Standalone wowee_editor tool for creating custom WoW zones.
This is a rough initial implementation — many features work but
M2/WMO rendering still has issues (frame sync, texture layout
transitions) and needs further polish.
Terrain:
- Create new blank terrain with 10 biome types (Grassland, Forest,
Jungle, Desert, Barrens, Snow, Swamp, Rocky, Beach, Volcanic)
- Load existing ADT tiles from extracted game data
- Sculpt brushes: Raise, Lower, Smooth, Flatten, Level
- Chunk edge stitching prevents seams between tiles
- Undo/redo (100-deep stack, Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Shift+Z)
- Save to WoW ADT/WDT format
Texture Painting:
- Paint/Erase/Replace Base modes
- Full tileset texture browser (1285 textures from manifest)
- Per-zone directory filtering and search
- Alpha map editing with 4-layer limit (auto-replaces weakest)
Object Placement:
- M2 and WMO model placement with full manifest browser (11k M2s, 2k WMOs)
- M2Renderer + WMORenderer integrated (loads .skin files for WotLK)
- Ghost preview follows cursor before placing
- Ctrl+click selection, right-click context menu
- Transform gizmo (Move/Rotate/Scale with axis constraints)
- Position/rotation/scale editing in properties panel
NPC/Monster System:
- 631 creature presets scanned from manifest, categorized
(Critters, Beasts, Humanoids, Undead, Demons, etc.)
- Stats editor: level, health, mana, damage, armor, faction
- Behavior: Stationary, Patrol, Wander, Scripted
- Aggro/leash radius, respawn time, flags (hostile/vendor/etc.)
- Save creature spawns to JSON
Water:
- Place water at configurable height per chunk
- Liquid types: Water, Ocean, Magma, Slime
- Rendered as translucent colored quads
- Saved in ADT MH2O format
Infrastructure:
- Free-fly camera (WASD/QE, right-drag look, scroll speed)
- 5-mode toolbar: Sculpt | Paint | Objects | Water | NPCs
- Asset browser indexes full manifest on startup
- Editor water/marker shaders (pos+color vertex format)
- forceNoCull added to M2Renderer for editor use
- AssetManifest::getEntries() and AssetManager::getManifest() exposed
Known issues:
- M2/WMO rendering may not display on first placement (frame index
sync between update/render was misaligned — now fixed but untested
end-to-end)
- Validation layer errors on shutdown (resource cleanup ordering)
- Object placement on steep terrain can miss raycast
- No undo for texture painting or object placement yet
Add complete spell visual pipeline resolving the DBC chain
(Spell → SpellVisual → SpellVisualKit → SpellVisualEffectName → M2)
with precast/cast/impact phases, bone-attached positioning, and
automatic dual-hand mirroring.
Ribbon rendering fixes:
- Parse visibility track as uint8 (was read as float, suppressing
all ribbon edges due to ~1.4e-45 failing the >0.5 check)
- Filter garbage emitters with bone=UINT_MAX unconditionally
- Guard against NaN spine positions from corrupt bone data
- Resolve ribbon textures via direct index, not textureLookup table
- Fall back to bone 0 when ribbon bone index is out of range
Particle rendering fixes:
- Reduce spell particle scale from 5x to 1.5x (was oversized)
- Exempt spell effect instances from position-based deduplication
Spell handler integration:
- Trigger precast visuals on SMSG_SPELL_START with server castTimeMs
- Trigger cast/impact visuals on SMSG_SPELL_GO
- Cancel precast visuals on cast interrupt/failure/movement
M2 classifier expansion:
- Add AmbientEmitterType enum for sound system integration
- Add 20+ foliage tokens, 4 spell effect tokens, isSmallFoliage flag
- Add markModelAsSpellEffect() to override disableAnimation
DBC layouts:
- Add SpellVisualID field to Spell.dbc for all expansion configs
Signed-off-by: Pavel Okhlopkov <pavel.okhlopkov@flant.com>
All M2 pipelines used VK_CULL_MODE_NONE, so back-facing polygons always
rendered. On NPCs whose torso meshes are single-layer geometry this
made the interior cavity visible through the back.
Create backface-culled pipeline variants (VK_CULL_MODE_BACK_BIT) and
select them at draw time unless the material has the TwoSided flag
(0x04). Foliage/ground-detail forceCutout batches and the shadow
pipeline keep VK_CULL_MODE_NONE since those cards are inherently
two-sided.
Implement GPU-driven Hierarchical-Z occlusion culling for M2 doodads
using a depth pyramid built from the previous frame's depth buffer.
The cull shader projects bounding spheres via prevViewProj (temporal
reprojection) and samples the HiZ pyramid to reject hidden objects
before the main render pass.
Key implementation details:
- Separate early compute submission (beginSingleTimeCommands + fence
wait) eliminates 2-frame visibility staleness
- Conservative safeguards prevent false culls: screen-edge guard,
full VP row-vector AABB projection (Cauchy-Schwarz), 50% sphere
inflation, depth bias, mip+1, min screen size threshold, camera
motion dampening (auto-disable on fast rotations), and per-instance
previouslyVisible flag tracking
- Graceful fallback to frustum-only culling if HiZ init fails
Fix dark WMO interiors by gating shadow map sampling on isInterior==0
in the WMO fragment shader. Interior groups (flag 0x2000) now rely
solely on pre-baked MOCV vertex-color lighting + MOHD ambient color.
Disable interiorDarken globally (was incorrectly darkening outdoor M2s
when camera was inside a WMO). Use isInsideInteriorWMO() instead of
isInsideWMO() for correct indoor detection.
New files:
- hiz_system.hpp/cpp: pyramid image management, compute pipeline,
descriptors, mip-chain build dispatch, resize handling
- hiz_build.comp.glsl: MAX-depth 2x2 reduction compute shader
- m2_cull_hiz.comp.glsl: frustum + HiZ occlusion cull compute shader
- test_indoor_shadows.cpp: 14 unit tests for shadow/interior contracts
Modified:
- CullUniformsGPU expanded 128->272 bytes (HiZ params, viewProj,
prevViewProj)
- Depth buffer images gain VK_IMAGE_USAGE_SAMPLED_BIT for HiZ reads
- wmo.frag.glsl: interior branch before unlit, shadow skip for 0x2000
- Render graph: hiz_build + compute_cull disabled (run in early compute)
- .gitignore: ignore compiled .spv binaries
- MEGA_BONE_MAX_INSTANCES: 2048 -> 4096
Signed-off-by: Pavel Okhlopkov <pavel.okhlopkov@flant.com>