Hey everyone.. I'm finally back after a month of being deployed.. blech.. nice to be back home now :)

After sifting through all the SOE updates while I was gone, and marvelling over the new clustering in eq2map, I went ingame.

The new map stuff is incredible.. and people have done so many POI submissions that it's amazing. Great job everyone!! :)

One thing makes me wonder though.. why do the POIs list their UID ingame? I assume it's for ease of reporting bad POIs, but it looks sorta unprofessional and 'beta'-ish.. Was this something not meant to be included for public consumption?

They were included for exactly that reason. Not much more to say on the matter; I agree with you that it looks sorta tacky, but I think the pros outweigh the cons.

Also, nice to have you back. ^_^

Quite a bit is in the works at the moment, so cross your fingers that I can figure a few things out over the next few days.

Quib

The UID's are a must! I use them constantly to tweek, remove, etc. POI's. Not once have I thought it was tacky. In fact, when I saw that it was included, I said, "Sweet! Man, that Quib is un-stoppable."

One thing that does bug me though.. If the EQ2Updater cannot update for some reason, it will not allow me to launch EQ2 anyway. Why the heck should I be stopped from playing my game because my POI's are not up to date? :confused:

:) i will change that in the next version of the updater then

As a compromise, would it be possible to make the UID display a plugin? I suspect not, but it would be helpful.

My girlfriend uses the map mod, and she doesn't care about UIDs, it just looks like useless clutter to her. Me, I care :)

You'd think there would be a way you could have a file which you can set 0's or 1's for off and on for things, and have the base code use IF/ELSE checks for things ;)

The biggest problem is, we can't concatenate strings, so we'd need two tooltips per POI and then the IF switch to flip between them which would significantly increase the memory overhead.

I won't rule it out an an option, but it's definately not even going to be on my list of stuff to look into until I get a few serious things taken care of. I STILL haven't solved the "glowy trail disappears" bug.

Default map window, you click a POI then click anywhere on the map/click the close button, trail stays; EQ2MAP window, if you click a POI then click ANYWHERE on the window the trail goes away.

I think my new OnLogin event is about ready to push live. It won't affect defaule EQ2MAP users but should be helpful to Zonx's reskinning and will provide benefit to future EQ2MAP mods.

Quib

Not to beat a dead horse here, but another approach to this is through the updater itself..

The website doesn't appear to generate the UID in the XML that it displays for each POI, so if this is somehow being added after the fact, then perhaps the updater could have checkbox to download icon files with UIDs included.

The server could generate two versions of each icon file - it wouldn't cause that much more space usage on the server (I don't think) - the only issue I can see would be processor time on the server.

Maybe someone else who knows exactly how the XML is generated/collected could have a more elegant idea.

A generation/auto-updater end to this would definately be the easiest solution. The website is putting the UID in the generated XML.

The way the clustering code is written, it'd be pretty annoying to recode clusters to not show UIDs on a toggle though.

Quib

Hehe, although I love the quote, UIDs are Eloa's brainchild as far as I know. The only other person who I imagine had a hand in them was taco-man. Heck, the compact POI system in-game itself was Eloa's design.

Quib

well this may not be an inprovement for the site .. more like an error on a map ..

i'm trying to add a npc thats at the docs in east commonlands .. it keeps telling me it's an invalid loc and the loc it's giving me is not what i'm putting in the form .. i'm assuming it's giving me the limit that the form can take and my numbers are higher than it's limit .. anyway .. here is an excerpt from my log .. you may want to look and see if it's so,mthing i'm doing wrong or if their is a problem with the form.


(1113463185)[Thu Apr 14 03:19:36 2005] Logging to 'logs/Splitpaw/eq2log_Lucindrea.txt' is now *ON*
(1113463186)[Thu Apr 14 03:19:42 2005] Your location is -1,040.92, -146.04, -646.48. Your orientation is 112.16, 0.00, 0.00
(1113463187)[Thu Apr 14 03:19:46 2005] You say,"Hail, Brandus Levine"
(1113463188)[Thu Apr 14 03:19:48 2005] Logging to 'logs/Splitpaw/eq2log_Lucindrea.txt' is now *OFF*

take out the thousands comma. The site looks for 2 commas, which separate three values. You have 3 commas making for values. We have yet to figure out 4d so just take that one out and you'll be golden.

Here is why I stand. I personally will not take out UIDs, if someone else wants to, go for it but I will not have any hand in it. The reason why: If we make a UID plugin, who the hell is gonna download it? Nobody. Because nobody cares about the UIDs and maintaining the site. The way it is now we shove it in everyones face and it couldnt get any simpler with what we have. IMO, Leave em or the site will prolly goto hell.

I understand, and I agree on some level, but I would prefer end-result quality to look as close to professional as possible.

Before we had the UIDs showing ingame, I never thought it was difficult to find a bad POI and look on the site to find it and mark it bad.

Ahh well, I'll get used to it.. looks like I'm outnumbered here :P

On another note, the clustering is awesome - what a great idea :)

duh , didnt even notice that comma .. fixed it

On the issue of POI comments..
 

Due to the fact that people are still marking POIs as bad with no reason attached, I propose that the site requires someone to enter text into the comment box in order to click the "mark as bad" checkbox.

Small suggestion
 

Don't know if its already mentioned but I can't exit the map screen by pressing escape like I could with the originial map interface. Maybe its possible to make this small fix?

By the way, what a great program!!!!! Way to go!

The map window not closing on escape isn't a bug. It is a change that was made intentionally. If you prefer the window to close when you press escape, you can get this mod : http://www.eq2interface.com/download...fo.php?id=3496.

I too would like the UID to not display in-game. They greatly increase the size of the tooltip and in the case of clusters, it gets really obtrusive. Since I have to go to the web site to make comments on a POI, finding the UID is a trivial problem since, I presume, the map on the web site would still show the UID with each POI.

The POI database appears to be following the Wikipedia model where anyone can add a POI and it gets pushed live immediately and without review. Yet we can't edit or delete POIs. There are many POIs with incorrect information, misspelling, duplicate of another POI just 2 feet away, etc.

The web dialog that is used to enter a new POI asks to enter a "detailed description". This gets added to the tooltip and there are some pretty large descriptions (paragraphs) showing up on some tooltips. I would suggest rewording that dialog so it says "Enter a very brief description ONLY if absolutely necessary for this point of interest."

i suppose that is reasonable, what does anyone else think?
if it does need changed it will take a while unless someone else can do it because i am leaving on thursday for a while to a comptetion and will be gone for quite a few days.

I agree with everything Joebwan said. Some of the PoIs are just insanely large, and a lot of them are just plain wrong.

As well, seeing the UID is completely useless :)

the uid is so that you can report incorrect information.

Hey guys.. Great mod! i just love it..

only thing that is a little annoying is the Rivervale map not updating when going from east to west part of it on northern road (which everyone uses).

Thanks a lot

Maybe just a rearranging of data?

Instead of making everything take up two lines, like

UID: 12345
POI text blah blah balh

Maybe something like

POI text blah blah blah (12345)

That way the POIs don't take up so much room? :)

Change the updater window so that it has scroll bars on it or is resizable.

On displays that are not 96dpi, or displays that have large fonts, the text winds up being bigger, and a lot is cut off because the eq2map updater window is not resizable