dereth.png (2041x2041x24 -- 3.49 MB)
Welcome to David Simpson's page of Dereth cartography. My main character is a level 49 unarmed adventurer named Ho on Thistledown, but in real life I'm an employee of the Red Zone division of Sony Computer Entertainment America., where I am currently a graphics programmer working on several sports titles for the PlayStation 2.
6-7-02 Nothing, for a really, really long time. Don't expect anything new either.
7-13-01 The map with all of the visible changes from the July patch is now up. In this patch, 729 landblocks were changed. The majority of the changed landblocks, 704 to be exact, are on the new island north of the Direlands. Minor changes were made to the island, such as the addition of some roads and a bit of snow on one of the peaks. What is the island for and when will it beome accesable? I guess only Turbine knows and the rest of us will have to wait.
Another 12 landblocks were changed on the pizza island in the southwest corner of the map, which is now known as the Singularity Caul. I don't know what these changes include since I've never been to the island before. In the screenshots section below I have one of the Singularity Caul that I took almost a year ago. Four more landblocks changed in the far northwest corner of the map. Since it is impossible to see that part of the map, I don't know what has changed there.
Of the remaining nine landblocks, one is probably an old dungeon that has been updated (01EB), four are new dungeons, and the other four are regular landblocks. One of the new dungeons is the Singularity Bore, in which one gains access to the Singularity Caul. I have no other information on the other dungeons. Of the four regular landblocks, one contains the Essence of Verdancy (30.5S, 74.3W), and another contains the group of Virindi Craftsmen (32.0N, 43.2W). There is also one changed landblock west of Rithwic and another changed landblock just south of WaiJhou. I couldn't discern anything different in either of these landblocks nor anything of note. However, this doesn't mean this is a random occurence though. Several months ago I investigated some landblocks that had been changed and found nothing of note, only to have the Devs trigger dungeons that appeared there about a week after the patch went live.
7-4-01 It appears now that after the end of every quarter Microsoft and Turbine make available an up to date complete set of patches in one easy, albeit large, file to download. One of the really nice things about these downloads is that they contain a complete up to date copy of CELL.DAT. All of the landblocks and all of the dungeons without the hassle of visiting every nook and cranny of Dereth. The last two downloads made the outlying areas of my map more accurate, but weren't particularly useful since these areas were inaccessable and unfinished. This large download is different though. In the June patch, a new island was introduced, but alas was not completely visible from the mainland of Dereth. This large patch fixes that though, providing the landblocks of the new island that I could not see. As always, the latest map can be found below.
6-15-01 The latest map of Dereth that includes all of the visible changes from the June patch is now available for download below. The biggest, and most noticable change this month is the island north of the Direlands. The old island is gone, but a new, bigger island is now in its place. However, this new island is further off the coast than the old island and is not completely visible, thus it is incomplete on the map. Is it accessable? I don't know, but I suspect not. As soon as it is accessable though, I will try to complete the map of this island.
The other changes in June were fairly minor. Five new dungeons were added. I know the location of one of these: Land Bridge Staging Complex (86.1S, 2.5W). This dungeon is restriced to level 32 and above. I've heard that there are three new dungeons involved in the new orb quest, leaving one dungeon I don't know anything about.
Lastly, four other landblocks were changed. One is the Essence of Enchantment (52.8N, 62.4E). Another is the lifestone at Danby's (24.1N, 28.1W). Third is the Land Bridge Stanging Complex dungeon I listed above, and fourth is a change in south Arwic. I didn't really notice any changes made there, but it did change.
Ok, now that I am actually writing something new here, I'll continue and list some of the changes in the last several months that I failed to detail at the time. I know, I'm slow, but I've been busy, and many of the changes in the last several months have been very minor, typically with very little of the landscape on the map changing.
In the May 2001 patch, 11 landblocks were changed. Four of these were for the three brances of the Bestower's Guild (in Qalaba'r, Eastham, and Lin). Two were for Danby's Outpost, one for the portal there near Zaikhal (16.6N, 1.6W), and the other one for the outpost itself (23.4N, 28.7W). Another change was for Larry the Rabbit Master (2.0N, 41.6E). Also, a landblock in the northeastern corner of the map changed. At the time I went there, I found nothing. This month the Essence of Enchantment is there. I find it a little strange that the landblock changed last month. Perhaps Turbine put the Essence in physically, but didn't have everything else ready, so it was removed until this month. In any case, it is there now. The other three changes were dungeons. Colier Mine (01AE) and Tomb of the Dead (01F3) were changed. I don't know the details. Also, one new dungeon (0299) was put in. Some people though Desert March was a new dungeon in May. It wasn't. Desert March was added way back in January.
Going back in time further to the April patch, I found that 54 landblocks were changed. A good deal of these changes (23 landblocks) had something to do with landlocked water (lake in crater, and the pixel lakes northwest of Glenden Wood). Upon inspection, I couldn't tell any difference. The three Advocate Statue tributes (40.3S, 84.5E; 24.3N, 48.6E; 14.4N, 1.3E) involved another 7 landblock changes. The three casinos (29.9S, 49.3E; 37.9S, 7.5E; 42.8N, 25.1E) involved the changing of 11 landblocks. Three more landblocks were changed with the addition of three lugian camps in the Linvak Range. Also, the opening of Linvak Tukal (76.7S, 28.0E) changed another landblock. The addition of a new dungeon, Grendaline Consulate (61.6S, 29.3E), which is restricted to characters level 25 and up, changed another landblock. Another dungeon, Tomb of the Dead (18.3S, 9.3E), which was not in my dungeon database and may be new, but has an older dungeon ID (01F3), also changed a landblock. Also, a landblock in Rithwic was changed, possibly to accomadate the Lugian that hangs out there now.
The last six landblock changes in April involved dungeons. Four were new dungeons: Linvak Tukal Entryway (029C), Grendaline Consulate (029B), The Envoy's Chamber (029A), which is accessed from Grendaline Consulate, and one other dungeon I didn't find (02AB). Also, Tomb of the Dead (01F3) may be new. Lastly, Incunabula Vault (011A) was changed, but I didn't investigate those changes.
Finally, there were 17 landblocks changed in the March patch. Six of these were in the Ayan Baqar region and involved the disappearnce of the human shopkeepers, which were replaced by Virindi. A few of the old inhabitants escaped and can be found just east of town, but most of them were placed in a new dungeon, Panopticon (59.2S, 84.0W) where they are being brainwashed by their Virindi captors. High level Virindi can now be found just outside of Ayan Baqar, along with their Singularity Troves.
The two brothers Ya-Bint-Al-Hawa and Anid-Al-Fadee can be found in a tent (13.3S, 5.1E) outside of Tufa, which changed a landblock. Possibly a new lich bunker (18.4S, 9.3E) was added in March. This is where the Tomb of the Dead dungeon appeared in April. The Mnemosyne Collection Site dungeon (2.5S, 16.4E) was also added in March. The Waterfalls near Cragstone were changed, but I don't know what was done to them. Also, one landblock out in the middle of the desert (8071) was changed, but I didn't find anything there. Lastly, five new dungeons were added, and one old dungeon were changed in March. Two of these were the Mnemosyne Collection Site (029D) and Panopticon (02A1). I don't know anything about the other three new dungeons or the one that changed.
As a side note, I was very busy for several months leading up to E3, hence the lack of updates or, when I did update, the brevity of my updates. If you have written me mail, I apologize for not writing back; I'm not very good at getting around to it. Also, I haven't read my personal email here in over two months, and now I have over 1000 unread messages. I didn't login and read them for about a week, and then it snowballed out of control. Now, I'm scared to even try to catch up, but I will try anyway.
This main page was getting cluttered, so I moved a lot of the older news into a News Archive.
5-1-01 I finally got around to updating the map for the April patch. I apologize for not getting this map up sooner, but I haven't had a lot of time to play recently. I'll try and write some more information of what changed in the April patch and also the March patch (minor changes), which I never posted, very soon.
2-16-01 The newest map of Dereth, built from the February patch data, is now available. Very little has changed on the map since last month. Most of the changes were the result of new dungeons being added, or old dungeons being changed. The new dungeons I found are Hieromancer's Halls (4.4S, 82.8W), North Tumerok Vanguard Outpost (7.5S, 0.0), and South Tumerok Vanguard Outpost (45.9S, 14.2E). I also know of two old dungeons that changed. They are Mines of Despair (75.4S, 57.3E) and Moss Chamber (14.1N, 0.7W). There are other new dungeons too, but I don't know where they are. Also, some other old dungeons may have changed that I don't know about. I can't see all of the dungeons, so I don't know when they change. I also found the Essence of Artifice (86.7S, 10.4E). Lastly, south of Kara on the coast is a very tall island which now has a castle, fortress, and and an empyrean building. It is not possible to walk up to these buildings, nor do they seem populated. However, just west of the island, there is a small temple containing one of the wooden frames portals are so commonly found under. Sadly there is no portal though. Maybe next month.
In January, I updated the map, but forgot to update the web page. There wasn't a whole lot to say about it anyway. The changes last month were extremely minor (only 14 landblocks were changed). Only one dungeon was added, Desert March (6.5N, 3.6W). I also found that there are still three shadow spires in Dereth. Also, the Essence of Strife was added (73.5N, 3.2W). The most noticeable change though was the addition of snow and the return of the water to its natural blue color.
One of the things I do in my spare time (and there isn't much of it) is decipher and examine the data located on the client side of Asheron's Call. I do this mostly because I think it is fun and it provides me and the several friends with which I play useful tools and information to help us play Asheron's Call.
Most of the results I've come up with aren't too interesting or, as of yet, incomplete. However, I've made a complete map of Dereth that should be both interesting and useful to the general AC player, and I'm making it available for downloading. Turbine has previously released a map generated from the land data, but they masked out certain areas of the map and, to the best of my knowledge, provided only a JPEG version which has some artifacts due to the lossey data compression.
The map I have provided here is a 24 bit PNG file. It is compressed for a smaller download, but the compression is not lossey. Most browsers should allow you to download, view, and save this, but I did have problems with my Netscape under Windows 98 because Quicktime decided to take over the functunality of displaying PNG files and does a horrible job of it. So, beware!
I HIGHLY recommend just right clicking on the link below and choosing "Save Link As..."
dereth.png (2041x2041x24 -- 3.49 MB)
The map was last updated on 7-13-01
The graphic below shows exactly what coverage I did get and the source of all data. I managed to get data for 61278 of the 65025 total landblocks. The data for the remaining 3747 landblocks comes from the CELL.DAT file that is unpacked by running the third big AC patch available for download. The CELL.DAT file from this patch seems to contain a complete copy of everything up to and including the June 2001 patch.
Bright green represents land that is possible to get to. Dark green is land that I know of no way to get to. Blue is impassable water landblocks. Red are landblocks that are possible to see, but I didn't collect data for. However, there is currently no red on the coverage map. Black represents landblocks which are not viewable in game currently. Data for red and black landblocks came from the third big AC patch. All other landblock data is current for the July 2001 patch.
The data I ripped out of the CELL.DAT file consists of the Z height information, the land type, and what I believe to be vegetation type/density. None of the vegetation information is present on the map I generated. The base color of each pixel on the map is chosen from the list of base colors for each of the land types in AC. These colors are based upon the average color of the actual texture map that is used for each land type in the game. I tried several methods of trying to represent the height data on the map, but lighting it seemed to produce the best results.
I hope you find this map useful.
There is another useful utility I wrote that actually uses this map data: an interactive map that lets the user fly anywhere on the map and see it all in 3D. It is also linked with our locations database and displays some simple geometry for each location we have mapped. For example, travel portals appear as purple wedges and dungeons appear as white pyramids. However, it only runs on a PlayStation 2 development system, so you are most likely out of luck. Of course, cooler than just displaying the land data, it can also track multiple players with positional data we feed it from a monitoring program that reads your current location from the AC client process memory and passes it to a server that collects everyone's positional data that is playing in the office. This functionality is really useful to find other players without having to yell across the office. I wish I had more time to work on this, but unfortunately, I don't.
Wagon wheels looking towrds Obsidian Plane
Asheron's Island(?) towards Eastham
South coast with Kara and Qalaba'r in the distance
Tall Ridge with the BDC in the background
Dungeons
Outside of Aerlinthe Reservoir
Aerlinthe Reservoir (part 2) (02ED)
Aerfalle Keep (02E4)
Complex (Type 2) Objects
Unknown spikey monster (0200049C)
Would you like fries with that? (020008C8)
What these screenshots fail to convey is that this is a realtime interactive viewer running at 60fps. Currently I have a landscape viewer, a dungeon viewer, and a viewer that can look at individual objects. These viewers only run on a PlayStation 2 development system.
The following source code is provided "as is," so don't expect much help. It should be easy to understand though.
Also, the source code provided below is meant to be executed from a command prompt, such as a DOS box or an xterm. They should compile using any standard C or C++ compiler on most platforms. They were all originally written in MS Visual C++, but I know that they compile just fine using gcc under Linux.
I really don't have time to maintain this web page, so don't expect to see it updated very often.
