[Alpha] Quel thalas footprints & graphical mind**** from vanilla alpha

[Nyarly]

So i was starting to capture clips for my project in vanilla alpha when i stumbled upon this where should be quel thalas one day.
While the area is empty, there is ground instead of water which creates a cute map (!) on the minimap.
When exploring the area, i noticed few things.

1) black shapes on the ground.
Few black shapes (cut triangles) are placed on the ground and seem to create a design. It goes up to the area behind stratholme. I know trees can sometimes make weird shadows but not like this. So to me, it looks like some buildings was there, got removed and left a few traces. It doesn't appear on the minimap and look very similar to the shadows behind ahn qiraj. Ladies and gents, this could be the first sign of a building on quel thalas ! Or it could also be some misplaced shadows of a stratholme building but it's quite far from there.

http://nyarly.dyndns.tv/new/alphaqtbuild.mp4

Edit : black shapes2 on the ground.
Wops, i just found another occurence, gonna record a video ^^
Edit2 : black shapes3 on the ground.
And another one, i'm pretty sure i can confirm those are not trees now.
Edit3 : guess what
A small house!

build 2 : http://nyarly.dyndns.tv/new/alphaqtbuild2.mp4
build 3 : http://nyarly.dyndns.tv/new/alphaqtbuild3.mp4
build 4 : http://nyarly.dyndns.tv/new/alphaqtbuild4.mp4

2) Shadow
Someone must have noticed this before but the only info i found about it is that shadows were introduced in wotlk from ExtShadowQuality

Patch 3.0.2 (14-Oct-2008 ): Added

And i remember discovering them myself during wotlk.
But after watching my feet for so long, i noticed i had a shadow. Dezooming make it quite obvious so i must not be the first to notice it and i don't know if it was there in vanilla but atleast to me, this is totally new and mind****ing.

3) Watching my feet
Oh and i was watching my feet because on the quel'thalas ground, it leaves footprints. Now again i didn't find any info about footprints and i don't remember it well but somone told me it was about 5-10 meters wide. Well, here it start to fade out after 100 steps without timer. Now i haven't seen this anywhere before and i would like you to correct me if i'm wrong but i think it's a little minor discovery, but still a discovery
I didn't show it on the video but i tried to draw a penis first, and it worked ;_;

http://nyarly.dyndns.tv/new/alphaqtfootshad.mp4

Edit : also happen on snow https://i.imgur.com/r3hE3xV.jpg i started a tic tac toe

Oh and if you want to explore the area yourself, you'll find everything you need here : http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/worl...locations.html ([Collection] Exploration patches of various locations) Coordinates (near) : 4410 -3955 172

Last edit : did i misplaced this thread ?

[Satori]

Dang Quel'Thalas was a crazy buggy looking place in Alpha Nyarly lol. +rep for sharing!

[akspa420]

That large area that seems like it has tons of shadows is actually a layer of water that's intersecting the terrain at the same level. The game engine doesn't know which layer to render first, so you get a weird effect on the ground.

As for the dark triangles, you have to remember that Blizzard has, and always will copy-paste sections of land from one place to another. These triangles are likely from a prefab set of zones that blended into a darker zone - in fact, I'd wager a guess and say that this was taken from a developer/designer island section of land.

It would be great if Blizzard gave us some more insight as to how they created the world map back then. I'd love to see WoWEdit from that era, as I suppose it was very much more like Warcraft 3's editor than what the community has come up with (Noggit, etc.).