Pioints of interest (recomendation)

[Charli]

I've noticed that you guys have been putting a lot of work into points of interest. I have found your map mod VERY helpful. And the points of interest are great as well.

The problem is, as you add more and more, the maps are getting cluttered with a zillion little dots for quests I care little about. Where the lady that starts the Jum Jum juice quest is, matters little to me!

My recommendation: An external program that dynamically creates the overlays. All it would need is a list of quests with check boxes and a save button. The user would simply check off the quests they want Points for and click save and the overlay would be saved to the appropriate folder. You guys wouldn't need to create new overlays all the time. There would be simple a small database with 5 fields:
Questname, zone, x, y, z
It could even be an excel spreadsheet. Then all you'd have to do is provide a new quest list with new points every once in a while.
If you wanted to get really fancy you could have an "Update" button that automatically downloaded points for you. Or allow the user to insert their own.

Anyways, it's just an idea.

[Dolby]

That is a great idea and maybe we could get that program to talk to maps.eq2interface.com database and get the POI's in real time.... down the road.

[Killarny]

A related suggestion (which I personally think is a better way to handle it) would be to add a filter dropbox to the map window, so that one would be able to select from a list of types of icons. For simplicity, just use the types that Eloa has made in the POI submission database. (NPC, ZONE, MOB, etc)

Note that this would not be an active filter requiring SOE code changes, but a dropbox displaying predetermined (by the XML) groups of icons.

The only problem I can see with this is that if one wanted to show all the icons at once, it could mean redundant XML for an "All POIs" selection. Unless the XML is flexible enough to allow you to make a more active dropbox that can include multiple groups.

I hope that I've described my idea with enough detail here. I wish I had the knowhow to do this myself and post it as a contribution, but alas, all I can contribute is brainstorming power

[Quib]

Hm, definately two suggestions to keep in mind. Zonx's idea of seperate xml's loaded for each map (well, for their icon pages anyway) would work well with the external program idea + database, and, if we can figure out how to make a drop box work for us, your idea would work well for on-the-fly filtering Killarny.

The thing is, dropboxes seem to be ornery... I haven't had much luck getting them to work for me. A faked drop box using button and page objects would probably do exactly what you're thinking though... hmmm...

Also, it wouldn't take duplicate POIs, just show multiple pages of POIs at once (splitting the POI types up between page objects), so it's a very viable suggestion.

Quib

[taco-man]

if a drop down box is too hard you could always just have checkboxes for each one, no?

[Quib]

Oh, to toggle each type. This I will definately look into after I get this release ready for download later today.

Quib

[Eloa]

drop down boxes definately do not work. There is no way to tell which item in it is selected. The checkboxes idea is great though.