Anyone have any idea how to parse over w3u,w3i,w3a, and wts files in mpq for icons?

[Nestharus]

I have an idea for an exe and I want to be able to load up all objects within a wc3 MPQ Map Archive as well as their icons and display them by icon.

I was looking over the data in those 4 files and while parsing over the object types + names seemed easy enough, parsing over icon paths for specific object type ids seemed impossible ; P.


Is there a trick to it? : )



Tx


I was thinking that it might be a general search for .blp, then building the rest of the icon path, then finding the ids the icon is associated with by searching for TRIGSTR, but I didn't even see icons for all of the data :\.


Posting this question here seemed to be the best area since this is for general programming =).

 

[Varine]

Look for files with whatever the image extension is and the pixel size.

 

[Nestharus]

It's not that simple ; (.

Not all of the icons were in there. I think only non default icons were in there. Furthermore, it was very hard to tell what object id an icon was associated with. I'm still not really sure ;o.

 

[Varine]

If you want default icons you have to go through the standard .mpq's with the game. It's not altogether very complicated in how it works, it's just figuring out what to search for.

 

[Nestharus]

Well, I want to account for custom too and it seems very chaotic figuring out what object the custom icon is for.

 

[Varine]

What exactly are you trying to do?

 

[saw792]

He's trying to map icon paths/files to their associated default and custom objects from the Object Editor. Which means he needs to find unit/ability/item/etc IDs for each custom or non-default icon he finds in each map.

I imagine the simplest approach to the entire database would be to pre-store the default mappings for normal objects and then overwrite/add to these when a custom object is found. But you probably already know/planned to do this. I guess it would be useful if object ids had a default offset from icon paths or if there was some universal tag before each object ids. I haven't really checked through the "spec" though.

 

[GetTriggerUnit-]

Maybe you can make, a chain, I'm not sure... First, find all the (.mdl or .mdx) files read their data (long operation...), find their dependencies and load those? Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole situation here...

 

[Nestharus]

well, the main prob is linking custom icon paths to object ids.

 

[GetTriggerUnit-]

Do you mean like in a map where the creator used custom icons/models?

If yes, I guess you should check for paths override.

 

[Nestharus]

ahem

well, the main prob is linking custom icon paths to object ids.

So my idea was to first do name/id/default icon, then look for custom icons and replace default with custom, but again, the problem is getting those custom icons out of the w3u, w3i, w3a files.

 

[saw792]

http://www.thehelper.net/forums/showthread.php/42787-Guide-Explanation-of-W3M-and-W3X-Files

According to that, you should look up what the modification ID is for the icon path in the appropriate MetaData.slk files, then scan through the file. Each time you find a modified object record it. If you then find a modification of the icon file (i.e. find the mod id in a modification section) you attribute it to the current object. Thus every time you reach a new object it will update the current object, and will record the icon change if and only if that occurs.

 

[Nestharus]

Thanks, that helps ; )