[Discovery] Interesting things in minimap files

[XpLoDWilD]

Hi everyone,

I've been looking around in minimap files, especially in "development" minimaps. As you may know, Blizz removed Designer and Programmer islands around patch 2.4 -beginning of Lich King expansion-.

But recently, I found that minimaps of "development" map were still there... And they contain interesting things, like early Northrend map, a copy of NorhtrendBG, "Sarah Land", some tests (caves, or some kind of holes), but lots of unknown things too, like some small maps in the middle as well as in the bottom left corner.

Here's the complete map (it's huge, 8192x8192)
h t t p : / / img38.imageshack.us/img38/4467/development.jpg

This part :
h t t p:/ / i m g32.imageshack.us/img32/1962/emerald.jpg
Located a little bit over the middle, looks interesting because it looks like Emerald Dream (same style).
And you can find the same style lower :
h t t p : / / img32.imageshack.us/img32/7100/emerald2.jpg

So... We are maybe in presence of some early map of emerald dream ?

[Confucius]

looks weird, so unorganized for blizz XD in the h t t p : / / img38.imageshack.us/img38/4467/development.jpg pic +rep 2x cause I'm bored

[The-Eradicator]

Odd. I saw what looks like a snowy version of Arathi Basin, Kul Tiras, Deathwing's Lair (best guess), early version of The Nexus, and ofc, a lot of stuff I can't even guess at.

Very nice. +Rep.

[agni]

well i've seen maybe all of these pictures so far in either of Xel's post or MoD's post <- which included kinda same looking big picture with almost all of those maps.

[Safturento]

Very interesting, the Yin-Yan that looks like it was made with dragon bones on the first picture is awesome. I'd love to see that in game..

[lolnej7]

Gief snowy ab/wsg at winter!

[Bareno]

I saw this also mentioned when the first wotlk F&F alpha build came out, maybe the map files are still in there if someone manages to get an copy of the really, REALLY old wotlk client, and you could somehow swap those development / programmer isle map files with an continent or something else that you can normally see? and test it out on an pserver? (Would like to know from an pro ME'er that this would be possible).

[kaven1]

if someone manages to get an copy of the really, REALLY old wotlk client,

maybe some PTR client or something? anyway nice find

[Wux]

Kewl find

[speedy243]

cannot see very much, though some of the maps look really cool +rep

[Bareno]

maybe some PTR client or something? anyway nice find

Nah, talking about the F&F alpha builds that were leaked around may 15th 2008, I don't think the PTR builds are old enough / based on an older build.

[Galinda]

I have the original FnF alpha on my desktop still, no idea how to extract stuff from it but if i get chance i'll torrent it and provide a link.

[mmhelm]

I have the original FnF alpha on my desktop still, no idea how to extract stuff from it but if i get chance i'll torrent it and provide a link.

Get mywarcraftstudio find the mpq with the maps in it for development, put them in a file on the desktop, make sure you get all of them include QA/DVD if you can find it too, upload that as a torrent ill see what I can do from there hopefully we might have this as something useable for private realms. Include the file structure as well like
\maps\development or whatever you find in a text file with it.

Edit: im a dumbass with my program names... pm me if you need any help with that.

[fish2k]

I've packed "\maps\development" from the FAF alpha client.

Maybe someone can do something with it :S

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

[Bareno]

Just looked through that, wth are .wlw files? I throught wow maps we're in the differnt format, with the file name something like "Development##_##.xxx" or whatever it's called.

Hopefully we can work with that, there's certainly some intresting tidbits in there.