Client: How to edit map assets

[Spirited]

Introduction

Conquer Online is an isometric game, meaning the coordinate axes are oriented at roughly 120 degrees to each other on a 30 degree slant. This produces a pseudo-3D effect the community calls 2.5D. Conquer Online is a notably interesting case, since it uses a mixture of both 2D and 3D assets. Maps in Conquer Online are completely 2D, while the character and monster models are all 3D. This tutorial describes how to edit those 2D assets.

Downloads

• Gimp: A free paint program that supports DDS (Paint.net also works, Photoshop requires this plugin).
  
• SageThumbs: Optional shell extension for DDS thumbnails on Windows
  
• WDF Extractor: Needed to extract assets from compressed archives
  

Editing Assets

In this tutorial, I modified a tree in Twin City. Before you can modify map assets, you need to extract them from data.wdf. You can do that using the WDF extractor you downloaded. Once complete, find the asset in "data/map/mapobj/newplain/plain" called "np09.dds". Open the file in Gimp using default DDS import settings.

Once done making modifications, export the file using default DDS export settings. Replace the file (make sure you create a backup of the original), then restart your game client. That's all it takes. Enjoy!