What folders in .MPQ's are protected and what are not?

[rkriekle]

To start off with, I am a graphics designer by trade and an avid WOW player. A few days ago I was looking for a way to make WOW more beautifull and stumbled across this site.

My goal and project is to take every single landscape/building texture and "refine" them. I am not swapping textures persay, but rather sharpening and adding effects to them to make them more appealing visually.

First question,
Are the tileset folders within the .mpq's protected? If so is the only way to get around this is by using the model edit fix 2.3 ? Which folders in the mpq's can be freely changed without a fix? I know the sounds can but what others?

Second question,
After I have the textures edited must they go back into an .mpq file? Or can they just reside in their same tree structure within the data folder?

Example: Say the texture I edit is in the patch.mpq under textures/tileset/blah.blp . Must I make this into another .mpq and put this texture in textures/tileset/blah.blp or can I just put the new texture into the data directory without being in an .mpq file? Such as c:/programfiles/wow/data/textures/tileset/blah.blp

Question 3,
How does WOW load its .mpq files? Does it load all the default Blizzard ones and then after load any other ones in the directory over writing any data in the blizz ones with my new ones?

Just trying to figure out the easiest way to do this My initial thoughts are to extract all the textures from tilesets and buildings and then do some briushwork using batch processing and then repack all the textures up and put them in a new .mpq , named highRes.mpq keeping the same tree structure as the origionals. Will this work? I am at work right now so I have no access to WOW or anything for that matter to test any of this stuff

Thanks for any help.

Ryan

[schlumpf]

Tilesets should be writable. No way around the fix. Creatures, Spells, Textues, Sound and Dungeons for example. Just try it out.

Yes, they have to go back. Make a new mpq with your changes. Putting them only in the Data-folder stopped working around 1.8. No exact patch for you, sorry.

Uh, do you really want to know how they load it? Its about 200 lines in ASM :P Nah. They load: common.mpq, expansion.mpq, enGB\base-enGB.mpq, enGB\locale-enGB.mpq, enGB\speech-enGB.mpq, enGB\expansion-locale-enGB.mpq, enGB\expansion-speech-enGB.mpq, patch.mpq, patch-%x.mpq, enGB\patch.mpq, enGB\patch-%x.mpq. Where %x represents every number. (Or 2 / 3 as of 2.3 iirc.)

It should work. But you should call it patch-3.mpq or something in that way.

[rkriekle]

Tilesets should be writable. No way around the fix. Creatures, Spells, Textues, Sound and Dungeons for example. Just try it out.

Yes, they have to go back. Make a new mpq with your changes. Putting them only in the Data-folder stopped working around 1.8. No exact patch for you, sorry.

Uh, do you really want to know how they load it? Its about 200 lines in ASM :P Nah. They load: common.mpq, expansion.mpq, enGBbase-enGB.mpq, enGBlocale-enGB.mpq, enGBspeech-enGB.mpq, enGBexpansion-locale-enGB.mpq, enGBexpansion-speech-enGB.mpq, patch.mpq, patch-%x.mpq, enGBpatch.mpq, enGBpatch-%x.mpq. Where %x represents every number. (Or 2 / 3 as of 2.3 iirc.)

It should work. But you should call it patch-3.mpq or something in that way.

Thanks, you answered exactly everything I needed to know