relaxok

Wow it's been 6 months and I just now looked up this thread again.. didn't have time to look at stuff much due to work duties =) I actually borrowed a few functions from GridMap code to try loading heightmaps in my own code (don't worry, nobody will ever see it but me =p) I went through the code and other than not understanding the math, I totally get it indeed now.. great stuff.. I was banging my head against a wall for awhile trying to figure out why the return values were so messed up... and then realized.. i'm exporting terrain models from 4.2.2 with machinimastudio, but the maps are from 3.x! Cataclysm has wrought changes on the height maps as well Around echo isles was totally messed up.. so well, i knew Mulgore hasn't changed too much, so I used kalimdor 32_35 -- it's mostly correct but still seems weird so apparently it's changed a little bit as well.. i wonder, if it's possible to create .map files from the current client? the available ad.exe is of course for running with the supported 3.x client... or else i'd need a way to export terrain from the 3.x client... seems the extractor would be easier to find a version of though..? sorry if this is a bit off-topic.. you guys are just the most knowledgable in the world in this area outside Blizzard

Artists make them. You can use Difference Clouds filter in Photoshop to generate a heighmap and then export it as single channel raw grayscale image. It is the simplest format to work with. To calculate vertex height at any point of terrain you'll need to find interpolated height from heightmap (for example, using bilinear interpolation) in 0.0..1.0 range and multiply it by maximum height of terrain. Hm, I'm asking specifically about what mangos uses - it looks like there are two grids of 129 x 129 and 128 x 128 - what do the floats in m_V9 and m_V8 represent? They describe a triangle list somehow? (According to comments) - how are these made from the terrain model data? (adt) But, how is 128 x 128 high enough resolution to get accurate terrain heights on a map tile that big? Previous poster mentioned that it ALSO uses ray intersection (not just a height map check)- does that mean the server has all the terrain vertices loaded as well? Or does the client do the last bit of 'snapping' to terrain and the distance between objects on the server side can be significantly wrong because of the lack of resolution of the height map?

Thanks, this is very interesting code.. what is BIH though?

Hi there -- I've been making an mmo client/server similar to wow and I've looked at some of mangos for some insight. However, I can't really tell how height is dealt with on the server side.. Obviously on the server side, the server must know terrain geometry/height in order to move mobs around, know distance between objects, etc... Can someone explain how this works in the server or where I can look? Where are the heightmaps generated from and how big are they? Are they about 4096x4096*32bit floats? That is 67 megs per tile and seems unlikely.. is it at a smaller resolution and then interpolated? I do client side height by simple ray intersection with the terrain at the given X Z value, but that's sort of expensive and im sure the server doesn't actually load in all the vertices of the tile and do that much math! I'm very curious how this works.. thanks.. -relaxx

Hi there, i'm a regular blizz subscriber so i have the current client at all times, and don't have an older compatible 3.x one for mangos.. Is there somewhere that has compatible vmaps/dbcs hosted for download? I imagine making them from the current client would be disastrous.. I was going to try to use the PseuWOW client just to look around in server code as it runs (come to think of it, even PseuWOW probably needs all the old client data too so maybe this can't work? ) I guess I could always install vanilla then BC then lich king in a separate client folder and apply patch exes? would that work? (besides taking all day)

beautifully perfect! thank you! tons of great info to be gotten in that source..

Hi there -- i know it may seem crazy, but I'm wondering if anybody has worked on making an open-source 3rd party wow client-side app? I'm wondering because I am in the process of making one, for myself, which uses all the wow mpq data, just as a personal project.. and i'm wondering if anybody has worked on such a thing already? Also looking for any sites that have tons of information about how the client side works -- the main site i know is http://www.madx.dk/wowdev/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page Obviously you can learn quite a bit from the mangos server, like opcodes and the structure of the packets for them.. but there's a lot beyond that which would be interesting to work on. I own Machinima Studio which can work with and export all the maps and models into a format I know, ive converted a lot of data as test data for my engine -- too bad it's not open source though.. Cheers!