nuTerra
September 2, 2026 · View on GitHub
World of Tanks map offline viewer writen in VB.NET using Visual Studio 2022 (NET 6.0).
Highlights
- Deferred renderer with reversed-Z, virtual-textured terrain (the game's own layer mixing baked into pages on demand), baked map-wide sun shadow with an MSM/PCF A/B path, water, trees, roads, decals and the game's volumetric FX pass with faithful shader-variant selection.
- Fire, smoke and glow. CPU billboard particles driven by the game's own
.vfxbineffect data, composited with the volumetric FX meshes into a float buffer so hot fire rolls off with its hue instead of clipping to white, plus a bloom pass built from the over-range energy. - Game-faithful outland backdrop: tilemap albedo baked at load the way the game's engine does it, ring meshes with the playfield cut out, heightmap data-welds that keep the sheet mathematically under the terrain (audited on every load), and background threshold decimation that drops the two cascades from ~4M to well under 1M triangles with sub-metre error - the load path never blocks, the full grid draws until the decimated mesh swaps in.
- GPU frustum + raster occlusion culling for models, CPU block culling for terrain and outland, and instruments everywhere: per-pass GPU timers, a console Snapshot, wireframe overlays, a VT page debug view with a colour key, and load-time audits that print what the data actually says.
The decimated outland in the wireframe view - dense where the terrain is, sparse where it is not:
Documentation
docs/ carries the reverse-engineering notes and the per-subsystem references.
Start with the handoff for whichever area you are touching.
| doc | what it covers |
|---|---|
HANDOFF_2026-08-31_fx_and_holes.md | Most recent. Terrain holes, FX compositing, glow |
FX_PIPELINE.md | The FX pass end to end - accumulation, composite, glow, what is locked |
PARTICLES_HANDOFF.md | Card particle simulation and emitter data |
VFXBIN_PARTICLE_FORMAT.md | The .vfxbin effect format, cracked from the packages |
terrain_holes.md | Hole block format, the per-chunk mirror, the mask and the discard |
terrain_blending_edge.md | How the game merges models into terrain - a post-pass, NOT holes |
terrain_blend.md | The game's eight-layer terrain blend, transcribed from its VT baker |
GAME_LIGHTING_MODEL.md | The game's lighting model as read out of its shaders |
HANDOFF_2026-08-28_lighting.md | Lighting work - probes, SH grid, tonemapping |
HANDOFF_sun_shadow.md | Baked sun shadow, MSM/PCF |
lighting.md, game_deferred_decal.md | Older notes on lighting and decals |
map_settings.md | The per-map settings files and what persists |
FX_plan.md | Historical recon of the FX data chain. Superseded, kept for the format work |
A note on how these are written: they record what was measured, and they call out claims that were believed and later disproved rather than quietly deleting them. If a doc says something is settled, it says how it was settled.
Game data, trademarks and attribution
World of Tanks® and all of its data - models, textures, terrain, shaders, effects and sounds - are the property of Wargaming Group Limited. nuTerra ships none of it. It reads a World of Tanks installation you already own, in place and strictly read-only: the only paths it ever writes are its own temp and settings folders, never the game directory.
The engine World of Tanks is built on is BigWorld Technology, originally by BigWorld Pty Ltd of Sydney, which Wargaming acquired in 2012. Much of what this viewer does is a reimplementation of that engine's behaviour - the terrain layer mixing, the deferred G-buffer packing, the virtual texture scheme, the effect and particle formats - worked out by reading the shipped data and shaders. Those formats and the rendering model they describe are BigWorld's and Wargaming's work. The credit for how World of Tanks looks belongs to them; what is original here is only the reimplementation.
nuTerra is an unofficial, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wargaming.
World of Tanks® and Wargaming.net® are registered trademarks of Wargaming Group Limited. BigWorld and BigWorld Technology are trademarks of Wargaming. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Third-party credits
Algorithms adapted from other projects and papers:
- three.js - the camera damping model follows OrbitControls (MIT). https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js
- Moment Shadow Mapping - Peters & Klein, i3D 2015, for the MSM sun-shadow path.
- Inigo Quilez - the smoothed terrain normal generation follows https://iquilezles.org/articles/normals/
- Garland & Heckbert - the outland mesh decimation follows their quadric error metric (Surface Simplification Using Quadric Error Metrics, SIGGRAPH 1997), threshold-driven with subset placement.
Libraries: