[FiftyTifty]

I've experience with making heightmaps, and fancy having a shot at loading them into WoW. While I'm still in the design stage, I need a reference for how big the details and the overall geography should be.

How big is a 512x512 heightmap in the game? Is that the size of a vanilla zone? Smaller, bigger? How large would a vanilla zone roughly be?

Thanks in advance

[Degen]

Each ADT has a 257x257 heightmap. Northshire Valley is about 1 ADT, Stormwind is 2x2, and Elwynn Forest is 2x4. A 4k heightmap would fit the top half of Eastern Kingdoms,  8k can easily fit all of Northrend,  and 16k will fill every single ADT (64x64) but at that size the alphamaps can become a problem as theyre 4 times bigger. 

[FiftyTifty]

8 hours ago, Degen said:

Each ADT has a 257x257 heightmap. Northshire Valley is about 1 ADT, Stormwind is 2x2, and Elwynn Forest is 2x4. A 4k heightmap would fit the top half of Eastern Kingdoms,  8k can easily fit all of Northrend,  and 16k will fill every single ADT (64x64) but at that size the alphamaps can become a problem as theyre 4 times bigger. 

Ooh, I forgot about this post.

I've been doing research myself using Noggit Red. The zones really do vary a lot, with the Orgrimmar zone being 3x6, and the border zone with Mount Hyjall being 6x6. The good news, is that tiled builds take care of any outright hardware limit (the RAM usage for 64k data maps...). Bad news, is that functionality is currently broken in Gaea.

Another strange thing is the verticality in WoW's maps. Outlands has everything extremely high up, with the actual playable zone being extremely squashed. Vanilla isn't quite as bad, but the height is used just for a zone's base elevation, rather than having varied and interesting terrain. I wonder what the reason was for this? The software just wasn't great, and Blizzard kept with the same visual look throughout their expansions for consistency?

Took a wee look at alpha maps, and it looks to be just splat maps rendered as three separate greyscale channels. But making them at 4x resolution for the best result...Ooft. Definitely need tiled builds to get fixed.