WoW liquid types are 0=water/1=ocean/2=magma/3=slime. A user-edited
WOT could carry an out-of-range value that the editor renderer
silently maps to plain water but the server treats as undefined.
A WOT water entry with non-finite height would push NaN through
the water mesh builder and produce a degenerate Vulkan draw
(invisible water at best, GPU hang at worst).
A WOT JSON could carry tile coords outside 0..63 (would compute
chunk world positions tens of thousands of units off-grid) or NaN
position/rotation values on doodad/WMO placements (would propagate
into rendering matrices and produce invisible geometry).
A WHM with non-finite height values would produce non-finite vertex
positions in the terrain mesh, breaking collision queries, pathing,
and the GPU's matrix math. Both the chunk base (one float per chunk)
and the 145 per-vertex heights are now individually validated.
Architecture fixes for open format data fidelity:
- WOT now serializes full doodad/WMO placement arrays (positions,
rotations, scale, flags, doodad sets) — was only storing counts,
causing all placed objects to be lost on WOT round-trip
- WOT loader parses placements back into ADTTerrain for client rendering
- WOB Material struct added: preserves WMO material flags, shader type,
and blend mode during WMO→WOB conversion (was geometry-only)
- WOB doodad rotation: quaternion→euler conversion instead of hardcoded
zero (placed doodads inside buildings now retain their orientation)
- importOpen() deduplicated: delegates to pipeline::WoweeTerrainLoader
instead of duplicating 100 lines of parsing code
- WHM binary now includes per-chunk alpha map data (alphaSize + data)
so custom zones render with proper texture blending in the client
- WOT exporter rewritten with nlohmann/json (was manual string concat)
- WOT loader rewritten with nlohmann/json (was naive substring parsing)
- Backward compatible: old WHM files without alpha data still load fine
The wowee client can now load custom zones exported from the editor
using the novel WOT/WHM format — no Blizzard files needed.
Loading priority in TerrainManager::prepareTile():
1. Check custom_zones/{mapName}/{mapName}_{x}_{y}.wot/.whm
2. Check output/{mapName}/{mapName}_{x}_{y}.wot/.whm (editor output)
3. Fall back to World\Maps\...\*.adt (standard extracted data)
Pipeline:
- WoweeTerrainLoader in src/pipeline/ (shared between client + editor)
- Loads .whm binary heightmap (WHM1 magic, 256 chunks × 145 floats)
- Loads .wot JSON metadata (textures, layers, holes, water)
- Populates the same ADTTerrain struct the mesh generator uses
- obj0 merge only runs for ADT-loaded tiles (custom zones have no obj0)
To use: export zone from editor → files appear in output/ → client
loads them automatically on next terrain request for that map name.
