[Discovery] Secrets in Plain Sight

[akspa420]

I wanted to examine the minimap of Deadmines, since it noticeably has some remanents of times past - I traced the areas I assumed were roads, buildings, and farms, and then looked at the eastern kingdoms minimaps for any corresponding roads. Sure enough, designer island was indeed the place where the deadmines terrain was pulled from - which also lead to an interesting discrepency between the geography of deadmines and the outside world.

As you can see in this image, I've overlayed the deadmines minimap with an inverted trace of the minimap, and layed that on top of westfall's minimap. The discrepency that I've noticed is that the doors in the deadmines would have exited to Duskwood, not Stranglethorn Vale. In fact, it would have spilled into Raven Hill.

The 'bubble' to the right is the extended land that deadmines has in its minimap, most likely denoting where water would have been, had deadmines been contained within the EK map.

This gives me a good idea as to how WestWood/Westfall/Designer Island was utilized early on during development of the game and these early dungeons.

I plan to do more analysis' projects like this, to determine where the prefab terrain came from within various instances in the game.

[CrowleyAshens]

I'm uncertain if this qualifies as exploration or not, but it's very interesting regardless. +rep

[Nonpareill]

i thought this was very interesting +2 rep

[Psypher93]

Its not so much about exploring, but its something alright and its new! +rep

[Nyarly]

I'm really interested about that !
Stuff like this will be very useful for a project of mine, please keep me/us informed of your finds

Must spread before giving you rep again..

[WizardTrokair]

I find this very interesting. The deadmines map has always been a focus for explorers. It is a fascinating place to us. Great find! +7 rep for sharing.

I'd be curious to see where the "Deadmines Secret / Outlands Testing Area" would fall on this Azeroth map.

[fa3sr011]

+rep
This is an amazing find and great new material! Stuff like this is at the heart of what we do. Thank you for sharing and good work.

[kreatin]

Noob question, ive heard of the other "islands" Besides Gm island, but are they actually in the game? Whether reaching them through hacks or not are they IN the game?

[spoutnik]

That's amazing. Never thought of that.

Have some cookies !

[akspa420]

I've been delving into the wow alpha data files again. This time, I've got the earliest version of the world maps compiled into single images. I plan on stitching together the detail maps from the same minimap files to construct an even earlier form of the world map.

Eastern Kingdoms: https://i.imgur.com/NJlWI8v.png
Western Kingdoms: https://i.imgur.com/dBoMVrd.png

Entire alpha world: https://i.imgur.com/3nMDDV8.jpg

What's interesting with the 'world map' is that you can see the original white plane that Kalimdor was built off of. This map is from around v0.3 or so, given that the first two links appear to be constructed from a map that was the predecessor of v0.5, I'd have to guess that they were from v0.4.
Kalimdor was built long after the Eastern Kingdoms were designed. It would appear that UnGoro and Silithus were the last two zones to be designed and implemented into the alpha of the game.

[elzabbul]

That's very interesting, too bad we can't get any older client. I like to mess with the old alpha client and worldport around unfinished areas. Apparently guys are afraid of lawyers and NDA stuff...