BlizzCon 2019 - CodeCraft: Exploring Blizzard Engineering
Join experienced Blizzard Engineers to ask questions about how your favorite Blizzard games are created.
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Join experienced Blizzard Engineers to ask questions about how your favorite Blizzard games are created.
- Containers weren't mature enough when Overwatch launched to use them. New projects at Blizzard are using Kubernetes.
- Teams with legacy software are slowly migrating them to containers.
- Diablo 4 uses C# and WPF for tools. Game is C++. Interop layer that glues them together.
- Overwatch is C++, tools are TED, in C#. Python for administration.
- Battle.Net - Java, Spring, Angular, Vue, Go, Python, Javascript.
- The game needs to be reliable regardless of if there are esports or not. Blizzard makes a game for players, not just esports. They need a reliable game for everyone, not just esports.
- Warden isn't sending private player data to Blizzard. It is GDPR compliant.
- GDPR compliance took a lot of effort.
- Blizzard operates like a lot of studios under one umbrella. Individual teams make tech decisions.
- Engineering council, engineering directors meet and discuss things such as coding standards.
- School isn't necessary, you can learn a lot on your own. Do some work and showcase it.
- For some games, Blizzard has to provision enough servers to handle peak load and leave it at that, as they were created before clouds and scaling was a thing.
- Overwatch autoscales VMs based on player demand.
- Classic was part of a hackathon project. Tried to load the code, then get it to run on a modern system.
- When Overwatch is rolling out a new feature, such as Role Queue, they use the Automation Team's headless Overwatch client to stress test things.
- Thunder Thursday - Internally stress test things.
- Work on open source software to get feedback on your code.
- Upgrading C++ standards is a scary thing that has to be timed correctly.
- WoW upgraded to C++17.
- When making something like Overwatch, you are restricted by developing on multiple platforms and the features available.
- WoW Classic APIs are an ongoing discussion about the appropriate balance.
- IT Implementation team flies out to datacenters and sets up, modifies, and tears down hardware.
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