For a fleeting moment, after 3.3.5a and before Deathwing did his thing, the old world (Azeroth/Kalimdor) used the old maps (as found in 3.3.5a).  Does anybody know if these maps are (1) obtainable and (2) useable in 4.3.4?  Is there a way, for example, to patch a 3.3.5a client to turn it into a 4.0.1 client and pull out the maps manually?
Any help appreciated
Scy

BIG EDIT - links to original (horrible) tool have been removed.

Dear All,

I've bitten the bullet and decided to add alpha-mapping into the project (now renamed from ADT Guru to ADTForge).  This means I'm a few more weeks away from release, but in the meantime, some teasers:

- Complete control over heights. Extract height information from greyscale bitmaps, combine, manipulate and transform that data, protecting or masking areas.


- Rip data from existing ADTs, then manipulate like any other data.


- Easily write ADTs and accompanying WDL and WDT files.  ADTs are complete with textures (including animations, overbright and cube-map flags) and ground effects, AreaIDs, impassible flags, and (soon) alphamaps for the three layers above the base layer - all of which can be applied on an Mapwide, ADT by ADT or Chunk by Chunk level.


Maybe ready before Christmas... ask Santa nicely.

Well this has me stumped.

I'm trying to change the random names generated at character creation.  The obvious place to do this is namegen.dbc, which I've altered to fit what I'm doing.  It's a simple enough dbc - ID, Name, Race, Gender.

The result, strangely, bears little resemblance to what I put in it.  Neither does it resemble the original, so it's not defaulting to that.  What seems to happen is that the names I list are randomly mashed together to produce new variants.  There seems to be some sort of logic behind the mashing - names generally stick to English syntax and rules - but there are odd exceptions.

This seems to be done in the client somewhere, probably the wow executable, as I can't find anything in the server code that does this job.

Will experiment and let you know what I find!

--

EDIT:  OK, done some playing.  This is really complicated.  What happens is that the client somehow takes parts of the names in the dbc and splices them together.  It seems to apply some rules to prevent the doubling of letters and silly combinations, but these rules are not totally robust.  They seem to work on a vowel-consonant boundary system.  Generally, the front part of a name is spliced with the back part of another (but not always).  For example, if my dbc contained:

Robert
Richard
Michael
Jake
Henry
Montgomery

Conceivable output would be:

Robard
Jakert
Henrael
Richy
Miche
Montry
Montgomard
Jakomery

- anything but the original names in the list (this makes sense, as the Blizzard dbc contains many names of NPCs)

And, if it goes wrong:

Roaely

My dbc contains about 2500 medieval names for both males and females.  Not surprisingly, some of the combinations this spits out are a bit stupid, but nine times out of ten they're ok.  I was really hoping it would just pick a name from the list and use it 'as is', but I can live with the occasional weirdo.

Hi All,

Following the demise of a WotLK project I was working on with a small team, I have decided to engage myself in a personal project that is being done mainly just to see if it's possible and to push myself hard in directions a little 'outside the box'.

Back in the day (maybe 15 years ago) I was a prominent figure in the fan-mission community for the Thief series of games from Looking Glass Studios.  If you've never played them, beg, borrow or (dare I say) steal copies of the trilogy - they're truly wonderful games which practically invented the stealthy, sneak-em-up genre.  The three games, The Dark Project, The Metal Age and Deadly Shadows (ignore the 2014 reboot), are set in a dark, dirty, medieval/steampunk city populated by thieves, guards, peasants, nobles, pagans, mages, necromancers, religious zealots and a secret society of 'Keepers' who preserve balance.  It's a rich, deep setting with a lot of lore which I've loved for a long time.  To this day, I play through the series on a regular basis.

I also play (and mod) WoW.

Now, for no particular reason, I have decided to fuse the two things together.  In other words, I am working on creating the city from the Thief series of games in the MMO environment of WoW.  This is a complete bottom-to-top reworking of virtually everything in WoW, which will simply be there as the client to drive what I produce.  It's almost an impossible task, but I have no time limit and like doing it.  I'm also not ashamed to butcher files from anywhere to get the job done.

This thread will be solely for me to 'blog' progress on this weird fusion project.  Hope you like what you see!

Scy

Hi folks,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I didn't want to put this in model editing (where there don't seem to be any other requests).  I'm hoping that one of you nice people with a little more experience of character model editing can help me with a minor edit.

Essentially, all I need is the removal of the ear and eyebrow submeshes from the WotLK blood elf models (male and female).  I can get as far as importing the original models into blender as M2i.  Removing the two meshes is easy (and I've also tried shrinking them and positioning them inside the torso so they can't be seen).  I can export, but have had no luck at all with M2Mod getting them back into M2 form.  I'm sure I've been doing something wrong, but can't fathom what.

Anyone with any insight into this, please do help!  Even better, if you know how to do this and have a few minutes spare, I'd be forever grateful if you could solve this for me.

---

Edit : SOLVED!  The ears and eyebrows are no more.  I was using the wrong version of M2Mod.  D'oh.

BIG EDIT (12th March 2016):

Sorry to say that this project has bitten the dust following a schism between team members relating to tone and style.  One half wanted to get gritty and realistic, giving players a tougher journey through the game world, whilst the other half wanted more whizz-bang-sparkle and lots of easy-mode stuff.  Not unexpectedly, the content and technology we created has gone two different ways, with neither remotely resembling a complete package.  

The future of Burning Wrath, as originally conceived, seems grim.  I will, however, make an effort to get some of the best features from what I retained out as general releases for the benefit of all who would like to use them.  I think the rather special way we handled transmogrification will be of interest to many (and that was all my work), so I'll pack it up as a stand-alone package that can be inserted into any 3.3.5 server (and, maybe, with modification, other servers too).  It's entirely done with database edits and dbc massage and thus requires no coding modifications to the server, but it manages to create a transmog system that is far more flexible and simpler than Blizzard's own.  Watch this space.

To ease the pain of the break-up, I've commenced a personal project that I'll be announcing in the correct part of these forums shortly.  Thanks for all your interest and support in Burning Wrath, and sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Scy

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Hi folks,

I'm starting this thread to prepare for the inevitable beta-phase of my project, Burning Wrath, and to post screens, discuss anything about the project and otherwise drum up interest.  Although I've never posted here, I've been a lurker for a long time and my project has been ongoing for over a year now.  I believe I am now at the 75% stage, and anticipate (after a lot of testing) getting a beta release out by the end of the year.

Burning Wrath - is a mod/repack for 3.3.5a clients that turns the game into a single-player experience.  This is not the same as a playerbot release (which aids a player by providing NPCs to adventure with) but a complete retuning of the game's content to suit a single player acting alone.  In Burning Wrath, all in-game features and references to other players have been carefully stripped away from quests, spells, the interface, etc.  The aim is for the finished repack to look and feel like a game that was always played offline and alone.  All dungeons and raids have been rescripted and retuned to suit solo play and battlegrounds have become exciting repeatable scenarios with challenging scripted enemy 'players' to outwit. World PVP zones (e.g. Wintergrasp and Tol Barad) have become quest hubs.

Burning Wrath - is complete up to the end of the WotLK expansion, but also includes a pre-cataclysm endgame in which players can attempt to foil Deathwing before he goes nuts (courtesy of the Keepers of Time).  This provides access to most of the Cataclysm content (zones, creatures and items), albeit in a very different storyline to the original (thus totally different quests).  The changed world of Cataclysm exists, in Burning Wrath, parallel to the old word - players can explore Uldum, Hyjal, Vash'jir, Gilneas, Twilight Highlands, Tol Barad, etc, but the old world remains as it was in pre-Cataclysm days.  In parts of the quest-line, however, the newer 'destroyed' world is visited.

Burning Wrath - has been designed to be challenging and slow-burning, offering players a chance to slowly develop characters and experience the entire world without the need to rush towards endgame. It's very much for those who prefer to spend a long time seeing and doing everything and enjoying the lore.

Burning Wrath - is based on the latest Trinity Core (modified to optimise the single-player experience) but includes some very special features.  The most exciting of which is our "Better than Blizzard" transmog system which offers far more realism and customization than the retail system.  You can keep your character's look indefinitely, without the need to revisit a transmogrifier every time you upgrade your gear.  You can even make armour items invisible, finally achieving the long-sought goal of hiding shoulders, boots, belts, etc.

Burning Wrath - cue controversy...  has removed Death Knights from the game.  Well, not NPC Death Knights, just players.  It is no longer possible to create or play this class, which has been stripped cleanly from the game files.  All items, glyphs, questlines, etc related to the class have been excised.  In their place, we offer many new race/class combinations (but not all those that current retail allows) and a wider range of character customization options.  A few DK abilities have managed to get redistributed to other classes that lacked a certain something.

---

So, that's the basic idea.  I'll post screens of the ongoing work over the next few days, and if anyone has any comments, ideas or questions, do feel free to use this thread.

Scytheria