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Maps and stuff
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 1:20 am
by torgum
I'm a fan of ... customized maps and so on. Is there a chance to make own maps or do we have to use the default stuff?
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 8:35 am
by techguy84
If someone can program a app to do this, then more than likely. When EQEmu started out, there was no OpenZone, and then WC came along and wrote it and now there is a endless possibility for custom zones. It just boils down to wether or not someone will take the time to make somehting that does this.
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 9:22 am
by LethalEncounter
Depends on what you mean by 'maps'. If you are talking about zones, then for the foreseeable future you will have to use whatever SOE provides. If your talking about the in game maps, I believe you can edit those yourself from the UI\Default\images\maps directory. I havent tried, but you should be able to edit those.
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 11:17 am
by torgum
Hm.. i was talking about zones of course...
I someone starts a free server then he'll NEVER need every zone... and of course you want to make something special... for me custom zones are essential!

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 11:39 am
by ZexisStryfe
While you may not be able to create zones initially, you can edit some features of existing ones. For instance, you can change zone lines and what zones they connect to. Also, since many of the items you see for in game houses in live are actually separate models, you can also put these in your zones for people to interact with.
Maps...
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 12:33 am
by kingmen30264
I was just wondering if anyone was able to throw me some maps for EQ2... its been years since i played and i can't even remember if it was like wow and had its own maps included or not... and i don't feel like DLing the trial version to test out that one thought.. i have other things i do.. someone help me answer my question?
Thanks
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 7:15 am
by Arremis
The maps themselves are .dds files located in the EQ2 > UI > Default > Images > Maps. These could be edited and saved into a custom UI folder (have a look at eq2map), which goes to show you there's quite a lot you can do.
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 8:31 am
by Andrew
torgum wrote:Hm.. i was talking about zones of course...
I someone starts a free server then he'll NEVER need every zone... and of course you want to make something special... for me custom zones are essential!

It's possible. I haven't looked into extracting the data from .draw files yet but I planned to do it at some point.
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 9:05 am
by tyeten
Wouldn't you need to "patch" to this custom servers files... If there is no data on the local machine all the person will see is black... So with the current EQ2EMU setup this would not be possible... there is no patcher for eq2 files
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 6:49 pm
by LethalEncounter
tyeten wrote:Wouldn't you need to "patch" to this custom servers files... If there is no data on the local machine all the person will see is black... So with the current EQ2EMU setup this would not be possible... there is no patcher for eq2 files
Once the EQ2Emu Patcher is completed by Link, I'm sure we could work something out that would allow it to connect to server specific update servers to patch additional files. Like the user would use the EQ2Emu Patcher (or whatever Link wants to call it) and select which server they play on. The patcher would then download the patch information from that server and essentially provide the end user with one program to patch information from any number of servers (assuming the server they played on had downloadable content). This is just an idea, but there is nothing stopping it from being done if the need is there.
Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 6:41 pm
by Andrew
I had a quick look at a few draw files and it doesn't look like they contain any 3D data.
I'm guessing these files are used in conjunction with the hit files to render the mesh and the sp files are used to texture the surface.
All pure speculation of course.

Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:59 pm
by Andrew
Figured out the .sp files. They contain all the textures used in a draw file.
You can
download the code here
So we have the texture locations, the mesh, we just need to figure out what .draw is for and how the multiple draw files are put together to form a level.
EDIT:
- Added a
google code project
The files in SP are also located in the draw file.
Find the hex value 57 at the end of the draw file, the following hex value is the number of textures used by the draw file. So if there are 6 textures in the sp file this number will be 6.
After that comes the number of characters of text in the texture name. That is followed by the texture name.
The texture name is in the format "texturename_objectname_shader", although that's just a guess right now on object name, not quite sure what that name is for.