[Request] WoW Alpha maps extractor - Some research already done

[akspa420]

I've been wanting to explore the terrain from the WoW alpha, but have found that the v0.5.3/0.5.5 version used compressed, single-file WDT/ADT's, somewhat different from today's WDT and ADT formats. I'm not a programmer, otherwise I'd have created a tool to extract the WDT and ADT's myself. I did, however, find the following description of the map format: Alpha - WoW.Dev Wiki.

The one thing that page does not tell you is that the map files are compressed as MPQ's, but there's no file names on the contents of the MPQ - I've done some research based on the Azeroth.WDT.MPQ file, and these are my findings:

The MPQ contains 3 files, 1 of which is the (attributes) file, the second is a 16 byte MD5 checksum of the 3rd file, which is a huge Azeroth.WDT file, which has the WDT and all the ADT's associated with the root WDT file.

I've also run the wowclient executable through IDA a few times, to try and figure out how the game reads these huge files (Azeroth.WDT uncompressed is over 700MB in size), and whether or not there's some easy way to use wowclient's Storm functionality to open the files. Then again, I'm really not a programmer, so I haven't any idea how to implement any of this.

[akspa420]

Just gonna bump this thread. I've been thinking of some way to detour around the SFOpenArchive function in the executable, but since I suck at programming, I doubt I'll get any further than contemplating ways to open those damn files.

[Tigurius]

The SFOpenArchive is the function to open the MPQs, so you open the MPQ and then open the file in a hexeditor to check which filetype it is.
The old wdt files were, just like I mentioned in the wiki, what nowadays is ADT/v18 - WoW.Dev Wiki and WDT - WoW.Dev Wiki
You could implement them, but as there isn't anything really interesting, no one did already.

[Avatarxxx]

I am interested in this too,does anyone know how to do this...Come on guys you are mmowned!!!!

[akspa420]

Taliis attempts to open the huge WDT files, but crashes due to the large amount of data above and beyond the expected filesize of a WDT file. Really, the best way to possibly make this idea real would be to manually split the huge file into proper adt/wdt files, which is going to take a long ass time to pull off, and will probably not be worth the time.