Re: Sylvanking's stupid fucking questions of day
I guess I just read the question "how did WoW do it" and ran with it.
It is just a different way of using dynamic loading. The invention of dynamic loading is what makes gaming possible because you don't have to load everything at once and you load just what you need. In EQ2, certain resources are linked to a zone, such as textures, geometry, etc. When you enter the zone, you are prompted to fetch those resources before continuing.
WoW and Vanguard dynamically load on the fly, so instead of loading all of the resources at once, you are loading based on your position in the game world. It is a slower and streamlined loading process, which is why you don't realize it is going on and it doesn't imapct your system performance that much. You would find that if you attempted to zip through the world in WoW or vanguard at a very fast pace, you would find yourself seeing unloaded textures and holes in the world and missing objects.
EQ2 started using this process a long time ago, but zoning will never completely disappear because it is built into the core of the engine. This is how they can now create very large zones with a wide variety of textures (JW, KP, etc).
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