Omen of War files (EQG, LIT, MOD, ZON, ANI)
 

Hello,

Last days, i investigated about new file system introduced with Omen of War, im posting this to share what i found.

With this new file system, SOE totally dropped WLD system (Thanks !), now zones look to be scattered into many ojects/zone parts (MOD), that are assembled into one file (ZON), like they were in WLD.
Two important thing is that Omen of War zones look like to have Bump Mapping textures (Now, we know why OoW zone look kick ass), and maybe active shadows (Still need to get confirmation on this), but with Omen of War, it look like SOE resigned in using more DX9 possibilities, even if lots are missing (Pixel Shading ?!). All we can hope is Omen of War is a beta of the new EQ Graphic Engine SOE is speaking since a moment now.

EQG : Appear to be a container such as S3D files were, EQG files contain all files related to the zone itself (LIT, MOD, DDS, ZON), it look like SOE is using a software called "ffcreate2.exe" to create (package all files) EQG files, but i was unable to find it in any EQ files.
ZON : Zone file containing all objects (MOD) reference, as well zone specificities.
MOD : Objects containing all informations related to it such as materials, specificities.
LIT : Lit vertices was a DirectX function introduced with DX8.1, if you want to know more, here is a good information website http://www.thehavok.co.uk/scene/32bi...1worldtri.php/.
DDS : Zone/Objects texture "*_c.dds" is for texture, "*_n.dds" is for bump mapping.
TER : Terrain, Ground mesh of the zone.
ANI : Only found in EQG NPC files, appear to be animation of models (MOD), where the MOD is the static mesh, and ANI the bone animated model.
BMP : Used for Zone Heightmaps.

I havent found where are located sounds, musics.

If any of you made some investigation, please, feel free to post what you found here.

Hmm...maybe TER is short for terrain?

Yes TER files are definitivly the ground mesh of the zone, while the ZON file contain zone/object reference, updated post.

KhAn...

I dont know where they are located but i do have them since im in beta :)

If you need, msg me on aim :)

Khan has beta too obviously because he's deconstructing the files. ... What's your point zkhava? it didn't take anything special to get in beta. i havent played in 2 years logged on and saw them saying go here to join beta. lmfao.

I know , heh... Same ... I Saw Omens of Beta Application... & In 3-5 Clicks on my mouse, I was in :D

i on the other hand ignored it, cause i could care less about ANOTHER crappy eq expansion =)

You don't even have to be in beta now to download the files from the eq patcher. :P

Edit: Btw zone music is still in .mp3 format as of the last time I patched the beta. Not sure about ambient sounds if there are any.

I wonder if the .TER files are Terragen heightmaps...OpenZone can import Terragen heightmaps as well as .BMP heightmaps when creating zones...

WC

Nevermind...I checked one out. It looks like the replacement for .WLD or something...

Yepeeh ! WC, glad to see you up on the works again :)
hmm -- this just ends of topic post in the thread :/

I noticed that the OoW Zones took a shitload more RAM Than any other EQ Zones, Would this be the reason?

It's due to the new graphical functions/effects used.
Also if you dont have enough video ram, the system will use the main ram
so add to this the textures if they are bigger

I have 128MB Video ram, and using ONE session of Everquest I was using 950/1024 RAM

500+ Mb for a fps game session. It's just going crazy.

If you look at OoW zones, its normal they took way more RAM, CPU process than any other EQ zones, mainly because OoW zones start to use some DX functions, and that zones contains way more polys, in OoW zones, you also load texture+BM when EQ zones only load textures.

The good thing now, would have to have this new file format figured, because for me, it could maybe make zones/mesh creation easier.

Nothing really crazy here, 128/256mo on a graphic cards is ok for all the games generally, but MMO are differents, because you load more textures than any other games, because zones are largers and there are more NPC variety, meaning PC will have to load many textures.

WC, When you are back, log on IRC please, i will be online whole week-end :p

If no one has mentioned it yet, OoW replaces all water textures with some kind of DX9 (I assume) water render. Just FYI.

Even in older zones? Should be interesting if so. I saw shots of the water in Oow zones and it actually looked pretty nice.

Yes. I have a shot of Potranquility and Powater with it somewhere.

First things first... http://home.archshadow.com/~daeken/omens.html has links to the OoW patch files (they're _not_ hosted on my box, they're simply links to the SOE patchserver)

Second, GXTi and myself have begun work on getting support for these files in FreakU. We decided that we're going to create our own file format and convert from the s3d/eqg files to the new format.

Also (off-topic) we could really use forums... if we could get them here (news, support, and dev preferably) that'd be great, or we could run them ourselves. If a mod from here is willing to create those forums for us, that'd be fantastic :)


Happy Hacking,
Lord Daeken M. BlackBlade
(Cody Brocious)

Water Render Images:
http://img88.exs.cx/img88/696/water1.th.jpg http://img88.exs.cx/img88/5017/water2.th.jpg
http://img88.exs.cx/img88/2669/water3.th.jpghttp://img88.exs.cx/img88/7184/water4.th.jpg
(Click to Enlarge)

Nice water shots. I need to get better PC =( 32mb vid & 384 mb ram just don't cut it anymore..

There are textures containing normals in the data files which implies that there must be light sources to make use of the normals.

Does anyone know how to calculate the position of the light source(s) for the zone?

man ... when did they add water like that to EQ?? i have a radeon 9700 and never remember water like that

The OOW patch, Sot :P

man thats pretty l33t.

im gonna log on live just to swim in the uber water

Anyone got any idea how the ZON files work?

It looks to me like amongst other things they contain details on which objects (from the .MOD) files are placed in the zone. I guess there is a name list at the start and then later on a list of objects included which object, and it's coordinates.

But I've not got it to decode to anything sensible yet.
I'm working on it but would welcome any input :)

Done =P

Hmm, my post disapeared. Did someone delete it?

Some progress on ZON files :-

They seem to have a hearer structure :

The object_count seems to be a count of the number of placeable objects in the zone.

Following the header is a list of null terminated string many of which are the names of models in the EQG file.

At the END of the file there is a list of "object_count" 32 byte objects which are the location of placeable objects.

The first 3 floats seem to be (-y, x, z) which seems a little strange but if I draw a marker in my world at those locations it looks about right. Maybe I've somehow messed up getting the data in my code as (x, y, z) would make a lot more sense.

The the unk1 values seem to vary between 0 - 1. I'm guessing that one or more of them are rotations...

The scale may not be scale factor. But it seems to be a number usually 100.0 but sometimes other values such as 60.0 or 125.0 so it seems possible.

I'm guessing the id at the start indicates which model to draw. I'm thinking it needs to tie into the name table at the start but so far I've been unable to work out the connection.

Well, that's as far as I've got so far. Any more thoughts would be welcome :)

I can draw little triangles at the locations and it looks like those are all places where objects should in the world at least this is the right data.

As you can see from the screenshot below the marker triangles look like they are in the right places, I just can't tell what to draw there (yet)
http://img79.exs.cx/img79/2686/render06.th.jpg