.MDX (media data extended)files are a binary file format for storing 3D models, engineered and used by Blizzard Entertainment in its games, with several existing variations. [1] This file format is mainly used in Warcraft III and its expansion pack The Frozen Throne . The format also has a human readable textual representation that uses the extension .MDL. Several converters exist to convert between these two formats. It was originally created by DAEMON Tools, and is generally used to create CD and DVD disc images and emulate the original discs as virtual drives. it contains both the disc volume formatting metadata and the disc data. MDX files are designed to replace the combination of .MDS and .MDF files by storing all disc image data in one file. [1]
All models have a tree hierarchy of components, or chunks. Many components lie directly under the root while others are subcomponents. The contents vary from type to type though most of them have the same kind of header as shown below.
struct Chunk { UINT32 Tag; UINT32 ChunkSize; ... };Each chunk begins with two 32-bit unsigned integers. The first is a tag describing the type. It is constructed as a sequence of four 8-bit characters giving them a descriptive ID if viewed in a hex editor (or Notepad). The second integer tells the size of the chunk. This size does not include the tag and size itself; it includes only the following contents. The ChunkSize is useful for determining the number of subcomponents. It is useful for skipping whole chunks in the writing of a non-complete MDX loader, in which case the tag and size are read and then that many bytes are skipped to start reading the next chunk.
Some structures have IDs to refer to other objects. These are 0-based indexes, referring to the object in the order in which they appear in the file. The special value 0xFFFFFFFF (or -1 in signed format) represents "No ID", or in some cases "Many IDs". In the latter case, the reference has to be made in some other way, usually from the other object.
This is a list of known software to convert to and from the MDX formats.
This is a list of known editors for manipulating the MDX files.
The .MDX extension is also used by the following software: [1]
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