Gillijim's Isle & Island of Doctor Lapidis : redone

[spoutnik]

Hello fellow explorers !

I, with Mjollnà and The Royal IdP Essploring Fundation, have the immense honor to present you some legendary places.

I have previously said that a software that would be able to convert Vanilla Alpha map files to the current format was being developped. It has taken a long time, but today, this goal is finally achieved, thanks to the efforts of Mjollnà.

Let's start with Gillijim's Isle !












And Island of Doctor Lapidis !


















And, as a bonus : Player Housing Test Zone :













Hope you enjoyed,
feangren

[ketrish]

i'm wondering sometimes why the heck did they remove so many beautiful zones from wow before live servers went up ;/

[Xel]

You always manage to surprise me.
Have all the reputation I can give.

EDIT: Need to spread.

[MoD]

Mjollna the Insane casts Time Twister.


Amazing job, seriously this is the most exciting contribution of the year for the least.

[Mjollna]

Thank you ^_^

I add some more screens, of Kalimdor

[akspa420]

I take it that we can now convert not only the terrain, but the model paths in the map files? This is awesome! I've had fun with the alpha terrain in 3.3.5, but now to see it with models on top of it, it makes me very very happy to be a part of this community

edit: I grabbed the latest code and compiled it, but it doesn't seem to work - am I missing something?

edit2: nevermind, I found the topic on Modcraft, makes sense now

edit 3: No idea what I'm doing wrong, but I don't get any models -- https://i.imgur.com/pAt2P.jpg
For now, since I'm not sure what I did wrong, I've uploaded a patch for Wow 3.3.5 that has all the terrain converted from the v0.5.3 alpha - http://sdrv.ms/N0P9Pa (730+ MB)

[WizardTrokair]

I am speechless. +5 reputation to Spoutnik and Mjollna for sharing this. I know OC rep isn't why any of you do this, but you deserve so much more. That one shot with Alpha Gadgetzan is so wicked!! Images of the player housing was a bonus, indeed!

These shots are AMAZING. I'm sure that I'd be 10 times more amazed if I had an idea of what was involved to make this possible. The objects... the textures... you guys are nuts!

[LuckLuka]

I know that what I am going to say right now will start a flamewar, but it has to be said.

I believe in "Sharing is Caring"... Yes, I understand that it took you a long time to achieve this, but why not share the program? Is it really that hard?

No rep from me.

[Mjollna]

If I were you, I'd re-read the thread with more attention

[LuckLuka]

I read the thread.
You haven't released alpha-conversion tool

[Andros]

"you must spread some reputation before giving to Mjollna & spoutnik again" as per usual.
The landscapes beautifully blend in with rest of Azeroth; was it necessary to edit the offset?
Was it necessary to re-make the water?
There's not much to be said. This is gold, as MoD said, one of the best threads this year. Continue, and show us more alpha zones - I especially liked Alpha ED; good lord, that was beautiful.

[Mjollna]

Hi Andros,

I've spent a hell lot of time to redo the whole objects chunks chaining so it's all automatic, and thankfully water was more or less the same as vanilla format.
The hardest parts were : vertices/normals order for terrain which were different in alpha, objects placement, and finding elements in mcnk header.
Things to do now : correct some stuff in mcnk header, which is still half junk. If possible, convert objects.

[Andros]

To akspa420:

I took a look on your .mpq - only terrain data (in .adt-format) is included in the .mpq, and I don't think the alpha objects exist in in-game files anymore. Therefore, objects needs to be included in the .mpq in order to load 'em in-game. Same probably goes for skyboxes & doodads & everything else. I don't know what determines the objects placement in the .adt's, but Mjollna seems to have a grasp on that.
My point & what to do: The objects are missing from the file, but probably not in the .adt's. Therefore, they needs to be included. I haven't used the extractor, but was only .adt's extracted from the alpha mpq's? Because then I don't know where one would get the objects from.

To Mjollna:
Which file-type is the alpha objects in? How would one 'convert' them as you wrote you were working on. Also, very nice job, even though I didn't even understand half of what was written

[Mjollna]

The objects are not converted yet, so indeed, there should only be adt.
And surprisingly, a lot of objects from alpha are still there in game files, and have been converted to current format. There are some of them missing though, or some that have changed but keep the same name, but not that many.

Object placement is determined through a bunch of chunks in the adt files, all linked one to the other.
You'll find more information on the wiki : http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/worl...-restored.html (Madx WoWDev Wiki Restored.) .

In alpha, m2 are in a somewhat mixed format between mdx and early m2. Wmo are in an early version of wmo, huge files that contain all group files. I have a very shallow knowledge of the format, and conversion (for me) is a true challenge.

dbc are a problem, some entries have been deleted/changed and areaID for example don't correspond. That's something I hope to solve in the future.

[fa3sr011]

+rep
Great work and thanks for sharing! These are two of my favorite places on my Alpha Server and having the ability to fly with the other conversions you've done is amazing. You guys really can do some amazing things.