That's a good question, Kobiesan.  

I'm slightly suspicious that Schlumf may be wrong about this one.  It seems odd to hard code something that would require localization (for example, in the Chinese client the loading tips are - of course - in Chinese, and in a substantially larger font).  There is, however, no difference between the US and CN client (at least, the wow.exe).  This seems to indicate that the font information for these tips is elsewhere.

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,

The stupid thing is, I knew how to do this a few months ago.  Now, I can't recall what I tweaked.

Anyway, can anyone quickly recall what records the model scale and light levels used on character creation and login screens.  I can't recall if it's a dbc, a frame, a glue, part of Trinity Core, or what....  Annoyed with myself.

Scy

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

This is going to be tricky.  I'm not requesting it, but any ideas or assistance is vastly appreciated.  I've started this thread because (1) it may be of interest to others and (2) somebody here may have an insight or brainwave that helps.

What I want to do:

Change the mechanics of Stealth (the Rogue ability) so that its effectiveness is dependent on the level of light around the character or npc using it.  In effect, to make Stealth much less of a binary affair - currently the ability puts you in two modes, hidden or unhidden, with no grey area.  I want a grey area, in which a model's transparency and statistical visibility varies by surrounding light.  I'm aiming to do this for WotLK on a Trinity Core, but am open to shifting client or server if a simple solution exists elsewhere.

Problems:

WoW, as far as I can tell, does not have any mechanisms for tracking the level of light falling on a model.  Certainly, the client must be passing information to the graphics hardware about this, but it's not information contained in parcels sent between the client and server.  The information is only sent from client to hardware.  Since client source code is (practically) unavailable, I will need to do something to the Trinity Core to make this work.

Vague Idea:

Add invisible (GM view only) gameobjects to maps wherever I want there to be light.  I'll call these 'LightMarkers' for simplicity.  These, of course, do not actually create light that players can see, but they simply mark light intensity.  Let's have a range of Lightmarkers (Lightmarker0, Lightmarker1, Lightmarker2 ... Lightmarker 10) for a good range of light levels ranging from 0 to 10.

For example, in-game there's a torch on a wall.  I want this to have a low light intensity, so I place an invisible Lightmarker3 on the same spot.  The players can't see it, but it's there all the same.

The position of a model relative to any nearby Lightmarkers is calculated, and some formula or other changes the intensities and the player's distance from the Lightmarkers into a figure that I'll call 'Exposure'.  Exposure ranges from 0 (complete darkness) to 1 (full, bright light).  Move closer to a Lightmarker, and Exposure increases.  Move away, it decreases.

The Stealth ability's code now gets re-worked to scale Stealth by the model's current Exposure.  I'm not sure yet, but I'm hoping this can be dynamic (e.g. if you enter Stealth in complete darkness and then move into bright light, your Stealth efficiency changes).

Pitfalls:

I'm not sure this system will work so well if Lightmarkers are, for example, behind something.  For example, if you are standing next to a wall, and there's a Lightmarker on the other side of it, your Exposure will increase... Maybe will need to give Lightmarkers a direction too?

Additional:

As well as the above, I'd ideally like the armour/weapons a model is using and its actions to have a noticeable effect on Stealth.  Wear more armour, your Stealth decreases.   Draw a weapon, your Stealth Decreases.  Move, your Stealth decreases (based on your movement speed).  Etc.

Why?

Good question.  I'll be starting a 'What are you working on?' in a short while.  Thanks for reading!

Scy

I'd suggest looking for a guide to CREATING new race/class combos (there are loads of these around).  All you want to do is the reverse, so these will point you to the files you need to modify.

Just a quick update:

Project has lost few months due to (1) people taking long holidays and (2) changes to the latest Trinity Core that resulted in us having to trawl through hundreds of thousands of our SQL scripts to make them compliant.

I think a few misconceptions exist about what we are doing.  For the most part, our core is exactly the same as any other 3.3.5 core - same quests, same mobs, same items, same instances - just tweaked to make pure solo play possible.  The gameplay and mechanics are relatively unchanged except where gameplay revolved around or required other players.

Many game features have been repurposed to do this. Auctioneers, for example, now buy/sell raw materials for crafting (at premium prices). Battlegrounds have become single player scenarios. Instance encounters that required different players to be in different places doing different things have been rewritten so a soloist can complete them.  

Our additional quest lines are exactly that - additional. They are only there to extend the endgame slightly.  They may not even ship with the first version unless we pull our fingers out.

Beta, when it happens, will simply be a case of people downloading a patch, playing it and letting us know what is wrong.  We will not be opening a server - the aim is to make wow a game that doesn't need one.

Scy

I'm struggling to understand the WMO file structure to be honest.  I would prefer to use Noggit to remove the unwanted WMOs and M2s (a much cleaner method), but I'm also having trouble with some strange entry heights (on entering a modified map in-game, the camera defaults to a position high above the map and the character falls into infinity).  I know this is fixable (having read about similar issues being solved), but sadly, the ADT file structure is even less fathomable to me and unfortunately those who have marked their issues as solved have not specified how they solved them.

Does anyone know of a better guide to the ADT file structure?  I can see the 256 chunks clearly enough when I open one with a hex editor, but I've no idea what the rest means.

I'll keep plugging away and let you know of any progress.

Oh, and 'he' is a 'she'. :shock:
Scy