Skarn

Classic RP server situation. Also, patch stealing is very common among WoW modding servers, there is nothing surprising in that. Just stop caring about them. Those who steal stuff never make things work well in the end.

Alphamapping Tutorial THIS TUTORIAL IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION As you have already learned in the previous part of our tutorial, World of Warcraft uses 4 layers to store the texturing data. Every layer of textures, except for the first one, is basically a usual grayscale image. So, there is a way to do texturing work a lot faster by editing those layers as a whole images. This process is known as alphamapping. You could see the result of alphamapping in the previous parts of our tutorial when you worked with our tutorial map. For using and learning alphamapping you would need a good 2D graphics editor. We recommend to use Adobe Photoshop CS6, but you can also use Gimp. The process will be explained using Photoshop, so some parts and functions may be different in your editor. Download our PSD alphamap demo Before you start creating your first alphamap, you should think about organizing the layers properly. As we are limited to 4 textures per chunk, you should decide what you are going to place on every layer of your alphamap. As you can see in the PSD demo above, Blizzard developers are not very organized with their layers, and it will only make things more complicated for you in the future. Now I’ll quickly explain my own system. First layer (the one you cannot edit) is always dirt for me, the second one is rock, then goes grass and the last one is darker/lighter grass. As you see, all 4 slots are already used, but sometimes you need to make a road or whatever you want. Most people just avoid using the dark/lighter grass layer which obviously makes your final zones look way worse. The solution is actually really simple: you just need to place your road on the same layer on the rock layer where there are no actual rocks around, so you’d be able to swap it to whatever you want. So, now when you’ve got the basic understanding of how texturing works, you can try creating your first alphamap. Step 1. Preparing your working space. Every ADT files basically contains 3 grayscale 1024*1024 pixels .png images which we will need to edit for creating alphamapped texturing. It is not convenient to edit all your .ADTs one by one, so we are going to create a single image for the entire map. Start your Photoshop. Go to “File” and select “New…”. Enter any name you like. Fill in width and height depending on the amount of .ADTs you have on your map. Just count how much .ADTs your map has in width and height and multiply each value by 1024. As an example I took a 5 x 5 map. So, 5 x 1024 = 5120. Press “Okay”. As a result you will see a white space. Pick up the “Paint Bucket Tool” and fill the area with black color. Now you need to divide your image into slices which represent every .adt file in your map. In order to do that, first go to “View”, choose “Show” and enable “Slice”. Also make sure “Extras” is also activated. Then find a “Crop tool” icon on the toolbar, right click on it and select “Slice tool” in the dropdown. Select the whole area with it, right click somewhere and select “Divide Slice…”. You will see the following window. Now right click on every slice and select “Edit slice options” and change the name of every slice to its coordinates on the ADT grid. It is boring, but it will save you a lot more time in the future. Step 2. Creating the alphamap Open the following folder: “WoWDevKit/Tools/Futa/Templates/”. Import some mountain templates from that folder in Photoshop and make a desired landscape layout out of them. You can copy, rotate and paste the same piece of template as much as you want. But don’t be repetitive in order to create a better map. Also try to avoid resizing mountains, especially making them bigger. It will make the texturing look blur in the game. So, here is an example landscape: I also recommend to create a separate layer and fill every ADT there with “chunks.png” that is provided in the “Templates” folder. It will help you to organise chunks properly when you need to create a road or something else that requires additional texture. Now create two additional layers out of dark grass and light grass templates. Switch back to your mountains layer, right click on it and press “Select pixels”. Switch back to one of the grass ones. Press “Delete”. Hide the revealed mountain layer. This is how it should look like: Do the exact same thing for the second grass layer (exclude mountains pixel from it). Export each layer + black background using the “Save for Web” function which can be found in the “File” menu. Select all the slices of your image in the windows where they are displayed. Set the extension to .PNG using the dropdown menu. Click Save and save your images to the “FuTa” folder of WoWDevKit. Step 3. Injecting alphamaps. Make a backup of your map files and open them in “FuTa.exe”. Keep in mind that you can only edited fully textured files with FuTa. It means that all 256 chunks should be filled with 4 textures. Open “Settings”, “Alphamap”, “Format” and set it to grayscale. Open every .ADT one by one and import your layers corresponding to the adt coordinate numbers. It is a long and boring process but you have to deal with it. At least, it is hundreds of times faster than manual texturing. Select every .adt one by one, go to “File” and click “Save”. You should save every opened file one by one. For speeding up the process you can use arrow buttons on your keyboard for navigating faster. Add the files to the patch or your working directory. Additional part. How to rip alphamap templates from Blizzard's maps. We have provided you with a bunch of alphamapping templates within our WoWDevKit, though it may not be enough, especially if you are working on a big project with multiple zones. So, the first idea of the solution to this problem is to extract the alphamaps from original .ADTs. However, there is a small problem. Unlike to Noggit, WoWEdit (Blizzard's map editor) does not care about the order of textures it paints on the ADT chunks, so sometimes multiple layers are messed up on one ADT. Though, it can be solved using a graphic editor. So, let's do it. Step 1. Choosing the proper .ADT to export from. I recommend you searching for the .ADTs that contain as much more mountains (or any other pattern you want to rip) as possible. Rip only those alphamaps that you can later raise with Noggit. From my own experience, some mountains styles like cliffs or spikes have the hardest alphamaps to raise. So, don't waste time if you want the immediate result, those alphamaps would require quite some terraforming skill to get raised. You should also try searching for some good repetitive patterns that can help you to create long mountain ranges by just copying them around. Here is an example of Blizzard using them in Hyjal (3.3.5a version). This particular mountain pattern is already ripped an released with our WoWDevKit. Step 2. Exporting and fixing the alphamaps. Open your .ADT file with FuTa, select the alphamap tab and press Export. All your 3 layers will be exported into the folder with the map files. Let's imagine that we want to rip that mountain range template. As you can see, some chunks are missing. You can find them as 1.69 x 1.69 cm squares on the other two layers. So, go to those layers. Scroll closer to the chunk by holding "Alt" and scrolling the mouse wheel until a pixel grid shows up. Select the chunk by using the "Rectangular Marquee tool", copy it and paste it to its place on the first layer. Do it for every missing chunk.

@Rangorn I believe everything is much simplier here. Someone wants to brag about his achievements but keep the teased people away from the knowledge. Case 2: You are just offended with all the community not serving you Legion or whatever knowledge you want on a plate. So, you sit there with your precious bits of knowledge that probably were not exactly hard to find and brag trying to make the community feel irritated. If I am wrong and you really do not understand why people stay on 3.3.5a that makes the situation even more sad. The real reasons are simple: a) many of us have started projects back in 2012 or smth when 3.3.5a was fresh. We have tons of work both clientside and serverside bound to core and storyline. b) Alastor's reasons. c) Amaroth's reasons. b) People like you not sharing 3.3.5a knowledge. And honestly, there are actually many people that contribute to your beloved wotlk+ expansions including Barncastle, Luzifix, all WoWDev.wiki guys, many others and even , surprise, me doing work on a new editor. Do you start sensing what is the main problem there? Am I triggered? Hell no. Just have to get myself something to do in the bus.

There was a thread in Ownedcore with all those builds cracked if I recall correctly.

Still wrong mipmaps. Best example is a texture with a lot of alphachannel. For example, tree leaves. After conversion in PS it is visible like in cata+ expansions, after Blipster and other software it looks like crap or more specifically as a swarm of flies in distance.

Without sharing thst found information, do not expect that to change anyhow soon. WoW modding exists only because of people sharing information on wowdev.wiki, ownedcore, modcraft, mcnet and other websites.

Yet I'd consider it more stable than 1.4 still...

Useful stuff for beginners. I need add this info to english tutorials. One question though, why do you write about SDL 1.4 at all? There is literally no use in it since beta was released.

Did not read the full thread, only the initial post. So, I am sorry if I am repeating already said things or not answering some questions. 1. There is only one outdated tutorial. It is the one explaining how to use Noggit. The others might lack some files in the devkit or some small issues. There are 100% complete and relevant tutorials besides that, so saying that no tutorial is up to date is simply wrong. 2. If anything is wrong or not present in _my_ tutorials, I am most likely aware of the issue as I am the one who wrote them. I just lack time to do everything at once but I want to get back to it in January - February. 3. Speaking about learning WoW modding. Those people who came to this scene before 2011-2012 had pretty much only one useful tutorial which is Eluo's Worldbuilding Basics. I can say it did not help me much. Besides that, we had a load of crappy tools that mostly worked through CMD. Noggit worked 10 times worse. Custom WMOs and M2s was only something we could dream about, tools for that purpose were either unusable and unfinished or did not exist at all in most cases. How do you think we learned everything? Practice, experiments, reading of WoWDev wiki and reading information provided by some experienced guys like Schlumpf. Now you have got everything to start. The thing is that now with all available information you can start WoW modding but if you don't dig deeper your experience will stop on the first obstacle you get (believe me WoW modding is made of them). So, take your time learning, ask questions, try things or, as much as I would not want to say it, leave.

Never use any other BLP software other than BLP plugin for Photoshop. For now it is the only software than handles BLP file format 100% correct with proper mipmaps support and all kinds of files opening.

Have you tried using WDBX editor for this purpose instead of 010?

It is very posssible that it is caused by texture dimensions issue.

In this video I am creating custom World of Warcraft styled worldmap using Adobe Photoshop and a custom .PSD template. The template can be downloaded here Big thanks to Vellear for providing Blizzlike assets for worldmaps.

Nowadays import plugins for Blender can be used for importing the models and exporting them out of Blender. It is better to use this new software rather than tools demonstrated on the video. But the overall technique is the same.

A tutorial on making _s textures.

This is a video I made for someone on ownedcore by the handle jbr373 , The map I'm using is also his however it's upconverted to Cataclysm. In WoTLK you can disable specular lighting to avoid the bright green landscape when you don't have a specular map with your tiles. In Cataclysm and up you can't so You have to make them.

NOTE!! -- I'm using 010 Editor 5.0 in the video, the one that's available now is 6.0, You'll need to change your 'Startup Action' to 'Display Empty Interface' in the General Options. To get to the options, click Tools then Options. If you don't do this, you'll get annoying 'cannot find file' errors. --

Sorry about this video being really long but I figured that the amount of people that are interested in Cata modding don't really know very much about the differences between WoTLK and Cata, so I made a much longer demonstration, semi-tutorial video covering the usage of my converter.

The name says it all. Some of those bugs have already been fixed in Noggit by Adspartan and other developers. Some information provided here is relevant to Noggit SDL 1.4 release.

REMASTERED edition of WoW 3D models importing with using OBJto M2 music is too loud ... my bad

So I got bored and jumped on Modcraft to check up on things, kinda got myself in the mood to do some modding.

So name of vid. says all you need to know ...

1st Videos Says " basicaly its very usefull for Nogit spawning since you cant place M2s thru nogit into WMO you can simply do it by this way " But my 1st method was not best so far there was problems with quality looses etc ... so this second method is quietly far way better