Vacations

Okay.
Its time for a week off time. So here a short remarks what happends recently:

- The Changes in the core are almost done. Maybe some of the plugins wont compile without failures. But a simple try-catch will solve that problems.

- Noggit from ich bin ein Versager, vergesse meine Zugangsdaten, und habe mehr Fehler in das Ding eingebaut als alle coder vor mir zusammen Beklet is back online.

- Our 3D preview grown a little. I think thanks to tigus work we can expect that its usable in the next weeks. Its still a slut ..

SVN and Stuff

Yes. Taliis is open source now.

Thanks to mmoforge i finaly found a suiteable svn space.

www.mmoforge.org/gf/project/taliis

I hope that now finaly i will get a little bit more feetback and bug reports ... 

Alot of stuff

Noggit

Most of the people know im not a big fan of noggit. Thats because it think besides the 5 original autors (the wow map ones and the noggit autor itself) nobody realy knew what he is doing there. Some of them know 3D, some of them know Binary reversing. But never - never someone was able to finish it and fix it bugs that it causes due some reasons.

I for myself had never a look on its source since last summer. But i seriously ask myself: HOW could this happend!?

All Textures cutted out and no Doodads visible.
How could it you want to ask? I have no idea to say truth. Okay. A look to a good Wiki tell us that the number of Layers and the number of Doodads are are close together.  And stupid readers might now say "hahahaha you switched them and all layers got killed! HAHAHA!".
But no. I did not. I checked it 3 hours. Hex Editors, tons of logs what happends and what got changed. Nothing. The values are still in that file. It should be allright.

But it is NOT. But another even more amazing sample:

Yeah and: NO .. the original have NO water. It happend because of another Taliis-Noggit combination.

Offsets

Suddenly all second layers got to water layers. And after you change them in Noggit its back to normal. Wait - Alpha layer/Water layer? Yes. The offsets are cose together again. And somehow its funny, somehow not. But i can just _quess_ what happends to noggit. In the last year i worked at taliis i found some abnormalitys in ADT files. And just Alpha and Water Layers are two of them. 

In fact im installing wow now. I want to check the stuff by myself. But i checked my offsets and my datas 1000 times since yesterday. Its just TRUE: my data is right. The way how taliis calculates the offsets is 100% the same as Blizzard does .. as least for all TBC adt files ive ever seen - and understood.

Wikis

And there we on my last topic for today. Wikis. Im a bit angry about some people that write in private wikis instead of the original wowdev.org one. Why?

1. It was the first Wiki. Everyone that is doing wow coding today learned from there or one of its copys. Had they ever paid back? NO. Its the same like this noggit dumpfucks that always keep GPL src by themself and call it theyr sources.
2. People write new inventions to theyr own wikis. some of them are known, such as wow.dev, some are not. But in fact i see no reason to do so. Everyone can register and post at wowdev.org - stop spreading your infos around everywhere :/
3. Last but not least: The quality. Some of the new posts are nice. But some are also horroble incomplete or wrong. Why? Because ppl dont complety understood what _happends_ (in adt files f.E.) .. So they just delete out some infomations that are still valid and think they understood why. Or a complete file change had happend. But nothing of that seems to be true.

So .. i feel a bit like the angry video game nerd.
In fact i spend so many hours of checking stuff at taliis that always was working .. beeing afraid its my fault. But i can not see reasons. Everything works perfectly like ADT's habbits and linear rules. I dont know whats wrong :/ I just hope soon i can test ingame again.

It makes me sick ...

Homepage

Yes. This is just a very smal update.

I decided to finaly complete this project in public. Therefore we have a new homepage that can be found at www.taliis.de.

You can find forums and downloads there.

Pfew .. new dbc core finished.

Finaly its done. The new dbc core is stable in all of his functions.

It includes everything i need (for now) .. But i have to say as bigger the GUI is as more logical problems come up. I never wanted to spend my whole life into GUI programming so i do not realy care. But in fact the problem is growing more and more.

Maybe some day someone will come and help me .. *haha* good joke ^^

Smal update

Yes. Im still alive.

Last days i was quite unmotivated to do something at taliis and of course soon we have examations and i should learn.

But however. Im still thinking about some new nice features and maybe i will do a new release, soon.
The Taliis Download got removed. Reason for this was that many boards allready have re-seeds of it so there was no reason to hold up a personal download anymore. If i ever would do a next release i will publish it at this blog including a md5 Checksum.

so long

Bugs and Mushrooms

`·.¸¸.·´´¯`··._.· Bugs ·._.··´´¯`·.¸¸.·´

Yes it finaly happend: Someone found a Bug in Taliis. This is the first time someone found a bug that is not caused by other tools unstability so i "celebrate" it doing this nice ASCII art there.

BUG: Unable to save a file more than one time. Even you cannot see it, it will not be saved again caused by a buffer Overflow. Bug got allready solved.

Thans to Faut from mmowned - You are the winner ;)


I also got finaly member of the Glowing Mushroom community. Well. They have hard rules but i just can say.. It worth. Finaly a community without flaming, leeching and (too much ;) stupidness. A 'community'. I just wish every place in the internet about WoW development would be a little bit more like that.


Well and finaly i re-included the DBC-Core back to Taliis. The new one of course. Its loading and parsing the entire spell dbc in 43 ms. A good time, im happy with it :)

Well .. Noggit.

Nice, huh? I created this by using http://worldof.leufven.se/gen_logo.php. Nice engine ^^ Did alot of funny things using it.

Today was not a good make friends day. I leaked the 2.3 Noggit at several forums.

Not that its difficult to bring up noggit to 2.3.. Many people did that. But only one smal team was so .. fucking stupid to say "yes we publish it". Nothing bat so far. But to exclude the save function is a validation of the GPL. No source, no full binary. Nothing.
Some days ago then they made a new _secret_ release at mmowned that (by exident?) found it way into the public area. Password protected.

I just can tell them. I would leak it again? Why!? Because its fucking open source! Other ppl had so many bloody work on it. And common! Dont tell me you changed alot! The interface is the same, the bugs are the same. The crashes are the same.

Stop publishing "trial" versions of something that dont belongs to you.
Fuckers -.-

Into the shadows

I decided to quit working on my own 3D code. Its just to stupid and slow.
So last days i where looking for alot of other engines and also found the J Monkey Engine. Well. I think i will give a try to it somewhen.

I started a smal tool to extract shadow infomations to png and back. Should be usefull.

DBC Tool

http://filebeam.com/e5b75ef19b6700a2de7a9f4643292e0d

Yes. Its a DBC editor.
This is the 8 Months old alpha Version of the Taliis DBC editor. It was the beginning of my WoW Development before. You are welcome to report bugs. The new Taliis dbc editor is alot more powerfull but well. It seems it will never get released so i hope you enjoy the old one.



To be true im still very pissed off by the WoW community. Not even GM gave response so far... Well .. Somethings u expect to much in space.

You cannot fight them thoose have no life! Its true ;)

To say truth. I dont care atm. I just got very happy with myself last days since i quit to be in a lot of communitys. Its like beeing free.

Merry X-Mas out there in the western world. Happy midwinter Festival all here in my world :)

Ganku

Problems and 3D rendering

Well. Some whyte Guy told me in AIM that he wish to continue his editor.
Im not sure how far i understood his pointers but it seems that he want to extend it by memory exploiting to use wow itself as ingame editor o.O
I cant wait to see his next release.

However. I did nothing except some planings last days. Since i gave some beta versions out of hands alot of ppl stopped to anoy me (wow, who wonders -.-) and i had finaly some time to think about the next steps.

First of all i need to redo the appeareance localization done by the helper functions set. At the moment its looking for each object and dd and find a location at the map. But blizz is mostly storing also alot of stuff that is not placed on the map itself but inside of the far-view that player might have. Therefore i need to keep care of it.
Suchtino, my Mac beta tester had some weird failures .. I have no clue what he is doing. It seems that i need more report taking beta testerst. Interested ppl can write a comment.


Next i decided to delay the alpha and shadow editor to rewrite the 3D code. Just posting some screens with 3D made ppl getting mad about it. So i made a list who next 3D code will be.

• Support LOD again.
• Make the points on the new grid "clickable" -> main feature to do terra forming.
• Make edges of a field glowing if wished.
• Show the base height of the field if wished.
• Show alpha and shadows
• Show water
• Include fast rendering by use only 64x64 testures.

But i will NOT include correct sized texture mapping. Why? Because it needs to much perfomace and taliis is a fucking editor. Nothing else.
To make a usable rendering possible i will include the mpqlib done by mwaat and the bpl functions to load all textures direct from mpq files.

The next big feature comming up with this is the script feature. The what? A script feature? Yes. I will include a JavaScript engine that allows to define "brushes" by the user. This will control whats happend of user drag a point on the map and moves the mouse. The API provides functions for the height of the points and to manipulate water (in the first version). Using this its possible to do mathematical sets for nearly every prupose.
All brushes can be changed and shared independent from taliis.

Bored again

I dont realy know what to do theese days.
My university project is complete garbitch and its hard to motivate to do something if you fail that hard just because everything is stupid. I hate it to loose time. But well .. Maybe i will get it finished somehow. We will see.

Because of my boredom i included the 3D preview feature to the editor. To make it a bit faster its mech only of course. But whatever ..
Its still the old, slow code. So nothing special. I think i finaly (REALY) should rewrite the 3D rendering code thoose days to speed and clean it up. 1 second loading time is just too much.

THIS city!

We spoke about the editor. We spoke about the server. Now speak about fun.
This is the first real project I want to try.



Its just a very small city. But its still terribly huge compared to what blizzard calls a city.
I thought starting with the east gate might be the best choice to get a feeling about the size the buildings have. Then go down to the garden. This one should be easy. In my first try Iwill do anything on a completely flat ground. I dont want to do heightmaps before Iknow the amount of space this city needs in real adt files. It should be something between 2x2 and 3x3, between Stormwind and complete Elwynn Forest.

I can't wait to do it. After months of just doing binary coding the day where I can earn the fruits of my work is comming closer and closer ..

Some Mod's I did

Using a Warcraft Server Emulator makes it possible to play the entire game on your local computer.
First time you are probably only playing around with gear and levels. Always wanted to have T5 and level 70? Well .. it's just a matter of time.

After that more advanced users start to play around with stats. Trying to change some things on the game. Like Items! But that is still boring. (made a small tool, but I'm sure it's allready outdated)

After that I was thinking about Player/Guild Housing. Something that Blizzard promised a long time ago, I found out that it's possible to spawn ships and some towers. So we tried a bit around and well, found a (a bit hacky way) to make this possble, too.

Then I wanted crossover classes. Undead paladins for example. Or human druids. This was a bit more complicated but well. Thanks Fearl and some hours later we also had this one working.

But in fact. I also found out that to really create an own setting we need alot more. We need new maps. New Objects,Models,Custom Classes and alot more.

Yay. That thats were my work started. First of all there was need for an dbc Editor. DBC Files are something like Excel tables for WoW were most likely everything is stored in.

The DBC file isnt that complicated as it sounds. In fact i think its the most basic file type in the entire client. Exluded the xml files. But anyway all of the editors seems to suck! The do not re-create the Stirng tables. Do not re-allocate the String offsets and they HELL do not detect the _type_ of a cell. (each chell can be integer, float or string .. its easy to detect).
So first of all i did a _good_ dbc editor that supports stuff like auto detection and so on.

Today i would say i made him realy scary. He also do not support re-allocation of String offsets. But well, i will re-code the binary part of the class as soon i need it again.

For the moment its fine. And well the auto detection feature i made allowed me to understand most of the dbc files on first view .. while other editors seems to use ominously ini files and let the user alone in trying around. However.


Using my dbc editor we were able to re-register most everything in game as spawnable and made a client patch. This made us able to build up new towns, new woods and so on. But it was still just changing the original World a but. Creating is something else .. i think.

yey yey Welcome

Hi everyone

After some weeks of pain and lazyness I decided to have a place where I could write about my stupid Warcraft Project.

So what is it about? Well I thought about the old Ultima Online freeshard time and had the wish to do something like that by myself too. But well since Ultima Online is a bit outdated I was looking for something else and decided that Warcraft, a game that everyone really seems to own, might be a good base to work on.

There are tons of WoW servers out at the moment and even if it is absolutely illegal to have public servers. And they are all using the original the same old original WoW settings. This is boring! Or so to say in other words: They don't even reach the original game. I can understand that Bliz is pissed off because it's just a pirate copy of their original game.

But however. There are not many tools around to make real custom settings. So i started to work on the needed tools by myself.

And this Blog is about my pain doing this. Enjoy^^