So, how many lines of code do you thik World of Warcraft (online) has?

Not talking lines or bytes of data; just the actual programming code.

What do you think?

A million lines?

10 million?

20 million?

And how many of those lines are old dead unused ones that no one could ever possibly go back and sift through to find and delete? Half a million?


I bet it's a lot.

You see, being a geek I know the difference.

The best example of "WHY THE HELL IS THAT WASTING MEMORY" is Excel 97. When you loaded the spreadsheet, you also loaded a mildly amusing flight simulator. If I recall correctly, highlighting X:23 through L:23 and hitting the graph icon invoked it. There was no disk activity, so it was resident in memory all along. It allowed you to fly through a blue/purple landscape and at the center was a pillar with a scrolling marquee of credits. No wonder Microsoft products are so slow.

A twenty-something year old game called "Quest for Camelot" is another good example. With functional code, it would have loaded and run fairly quickly. Ah, but ah. It had to account for perverts. While playing it (with my wife), I instructed Arthur to "fuck Guenevere". Her response was, "There will be plenty of time for that when you return, dear." So I instructed him "Fuck horse." Guenevere responded, "Those are not the thoughts of a pure man." Now in the instructions at the beginning of the game, it said you could only win if you were pure of heart and mind. My wife yelled, "If we loose this game because of that I'm going to be really pissed!!!!"

So, how many lines of code? Probably on the order of a million necessary, rather than gratuitous. The library routines don't count. In reality? Check out what Congress just passed and you'll be closer to the mark.

Though I doubt that WOW has much if any intentionally bloat code.

10 Gosub 30
20 gosub 10
30 gosub 20


:rofl:

I'd bet 85% is dedicated to handling the models. Endless drudgery code to detect collisions, prevent clipping, moving skeletons in a valid way, applying physics. Not my cup of tea. Boring, boring, boring.

I'd imagine around 7% is dedicated to the game engine: storyline handling, interface, coordination of events, data management, the good stuff.

Maybe 3% is dedicated to network traffic management and maybe another 10% in the server side software.

Maybe 5 million lines total? I'm excluding information in the database (like story info, item data, etc) and counting a line as code until you reach a ;, not carriage returns.

I bet most of the dead code is in the game engine, and that the server code is the leanest, cleanest code.


But that's just a wild guess on my part