World of Warcraft

There have been a number of World of Warcraft maps, most notably has been EvilPitlords. While I enjoyed playing this map I still felt it was to detached from the real World of Warcraft. No Warcraft 3 map can come close to truly imitating a mmorpg however I still felt a map could come closer than EvilPitlords as his really didn't try to imitate it to much. To that end I began working on my own World of Warcraft map. I have been working for a fair amount of time now mixing between triggering and terraining. Below I will outline my current progress and features currently in, and planned.

Features:

- My World of Warcraft map will allow you to choose any one of the World of Warcraft classes, from the mighty Warrior to the insidious Warlock.
- Complete dozens of quests for the various NPC's located around the world, they can be simple things like deliver a package, to slaying a dangerous enemy to fending a city from invasion.
-Level your hero up to 60, group with friends to tackle the various quests as well as the high end areas.
- Explore the various mini-dungeons of each continent, these can be wide ranging from a simple Kobold Cave to an Arcane Tower.
- Explore a lush world and see some of your favourite areas like Orgrimmar, Stormwind, Elwynn Forest, Thunder Bluff etc. All main cities will be included and will be imitated as best as possible to fit in with the various races themes.
- Use a wide variety of tradeskills such as Blacksmithing, Alchemy, and Engineering. Buy reciepes from vendors or find them on mobs. Search for the various ingredients needed across the world to craft your items. These ingredients will randomly spawn in designated areas depending on rarity.
- Learn new spells as you level but also buy various special skills from vendors at certain levels. Mages can gain the ability to Teleport to main cities or encase mobs in ice. Priests will be able to Resurrect dead players or quickly drain mana from an enemy.
- Utilize world wide transport such as Gryphons, Hippogryphs, Gargoyles, Wyvern and boats to traverse dangerous landscapes and continets - all for a price.
- Completing quests will yield experience and often items as reward for the adventurer.
- A multitude of new items including low and high level items as well as a large assortment of food and water that an be bought to quickly boost health and mana regenration.
- This is an Open RPG for the most part, you can do quests but you do not have to, quests will yield experience rewards for the one who completes it as well as often offer item based rewards. Still no quest requires completion, although there may be on occasion grave consequences for failure to complete quests on time in the later levels.
- More I cannot think of when writing this post ^_^

Current Completion:

I have currently terrained most of the Azeroth Continent as well as Ashenvale and most of the Barrens. Although I am still somehwhat a newbie in terraining and am learning and making improvments as I go along. The Human and Dwarf areas are currently the most completed in terms of fine-tuned terrain and quest content, vendors and various other small things.

Currently the Priest and Mage classes are at about 95% fiunctionality with minor changes and additons to their bought spells. The Warrior class is currently hafl way through completion after experiencing a few problems with his abilities. The hunter is also largely completed, able to tame beasts as well as utilize various other spells. He currently needs another spell and bought spells as well as pet upgrades.

Well thats all I can think of for now, I will post here again with new updates and will now try to upload some screenshots.

Screenshot 1: Our inteprid Dwarven Warrior to the rescue of poor Tom in Elwynn Forest
Screenshot 2: A Dwarven Hunter on the outskirts of a Goblin operation with his trusted pet spider. Hunters will be able to buy various abilties to heal their petsas well as revive them. If a hunter choses to take a new pet his old one will attack him.
Screenshot 3: Our poor Dwarven Hunter has died and his spirit now wanders the corporeal world.
Screenshot 4: A shot of part of Stormwind and its harbor.
Screenshot 5: The Undercity, well most of it, with sewage pipes running the length and widht of it all spewing forth into the tainted river. The Abomination guards can be seen at the entrance and travel is handled through the various teleportation points, some in the city and easy to find, some not so easy to find.

An criticism for any shot is appreciated as I am still trying to improve my terraining. Thats all for now, I will post more soon.

The Undercity looks really nice. Elwynn forest, I think, could be improved a lot if you stuck in a custom model that looked somewhat like the trees from WoW.

I have a question, too: Are you doing the whole world on one huge map or is each zone going to be separate. If I were you, I'd definately go with each zone being its own map, seeing as you can import different custom models for each, use different tiles, have more detailed, larger, and accurate terrain, etc.

I'll look into the custom model but I have to be wary about size since it isn't every zone on seperate maps, instead it is the overworld with many of the various zones from Worlo of Warcraft. I suppose in many ways having it seperate could have advantages like being able to include everything but there are numerous problems such as actually getting people to play it. While some might most of the average bneters wouldn't spend 2 minutes trying to fidn out which map is which and what levels it caters to. Thats not to say that the map wholly caters to the average bneter as there are going to be 60 levels and the higher you go the more grouping is encouraged as some of the later areas will require multiple people to complete and some hopefully decent teamwork.

Yeah, I can definately see how there are advantages and disadvantages to both. With so many zones and so few people, though, it seems unlikely that there would be more than one person per zone in most games. You could also put approximate level ranges in the actual name of the map, too. With the one-map-per-zone approach, you release one map, which would assumedly build interest, and then add increasingly high-level maps from there. But it probably doesn't matter now, anyway, since it sounds like it's kind of late to turn back.

Another random comment: For the ghost mode, isn't there a trigger to put a colored mask over the screen (like they use in cinematics)? If you put a throbbing blue one and colored the player blue as well, it would do a pretty neat job of recreating that surreal, discombobulating feel you get running around dead in WoW.

I made a Elwynn forest-esque bush and tree just now if you want to use them.

Yeah much of the map is complete already and going back now would waste a lot of hours of work. The ghost thing is a good idea that I never though of, I will look into adding it asap as will I try and add some of your trees and bushes in the near future after I complete a few more things on the map.

There are also a few features I forgot to mention in my post. Almost all NPCs are attackable and will attack back allowing people to RP and attack Orgrimmar, Stormwind etc although they will be guarded well and difficult to do. There were also be a quest or two involving this feature. As for the transportation I mentioned earlier you have to pay a fixed rate depending on your current location and your destination. You will board the Gryphon, boat, Gargoyle etc and be able to watch the area around your tansport as it flies or sails to your destination. Most arial transport will be relatively expensive save for a few instances with boats being cheaper but slower. Death is currently handled by becoming a ghost for a short while and then returning to normal but will likely end up being more like the WoW death system.

Edit - I will try do updates as regularly as possible. Today I have a few more screenshots.

Screenshot 1: One of the higherst level areas on an island located between Kalimdor and Azeorth. Here we see some level 50's Warlocks and Skeleton Grunts.

Screenshot 2: Here we have a Goblin encampment located in Elwynn Forest. At the forefront are Goblin Shredders harvesting and in the background is a goldmine being harvested. You can also see a Goblin Tinker with a quest for you.

Screenshot 3: Shot of a fairly dense jungle area, I will let you guess where it is =)

Screenshot 4: Here is a shot of part of Thunder Bluff, in the background you can see the bridges connecting the various sections of the city.

Screenshot 5: Last one for today this is Teldrassil and the entrance to the harbor. In the background an Ancient Protector can be seen wandering around.

I got some comments on the screenshots...

-Teldrassil has purple trees and some green trees.
-Thunderbluff has grass and is not situated in the barrens, Thunderbluff is also located on huge hills.
-Elwynn forest has leaf tree's, not pines.

And if u want to make the map more WoW-looking, then plz dont use cliffs, use change ground height and make a camera thats controlable.

Plz try make elwynn forest like this... (took me 10 minutes in the editor ^_^ ) (ill remove this if u want me to).

Thanks for the comments.

-Firstly I know Teldrassil and Ashenvale as a whole has purple trees but Warcraft 3 does not and I am not a skinner. While I am trying to get a WoW feel I am not trying to clone WoW as that would be impossible, purple trees would be a nice touch if someone could do them.

- I realize that, I also realize that Thunder Bluff is in Mulgore far from Crossroads let alone Orgrimmar. The same is true for Iron Forge and Stormwind unfortunetly this is like an overworld perspective, it would be nice to have more distance but its simply not feasible on a 256x256 map. If someone wanted to do many seperate maps to try and accomplish a more realistic WoW impression more power to them but I have already stated above why I am not using that concept. As for the grass I realize that to, however, I just started terraining Southern Kalimdor and its not even close to being finished and I will be making continious changes along those lines to make the area more interesting.

- I realize this to, I have in fact played WoW before. Are the models you provided available for download?

- The camera is something I will consider in the future. I definitly don't want to force certain camera positions or completly limit a player to a certain angle as while some people like it I personally have hated most I have seen so far.

Thanks again for the comments, I will post some more screenshots and some abiliities of the Sorceress tomorrow when I have more time. Keep up the comments =)

Well... i just wonder then, why didnt u make the map 480x480 or something? And you could use color tinting on the trees to make them purple.

Again there are limitations. While a 480x480 would allow far more space which would be very nice the map size would likely be in the 2mb range which is far in excess of what the average player will bother with. Whats more load times would be far longer and I'm unsure how slower PC's would handle it. My current PC hates the map as it is although I do only have 512mb of RAM =/. The tinting is a nice idea that I didn't even consider so I will have to play around with that. My main problem at the moment is that the new 1.17 patch seems to be incompatible with the WEU No Limits patch for me crashing the WEU each time so I am kinda stuck for the moment.

Ok, but i'd like to see a warcraft 3 map on battle net with a Non-warcraft style.. your ideas are very good but id prefer some improvements on terrain.
got any screens of Ironforge?

I probably could help u do some skinning if you want...
And making a map looking like WoW would not be impossible...

Like I said I havn't been terraining all that long and am still fairly new with it, someone helping me out with it would be very helpful ;). I do have most of Iron Forge done but I am still kinda thinking of what to do with some pieces of it, I will probably post a screenshot of it when I'm home.

As for skinning if you can help out that would be great, I use ICQ/MSN so PM me and we can talk some more.

i would like to do alittle skinning if you want my help:D

Ok, whats your msn? i'd probably be able to help out a bit with skins... If u need, i could do terrain... And why do u bother keeping the map under 2mb? a fully triggered and terrained map of mine took 1.6mb without any imports... I try to use all space available when i make maps... that is 4mb (all u can have on b.net maps

1.6 mb are you nuts??
my maps ios anput 1.5 mb 'with' imports

I'm not too concerned with map sizes at the moment I'm just trying to by the end use the space I use to the maximum efficiency, if you can help with terraining/skinning then contact me on msn at [email protected]

My current progress stands at 90% of Human lands triggers done, the basic terrain of Lordaeron, Kalimdor and the Barrens is done but needs a lot of work still as do human lands. I have started triggering the Undead lands but also have to change the terrain to better fit my needs. I will edit this post in a bit with the spell list of the Sorceress and hopefully a picture of her Chains of Ice spell.

In regard to the idea of multiple maps mentioned earlier, thinking about it more I would love to do that but I think it qould require someone to do the terraining and someone to help with a few of the triggers as I could never do all those maps alone O.O