GW Texture Editor

GW Texture Editor was originally designed in mid 2005 as a method of editing Direct3D games (mainly Guild Wars) by exporting and importing vertices and textures. After a little work a tool was designed to primarily import and export textures to and from Guild Wars at run time. This allowed users to create or edit their own UI, create their own items, armour sets, guild capes, and endless other things.

The program simply loads a DLL into the target process, then communicates to that DLL using Winsock. The program acts as a Server and the DLL like a Client. This allows for rapid communication between two or more processes which cannot share the same memory, and is fairly simple to implement. The program simply communicates user input, such as commands, to the DLL, which processes these commands and replies back to the program with a result. Users can dump all the textures used to draw a frame into either a Bitmap (.BMP) or a DirectDraw Surface (.DDS), and they can also load new textures into video memory in DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) format.

GW Texture Editor doesn't exibit any additional overhead when replacing textures due to the fact it modifies the pointer so it points to the new texture, rather then just replacing the old texture. Additionally, the old texture remains in memory, but can also be unloaded if need be. The program also allows you to set custom debug hooks on any texture and set breakpoints on certain textures so you can follow the game engine code that calls for the texture to be used.

The most famous uses of the program were to first create the Icy Dragon Sword, which after a month of hoaxing GuildWarsGuru forum users, ArenaNET (with strong encouragement of Isaiah Cartwright) had the item actually added to the game to get back at the creators. When rumours of the real item started circulating around forums of the item being dropped near Mineral Springs, the creators thought they had a perfect hoax going, little did they know the item actually did exist. The second prank pulled was the Terror Shield. Starting off with a nice looking shield, 6 users set out to create believable screenshots, a few videos, an inventory caption bubble for the item, and it even being used in GvG matches. Although it didn't go as well as hoped, quite a few people were had. For the better part of a day, Guild Wars players were spotted forming large groups in Temple of the Ages to go Terror Shield farming, with some players even claiming to had Terror Shields drop for them.

'''*At no point has the GW Texture Editor been made publically available, and there was never any plans to do so. Only two people have ever had copies of the program and source code.'''