World-of-MapCraft - World of Warcraft Slippy Maps

To see the maps in action: http://worldofmapcraft.com/

For an explanation of how it all works: http://www.iamcal.com/world-of-mapcraft/

Generating the map tiles

This code will help you to generate your own set of map tiles. It wont work immediately out of the box - there's some fiddling involved. There are many more maps included in WoW than are used on the website - try extracting some different ones!

Preparation

• Make sure you have at least 10 GB of space!
• Install ImageMagick
• Install MPQExtractor & BLPConverter
• Both of these tools require cmake to build
• Create some folders:
• mpqs - base MPQ files will go here
• blps - extracedt BLP files will go here
• pngs - PNGs converted from BLPs will go here
• maps - Preview maps will go here
• built - Final built tilesets will go here
• It is very helpful for these folders to be accessible in a browser.
• Modify build/config.php with the paths and URLs to these folders
• Copy MPQ files from your WoW install, specifically:
• art.MPQ
• world.MPQ
• wow-update-nnnnn.MPQ (multiple files)
• wow-update-base-nnnnn.MPQ (multiple files)
• You'll find them all inside the Data subfolder of your WoW installation

Generation

• Extract the BLP and WMO files from the MPQs:

• ./extract.sh is a good starting point

• This will take a few minutes!

• Run build/0_rename.php to fix path casing.

• You don't need to do this if you have the -c option in MPQExtractor

• Run build/1_convert.php to convert all of the BLP files to PNGs

• This takes a while!

• You should now have lots of sub-folders in the pngs folder

• Run build/2_combine.php to make HTML previews or all the maps

• You can now browse the maps subfolder and view everything you extracted

• The files ending --16 use lower-resolution files so are good for quick previews

• Once you know the tiles you want, modify the code at the top of build/3_build.php

• The defaults are set for patch 4.3, extracting a few different maps - you may want more or less

• They include combining multiple maps and patching over unused parts of tiles

• This script builds the most-zoomed level of tiles for the final maps

• The background colors specified here need to match build/colors.php

• Run build/4_recombine.php to preview your creaed tilesets

• The $size setting at the top lets you change the preview output size

• Choose 16 or smaller to load the quick preview images

• Run build/5_resize.php to build the other zoom levels

• This will take a long time for big maps

• You should now be able to view your slippy maps!

• Modify www/index.php to point to the tiles

• Also add the zoom levels & dimensions here

• If you want to put the tiles on S3, use build/6_sync.php

• To compress the PNGs for faster serving, use build/7_crush.php

• If you want to make WMO maps, you'll need some extra tools:

• build/wmo_build.php to assemble a flat image from a WMO group

• build/wmo_assemble.php to assemble multiple flats into a tileset

• From there, you can use build/5_resize.php to build the other zoom levels

Changes in MoP

• art.MPQ has been renamed textures.MPQ
• Expansion minimap textures have been moved to exspansionX.MPQ files
• world2.MPQ is gone, with contents moved into a bunch of new MPQs
• All patch MPQs have no prefix (this changed in cata in March 2012)

To find new WMOs to build and preview for MoP, I used the following commands:

find dungeon | grep pa_ | grep .blp | perl -pi -e's!_\d\d\d_\d\d_\d\d.blp!!' | \
    sort | uniq | perl -pi -e's/(.*)\/(.*?)$/$1!!$2/' >> wmos.txt
find pandaria | grep .blp | perl -pi -e's!_\d\d\d_\d\d_\d\d.blp!!' | \
    sort | uniq | perl -pi -e's/(.*)\/(.*?)$/$1!!$2/' >> wmos.txt

This found all WMO groups under either the pandaria folder, or inside the dungeons folder with a prefix of pa_. I then used this list to make a bunch of calls to build_wmo_map() in wmo_build.php.

Installing the web site

./install.php https://github.com/iamcal/World-of-MapCraft