A modern, browser-based map editor for World of Warcraft 3.3.5a (WotLK) — the classic Noggit rebuilt from the ground up.
Noggit Diamond reads and writes real WotLK ADT terrain files and gives you sculpting, texture painting, water, holes, area ids, vertex shading, object placement, procedural generation, heightmap round-tripping and full undo — running in any modern browser, with zero installation, on Windows, macOS and Linux.
The classic Noggit (and its forks) are 15-year-old C++/OpenGL codebases that are hard to build, Windows-centric, crash-prone, and famously weak at undo. Noggit Diamond keeps the workflow map-makers know and fixes the foundations:
| Classic Noggit | Noggit Diamond | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Windows build (fragile) | Any browser — or native desktop builds for Windows/macOS/Linux |
| Undo/redo | Partial, unreliable | Every stroke, transactional (200 steps) |
| File safety | Can corrupt unknown chunks | Byte-preserving round trip, unknown chunks kept verbatim |
| WDL (distant terrain) | Never updated → far-view mismatch | Regenerated automatically on save |
| Procedural terrain | — | Seeded simplex fBm/ridged/islands, seamless across tiles |
| Heightmap import/export | — | PNG + lossless 16-bit PGM |
| Scripting | Lua (Red fork only) | JavaScript console with a typed nd API |
| Alpha maps | 2048/4096 | 4-bit, 8-bit ("big alpha") and RLE-compressed, auto-detected |
| Tests | none | 121 unit tests incl. byte-idempotent serialization |
Terrain — raise/lower, flatten (raise-only / lower-only / locked height), smooth; seven classic brush falloffs (flat, linear, smooth, polynomial, trigonometric, quadratic, gaussian) with inner-radius control. Edits are seamless across chunk and tile borders, and normals are recomputed automatically after every stroke.
Texturing — paint up to 4 layers per chunk with pressure/opacity control, automatic layer management, empty-layer pruning, texture swapping, per-chunk layer inspector, and a palette that can be "skinned" with your own PNG/JPG previews of the real BLPs.
Water (MH2O) — flood/drain per chunk with river/ocean/magma/slime types, level control (absolute or relative to terrain), full support for multi-instance cells, exists bitmaps, depth maps and all four liquid vertex formats.
Detail — MCCV vertex-color shading, terrain holes, area-id painting, impassable flags, baked-shadow display, area/impass overlays, wireframe mode.
Objects — inspect, select, move (terrain-snapping drag), rotate, re-scale and delete M2 doodad and WMO placements; MCRF reference tables are kept consistent.
World — multi-tile editing with automatic seam stitching, minimap with click-to- teleport, WDT map index maintenance, WDL low-res heightmap regeneration on save.
Generation — seeded procedural terrain (rolling hills / ridged mountains / islands) that lines up perfectly across tiles; heightmap import from any grayscale image and lossless 16-bit PGM export/import for external tools (Blender, Gaea, World Machine…).
Scripting — press </kbd> for the Diamond Script console: drive every editing operation from JavaScript (nd.raise, nd.paint, nd.water, nd.generate, nd.heightAt`, …) for repeatable, scriptable map work.
In the browser:
npm install
npm run dev # → http://localhost:5173As a desktop app (Electron — native window, native save dialogs, works offline):
npm install
npm run dist:linux # → release/NoggitDiamond-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage
npm run dist:win # → release/NoggitDiamond-Setup-<version>.exe (+ portable .exe)
npm run dist:mac # → release/NoggitDiamond-<version>-mac-<arch>.dmgEach dist:* command must run on its own OS (or use the Desktop builds GitHub
Actions workflow, which packages all three from one click / on version tags).
For development, npm run build && npm run app launches the desktop shell directly,
and npm run dev + npm run app:dev gives hot reload inside the native window.
With Visual Studio (Windows): open NoggitDiamond.sln and press
Build — Debug produces release\win-unpacked\Noggit Diamond.exe, Release
produces the NSIS installer + portable exe; F5 launches the app. Needs the
JavaScript and TypeScript development workload and Node.js on PATH — see
docs/VISUAL_STUDIO.md.
- File ▸ New Map… creates flat or procedural tiles from scratch.
- Or drop
.adtfiles (ideally together with the map's.wdt) into the viewport. Extract them from your client's MPQs with any MPQ tool (Ladik's MPQ Editor, etc.). - Edit with tools 1–0, then File ▸ Save All to download the edited ADTs plus regenerated WDT and WDL, ready to pack back into a patch MPQ.
npm test # 121 unit tests (format round-trip, editing ops, generation)
npm run typecheck # strict TypeScript
npm run build # production bundle in dist/| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| RMB drag | Look around |
| W A S D / Q E | Fly / down / up (Shift = boost, wheel = speed) |
| LMB | Apply active tool |
| Ctrl + LMB | Inverted tool (lower / erase / drain / fill) |
| 1 – 0 | Select tool |
| Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y | Undo / redo |
| Ctrl+S | Save current tile |
| ` | Scripting console |
| R / Delete | Rotate / delete selected object |
src/lib/ Pure TypeScript library (no DOM) — fully unit-tested
binary/ Chunked little-endian reader/writer
adt/ ADT parser, serializer, alpha codecs, blank-tile builder
wdt/ wdl/ Map index + low-res world heightmaps
edit/ Sculpt, texture, water, holes, areas, normals, undo
gen/ Simplex noise, procedural terrain, heightmap I/O
world/ Multi-tile Terrain facade (spatial queries, seams)
src/app/ Browser editor (Three.js renderer, tools, UI)
docs/ User guide and format notes
The src/lib layer has no browser dependencies and doubles as a standalone
ADT toolkit — see docs/FORMATS.md.
WotLK 3.3.5a monolithic ADTs (version 18): MVER, MHDR, MCIN, MTEX, MMDX/MMID, MWMO/MWID, MDDF, MODF, MH2O (all LVFs), MFBO, MTXF, and per-chunk MCVT, MCCV, MCNR (incl. the 13 preserved pad bytes), MCLY, MCRF, MCSH, MCAL (4-bit, 8-bit, compressed), MCLQ (preserved verbatim), MCSE. Unknown chunks survive load→save byte-for-byte. WDT and WDL are fully supported. Cataclysm+ split files are out of scope.
Model files (M2/WMO geometry) live inside MPQs and are rendered as markers, not meshes — Diamond is a terrain editor first; see docs/USER_GUIDE.md.
MIT. Not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment. World of Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Use with game data you are licensed to use.