WoWExplored

Received some mails over the last couple of weeks about my wow-dev work. Some of the mails are just crap questions about stupid things from kiddies, but some are very interessting from talented people.

Basically it’s all about supporting them with exports (textures, models and so on). There’s one guy doing an UT3 map based on WoW-Terrain/models. How fun would that be: shooting heads on a wow-terrain

 
(Doesn’t that look nice, parallax mapping, smooth shadows and lot’s of other UT3-engine supported features. Wish the WoW-engine could handle such things )

Another one (Malu05 himself) is working on a futuristic movie set in a stormwind-like environment.

Once again: I’m always happy to help other people as long as they can proof some skill/work/projects they’ve done in the past. So feel free to contact me via e-mail or msn (wowexplored@windowslive.com).

-All images are posted with the autor’s permission-

It’s 4:24am and I’m #§¦@# tired… so here it is, the WMO export feature INCLUDING all of the models.

 
   Without models        With models

Btw: I HATE matrix-calculations… and what the heck did Blizzard think when they implemented their fileformats? No consistency at all. It’s like playing lottery, the chance you put the right vector-coordinate in your calculation is like 1 to 6345257

I got bored of starting WoWMS all the time just to look up a certain texture or something.
So what stops me from seeing some of the game-client files information in Windows Explorer? Nothing!

Just use some good ol’ COM shell extensions

Browsing BLP textures with Windows Explorer thumbnail preview, ahhh sooooo convenient.

UPDATE:

Fixed some alpha-issues and added an Infotip-Feature. Also added shell extension support for all the “important” wow filetypes (ADT, BLS, M2, DBC, WDB, WDL, WDT, WMO) :)

Finalized the ADT Viewer and ADT-Export things (Height/Shadow/Texture-Maps)

Now I can extract very highdetail height/shadow/texture-maps and use these in other programs like “EarthSculptor” or use them as a very highresolution minimap.

Put some work into WMO files today.
The result is a WMO Viewer and finally a WMO export feature (WMO to MS3D).

After some intensive hours of coding I managed to write some of the basics for my M2 Editor.

As a result here a few pics from a self created m2-modelfile (no replacement etc.).

Before I’m gonna implement a M2 Editor, I need to make sure that all the data is actually correctly mapped to my internal classes. And as I found out, there was a lot missing or just wrong (always used M2 Fileformat Reference sites on the web, but they are all out-dated and sometimes badly wrong). So I fixed some stuff, but unfortunatly some data is still unknown. This little tool makes it wwwwwaaaaayyyyyyyy easier to figure out what data at certain positions could be, so that’s my mission for the next couple of hours I guess.

Hmmm, maybe I should release my own M2 Fileformat Reference pages…

Just wrote my own little DBC Editor. Supports useful features like Dropdown-Value selection and validation etc. So your DBC files are always valid and won’t cause WoW.exe to crash

Here you see how I modify the Startoutfit table (giving Human Female Warriors a Northrend Shield/Sword and some fancy shoulders)

PS: Another thing I just finished is full M2 writing support. Now I’m finally able to edit every single bit of M2 files (Animations, Colors and lots of other stuff). An Editor’s coming soon.