Welcome to Deep's DBC Tutorial for World Builder.
What is this Tutorial for? Good Question. It's not to show you how to make maps, or use Noggit. Sorry, I'm that's not where my skills lie. It won't help you get the ladies... Unless they are into modding, then it might. But what it will do is help you get your shiny new maps working the way you want in game. The goals here are to explain what most of the DBC's do and how they function relation to making them work with the WoW Client. This Tutorial will grow as I figure out more and more. What I'm going to cover is:
Adding a new Area ID
Making Zones out of Groups of Area Id's
Coming Soon:
Adding 2d maps to the Client
Note: Some of this material has been put out in some shape or form by others on Modcraft. Credits to all who have done work before me.
Before we begin, I'm going to cover a few terms that should help use understand what we are trying to do.
Map: Sounds simple. A map is a collection of ADT's that are grouped into one big continent. Easiest way to think of this is like a House. Everything inside would be one 'map' (I know this sounds obvious, but I promise that it will make sense later.)
Area: A specific section of a map. Think of this as a room in the house. Living room or dining room.
Zone: A collection of areas. For example all of the bedrooms could be the "sleeping quarters" zone.
Now lets move on to the DBC's!
AREATABLE.DBC:This DBC holds a listing of all the individual Areas and Zones in the game. Inside this DBC we can create our own custom area id's and zones. Why would we need our own areas and zones you might ask? Because the Client and Server both need them, for mapping and for critical features such as graveyards...
Let's start out by making our own Area Id. (Remember, Area Id's are painted on in Noggit.) I'm using MyDBC Editor 1.2.2, and using zero based column numbers.
Right click on the last line and select "Insert line." Set the ID to something high but something you can remember, for this tutorial I suggest using 5000. Lets start filling in the Columns one by one.
1: MapID The map id that this area entry will be used in.
2: ZoneID Leave this at Zero for now.
3: ExploreFlag Each area id must have a unique exploreflag number. I started at 4000 and they seemed to work just fine for me. If you don't it will break the whole area / zone relationship. Trust me on this.
4: Flags: I set all mine to 0x41. A good place to look up these flags is the wow dev wiki. Links at the end of the Tutorial
5-9: SoundID's: These are used for area music and ambient sounds. Can be left at 0
10: Exploration Level: What level the area is for. 0 is all levels.
11-27: Names for each Locale. 11 is the column for english (enUS)
28-32: More stuff that can be set to 0
33: Minimum Elevation Yeah, just set to -500
34-35: Set to zero.
Now let's move on to the next section, making our own zone, which is a collection of area ids. It's rather simple. Remember column 2? ZoneID? Pick which area id is the master area for that zone, this will be the zone number and name shown in the client. For example we have an area called "Awesome Land" with an id of 5000. This will be our master area, so it's zone id is going to be 0. Now say we have 2 more areas called "Funhouse" and "Lounge" that are seperate areas but apart of the Awesome Land zone, you will set the zoneId of those two zones to 5000, the area id of Awesome Land.
In recap, when making a zone, use the following rules:
1. The zone name and number will be taken from a master area entry, which will have it's zone id set to zero.
2. Each area in that zone will have it's zone id set to the area entry of the master zone.
Links:
WoW Dev Wiki
http://www.wowdev.wiki/index.php?title=Main_PageAttachments:
MyDBC Editor Profile [attachment=0:2jgl6qwe]Profiles.ini[/attachment:2jgl6qwe]
