Request - How To for Mapping/WoW Data

[Tanaris4]

Was just curious if anyone knew of a good "101" style article/guide to understanding how game worlds are mapped.

I wanted to start working on using map data for players to move better (vs. the routes they are following today) and I'm not sure what a good starting point would be.

I take a look at wowmapper, then see something like:

Bounding box chunk (28 bytes):
id		char[4] (BBX)
size		size_t
bbmin		float[3]
bbmax		float[3]

ADT position chunk (16 bytes):
id		char[4] (POS)
size		size_t
x		int
y		int

Index chunk (8 byte + size*sizeof(int)) :
id		char[4] (IDX)
size		size_t (num indices)
indices 	int[size]

Vertex chunk (8 byte + size*sizeof(float)*3):
id		char[4] (VTX)
size		size_t (num vertices)
vertices	float[3][size]

And am horribly confused as to how I could/should use this data.

Thanks in advance!

[caowenyu]

ADT/v18 - WoW.Dev Wiki
try this.
and search ppather in google.

[Flowerew]

This is how the Sample_MeshExporter writes the parsed data for each ADT to a file. Every exported file contains chunks of data (similar to the chunks used by WoW) in the order you quoted. So let's say you open a file that has been exported, it will contain: a bounding box chunk contains the real extends of an ADT, cause the exported data includes a border which is helpful in recast, a position chunk contains information about the placement of a particular ADT in the world and its coordinate, a index chunk and a vertex chunk which contain the geometry of the ADT.

In c++ you would do something like this:

struct BBXChunk_s {
 char id[4];
 size_t size;
 float bbmin[3];
 float bbmax[3];
};

...

std::ifstream f( "12_16.mesh", std::ifstream::binary );
BBXChunk_s bbx_chunk;
f.read( reinterpret_cast<char*>(&bbx_chunk), sizeof(bbx_chunk) ); // read bbx chunk
std::cout << "Bounding Box Minimum X:" << bbx_chunk.bbmin[0] << std::endl

Hope that helped.

p.s.: What caowenyu posted is how wow chunks looked in v3.3.x, use that if you want to write your own parser for the old format. Cheers