MDX and MDL Complete Format Specification

Hello, WC3C

I was a contributor to these forums when the site was in its early days. I had thought this entire site was taken offline but I am ecstatic to find it still up and running!

Almost 5 years ago, I completed a brute-force analysis of every MDX file Blizzard had ever released to that point (Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne). The process was simple, extract every MDX from the game's data files, run every single file through Yobgul's converter to MDL, and then create a Java-based application to compare the known structures against the contents of the MDX. When I had confirmed that over 3300 files showed no uninterpreted structures, I did the same with MDL and wrote an MDX->MDL converter to test it. Every MDL file my application exported was identical to every MDL file that Yobgul's exported. At this point I was confident that I had documented the entire MDX/MDL format.

That format is attached. The last update was 12/13/2003, so Blizzard may yet have made further changes to the format since that time. I hope this is of use to some developers on this site, and that it is not too entirely redundant (I have not yet had a chance to re-read the entire forum).

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me via e-mail, included in the file, or you can usually find me on WoW on my character, Salty , of the realm Garona.

Hey, there are a few animated tags (tags as in 'KGTR' etc...) I'm missing in the MDX format. I wanted to manually make these fields animated in an MDL then convert to MDX to see what tags they have, however I've been unable to get yobguls to work on Vista. Feel like checking these out for me? :)

No existing warcraft model seem to use these tags, but that doesn't mean they're not supported.


Oh, and you missed 'KRAL' (Ribbon Emitter Alpha) in your spec :)

Ok, I managed to get yobguls to work long enough (crashes 9 out of 10 times u start it, and always on exit ^^). Here's the last undocumented tags: