on my pc, yet I feel like I wasted money.. all the potatoe pc’s get all the love. Ppl who invest in hardware are most likely a better paying WG customer than the potato pc community. So how about some high end love!! No offence, but it’s true
yeah, the russian are doing it right! dont waste your money for a better grafic-card, invest it into a new tier VIII sovjet premium!
Honestly whats to optimsie?, people have been playing/making games like this for decades.
Ie. small arena shooters With low numbers of players been doing it since the days of Quake.
I would be far more impressed with some actual good maps rather than tarting up the same old stuff we have benn lumbered with for six years.
ps. Which also after six years they still cannot even manage to take out the well known expliots and people reacheing areas the should not be able to reach..
They removed all my favourite maps left all the shite maps. Unless you live for medium tank play.
I was under the impression that ghost-shell meant something completely different…
i think from the screenshots alone you can tell that the hd maps look awesome, but why did they need to completely change the tone and setting of the maps?
look at mines and cliff. no more fresh green tones and tons of pillars and castle walls? cliff looks almost like a desert now with a lighthouse completely out of place in regards to the greek(ish-looking ruins)
before you shoot me down as a whiner, i think change is awesome and hd maps are a must and look well done, i just don’t understand why the unnecessary changes were done.
Hope there will be some green maps left when they are done 😉
I think it’s just to add some variety. Right now a lot of the maps that are primarily cooler colors; lots of green or bluish-green with overcast effects that really emphasize this. Keep in mind that the more you desaturate a color, the cooler it gets, so even maps like Overlord or Tundra, that look warmer from the minimap, have a cooler feel. Many of the maps that have been removed in the past (Province, South Cost Severogorsk, Northwest, Dragon Ridge) were either featured a predominantly warm palette, or a brighter atmosphere.
Also keep in mind that smaller details are going to stand out a lot more on brighter maps, which I feel is why they’ve chosen to display the ones they have.
I remember murovanka remained very green. Although it became brighter
Murovanka did get brighter, but we’ll see what happens to it on this map remake
Maybe will be changed to desert maps, to force you to buy desert camo ;-).
Bub bye War thunder! If this is as good as you say it’s going to be! I’ll take another year of premium, take my money!
Hey Rita your last Q&A I asked you if havok was happening, you said no, it’s been scrapped (mmmmmm)
P.s fire your info source 😉
I mean, shots in World of Tanks don’t tend to fly through the ground, so their maps have been better than War Thunders since pretty much forever.
Still waiting for the weather effect and night mode
Be careful what you wish for meng!
It will never happen! The average Player is already stressed with the normal gameplay. how can you expect that they will know how to turn on their lights?
hahahaha. yeah right even wasd is too much for some ppl as they always drive into you 😀
night, snow storm, rain, fog just what we need to make the maps feel diferent
night mode should be easy to implement (there’s a mod for it that does it in an ad-hoc way). weather effects might hit performance since the one on the consoles are stupidly highly optimized for consoles, which have fixed hardwares. desktops aren’t.
Good job to the graphic desighn department but wg doesn’t know the meaning of priorities. People leave the game lately not cause the game looks bad (constantly becoming better) but because the balance and mm is laughable! A broken game that has stunning graphics will always be a beautiful broken game! So spend your resources on what really matters: game balance! And i don’t think people will wait for a long time (us server merging).
Then play something over powered and quite your bitching!
That’s why this game will die off. Cause you have absolutely no expectations from wg. So what you tell me Liam is that you are fine with the mm and balance and what you think the game needs the most is hd maps! Even quickybaby and jedi think mm is broken but the average wg fan boy thinks it’s OK!
Well the MM is a whole lot better than what it used to be, yeah you get bottom tier a whole lot more often, and WG will have to fix that issue, but at least i won’t be facing 13 tier 10s in my tier 8 anymore, to it at least made bottom tier matches more bearable.
But MM is undoubtedly nowhere near completion.
What they are doing in the next patch however is something i quite like: Balance tanks on their role in MM, it’s one step in the right direction, all they need to do now is the whole amount of bottom, mid and top tier matches one does get and they have a solid MM, Stuff like skill balance could always be added later in order to have teams with similar skills facing each other. ( 2, coupld of lemons and tomatos vs. 2 unicums a couple of lemons and tomatos)
I personally don’t give two shits like u do. I log in and play. I win, I win! I lose oh well! Life goes on.. dying and adapting is a part of the game. Quick baby and whoever the other guy is do not chose my happiness in a game. If wot dies I’ll find something else. Time for you to realize this too.. cheers!! And remember there is life outside of tanks meng 😉
“You’ll also notice that your tank causes ripples and waves rolling through a river and its tracks crush the grass, leaving traces. Worry not; these effects won’t give away your position as they’ll only visible to you and are there for the purpose of adding extra realism.”
*phew* i primarily drive high tier lights and was getting worried that these effects would be an indirect nerf to LTs, especially those moving bush effects when you drive into them
Tried to logon and participate, the link to join is only for EU players ~ is there a link for NA players?
Finally!!!
But wait, can the Crappy computers of the majority customer base handle all of it???
I mean wasn’t that the excuse they gave us a while back when they shelved this before?
For the left year they told us many things were cancelled and postponed in favour of HD maps and now only 12 are even finished?! That’s very disappointing
Whiner, whiner keys on fire.
Yes HD the maps the same fucking maps we been playing for 2.5 fucking years
Have a HD map you dumb cunts and be quiet
fuck you WG morons for still fucking the game
it’s called a visual update, you dense….. fabulous personality.
If I were you I’d prolly quit playing. This game seems to mess with you blood pressure. Wargaming owes you nothing. You play the same maps for 2.5 years and hate it?! The jokes on you retard.
Isn’t it funny how people don’t complain about playing chess with the same board and pieces for 100s of years, but get upset about the exact same thing in WoT? The opponents are what makes the game interesting (and that’s where the actual problem lies: WoT needs ELO and SBMM).
i don’t understand some of the unwarranted rage on the comments. like what i’ve been saying all this time, if you think you can do better, go apply to Minsk, or make a better competitor that didn’t fuck up like AW. if you can’t, clam it, and offer a suggestion on how things “might” become better than some baseless ragespam. game developing isn’t just pressing a few buttons and go gold.
more insightful feedback, less animal noises. we are civilized men, and i expect you to speak in a civilized manner, not as overpriviledged sheep
Some of the spiel sounds like whats a bluff to the boss, to let u string out being employed.
even if you give helpful information the fuckers will sell you a new Tank
rather than give you a new map or even an old map thats been removed
i can give heaps of suggestions to fix the game ,,
but Fuck WG they dont listen
All the graphics eye candy in the world don’t mean squat if the same broke-@ss RNG is the biggest drawback of the game.
You and a lot of other ppl use RNG for your bad skills in wot. If rng played such a major roll in this game, everyone for the most part would be pretty equal..
Wow, there’s weak ass comeback… If RNG wasn’t such a prevalent force in WoT, we wouldn’t have 90-some episodes devoted to “Look how WoT fux over this unlucky bastard in favor of this next scrub.”
It ain’t comedy when it’s 90 episodes later. That’s a broken game dynamic, coded by people, who just as well could code it NOT to.
WoT used to be fun, now it’s just immature egos gotta swing their dick because, “I’m better than you because I REKT U @ pixel tanks!”
There’s legit reason over half the people who post here DON’T play WoT exclusively, if it’s such an epitome of what every game aspires to be more like.
Enhanced graphics won’t save a game led by a broken leadership making poor decisions at the expense of their players. Just look at WT and AW.
Finally!