Marlamin

Hi! I've spent the last 16 years or so devoting much of my spare time into my hobby which is the combination of programming, datamining and tool development. Note: If you don't want to deal with Patreon you can also donate through PayPal here. Much of my programming career has been guided by making tools that interact with World of Warcraft (WoW) and its many file formats. I create and/or help maintain several WoW things relating to this: wow.export WoW.export was made from the ground up by Kruithne (go support them if you're here purely for this tool) based on functionality in the old WoW model exporter I made and replaced the old tool in early 2020. Artists can use this to import terrain, buildings and other things into their tools and use them to create 3D art such as character portraits or machinima. While active development on the tool has largely come to a halt, I'm still planning to maintain it in a way where it at least keeps working (until Blizzard really makes my life difficult). wow.tools.local The WoW.tools website was created after I figured it would be pretty easy to automatically archive WoW builds using Blizzard's new distribution method they started using in 2014. With this archive, it was possible to retrieve files from many different versions of WoW (starting with 6.0). Through the years I added more and more tools to the site that made use of said archive. While the website has been retired, much of its functionality still lives on in wow.tools.local (WTL) which starts up a local version of the website with more or less the functionality of the original site and more. Database definitions WoW uses a specialized file format to store database information that the game uses for the storage of most information the client requires. These files do not contain descriptive names for their contents (column names, types, etc) and this project aims to created a standardized way of storing these descriptive names for implementation in other projects. Listfile Blizzard no longer uses filenames to store things inside of World of Warcraft's client. To combat this change I've built a set of tools that allow the community to suggest/set filenames for files. This has mostly solved the problem for now, but additional and continuous work will need doing to not let the amount of unknown filenames get out of hand. Missing filenames will make it harder to use various community tools such as most of the ones listed here as well as third-party tools such as WoW Model Viewer.  Minimap Viewer The project that started it all and still lives on to this day. Allows people to look at compiled images of Blizzard's in-game minimaps inside of a Google Maps-like viewer. Supports multiple versions going back to before WoW was released. TACTSharp/DBCD/other I also help maintain a few C# libraries that make interacting with WoW data easier for C# developers. Amongst them are TACTSharp which interfaces with the filesystem(s) WoW uses as well as DBCD which allows developers to read/write WoW's client database tables. There are other smaller libraries/tools as well. WoW modding things While I will not one count myself as one of the many authors of tools like the community map editor for WoW Noggit, I've been working on slowly dragging Noggit into the modern WoW age as well as making other tooling around it to make map making in modern WoW clients accessible enough for artists. WoWDev.wiki This is much less of a time burden compared to many of the above projects, but I also pay for hosting the WoWDev Wiki, a wiki full of information on WoW's different file formats/quirks. The WoW dev community (including myself) use the information on this wiki to build tools with. While I can't promise any of the resources will go to any specific project, and most of it will likely be spent on just keeping things going, if you have a specific feature request or comment regarding any of the stuff I work on you can always reach out to me on BlueSky, Discord (Marlamin, make sure to have a name I can recognize from Patreon if you add me) or by email to [email protected].