Better than <i>that other guy's</i> site at least ;)

We're still working on getting everything in there, and this IS the plan. I want EVERY zone that is ingame to have a map on this site. One thing holding us back is zonerects for places like antonica whose maps are sent down from the server.

Are you meaning like move the forum to the MAP site, like maps.eq2interface.com/forums/ ?
I like the idea. Does anyone else like the idea? I'll have to talk to Dolby on that one.

Either way, move it, or perhaps since they're both on the same site basically, the forums can be accessed from both locations? (ie, from here with this site style, and from EQ2MAP with that site style)

I styles thing wont really work. just because of the way the sites are designed. There is now a link on that page to jump to these forums though. That will do for a bit.

If they don't want "their" maps used, we can make our own, after all, they got their Thundering Steppes map from me.

In fact, I would like to know more about what exactly went on. If they are being jerks about it, they are going to lose one of their biggest contributors.

Now that is very interesting...that was the one that started the whole deal, as it was 'personally made by me' as someone said. They pointed out all the little things about it that made it theirs. But what the hey, it doesnt matter any more. We made our own maps. We made our own site. Each of them are better than the original, so he can whine if he wants.

The ability to view/post comments for each POI is now up as well as a grading system for the correctness of them.

I'd like to know if anyone knows of a program that I can use to:
-Search a lot of .php (text) files at once and find all occurences of a string.
-Count total characters in the group of files.
If anyone knows just post here or send me a PM, thanks.

why would more people vote for dark when both includes dark?

meh whatever lol

Well, most of the posts regarding the problem that occured were deleted because they were off topic and pretty negative, so nothing remains of the arguments that occured and minor name-calling that ensued.

No one has really responded to your question because it's a delicate topic that we've all put behind us, though I will atempt a fair and unprovocative summary.

We used some maps from ***************. A few were 100% work done by SoulPl (the person from *************** who asked we stopped using his work), some were derivative. The credit given for his work was fair, but he didn't want us using his work whatsoever. At first we argued that it wasn't fair, he didn't want us using even derivative work, or his copies of the SOE maps; but we decided it wasn't worth arguing over and used maps that were by other authors who said anyone could use them (for our initial maps) and have been since creating our own.

Quib

...and your maps are better, so keep up the great work! :nana: :nana:

Eloa and taco-man... oh... my... gosh...
maps.eq2interface.com is freaking amazing. I hadn't been there all weekend, busy and junk, and I stopped by to check out how things were going.

I about passed out from amazement. It's like this awesome, I don't know, mapping thing that's just more amazing than I can explain. Wow. Lacking words.

Quib

haha! i love the mouseover!

bye-bye other guy...

:D
Thats what I wanted to be hearing.

Why...thank you Quib. I really dont know what to say. That's probably the nicest thing I've ever heard. :)

Comments sytem is working perfectly. Users may mark the POI as bad (Pending status, which will not be generated with XML) when they post a comment. This will automatically append to their comment that it has reflected a change in the status of the POI.

Admins may view that POI and mark it as good which will automatically insert a comment stating that the POI has been fixed and certified corrected.

Quib, are the XML file styles going to change at all or are they fixed like that and we can start generatign the files?

Success!
Blackburrow now generates the XML file 100% correctly. The generated file is identical to the file in the release version, besides more POI's, which is the point of this system!
More/ALL are soon to follow!

There's gonna be one tiny eeficiency change to all the multi layer maps (blackburrow, stormhold, the caves and the upcoming nektropos castle) but other than that the icon page format is set in stone. Attaching the new versions so you can see the change. I just removed some unnecessary properies from the child page objects.

Other than that, we're good to go! I'm preparing some example code for Deathbane27 (and Zonx) to show how the EQ2MAP window mods will work, and fully explain why I finally settled on what I did. I did multiple "dummy" tests, having friends who didn't know jack about the UI try setting up 2 seperate systems and had error-less results with one system, and EQ2 failing to load problems (which I had worried about in the first place) with the other.

So we'll be shooting for our first official modular release in a day or two.

Quib

Awesome, I'll take a look at those files next time I'm on, time to play a while now. Maybe the release after this one will be a web interactive one...

Quib, What has actually changed on those pages? Actually I just need the bb one since thats all I have code written for. It'd help me out ALOT if you could give me find/replace statements for the changes. Thanks

Great job on the maps guys...

Maybe u guys could throw these maps together and put them in, there very nice. http://eq2.gamergod.com/maps.cfm

And for people trying to do Legendary JBoots quest this would be a tremendous help if these maps could be put in as well. http://www.friendsnfun.net/forum/for...p?TID=454&PN=1

Just my 2c

vroxx,
i saved the runnyeye map to hard drive, could be VERY useful when i / whoever finally gets to that zone to do our own /loc.

The JBoots deal is something i planned on doing before, but honestly think it should be a part of Eloa's quest mod.

And you posted an off topic thread on this post, shame shame and here i am answering you :) Please try to find a relevant post to your question, if there is none just start a new one in the eq2map forum :D

The maps already exist on the gry-online website. perhaps some form of partnership with eq2interface and gry-online would speed up the addition of new maps. The mod could even keep the gry-online's link on the images, to show credit where due.

http://www.***************/eq2/index.asp

Any thoughts on this suggestion?

There was already a dispute, and the owner of those maps got mad when the maps were used. Long story I guess, but basically:

been there, done that.

This wont happen. To be honest, most of the maps on gry-online are wrong and/or outdated from being drawn before the public release of the game, the webmaster himself used this as an argument when pushing us away from using his maps.

The whole approach of gry-online, is a web based mapping system, while this is not the case for us. The purpose of the MAP website, is to provide a database that is interactive with the users so they can input POI's into their own game, and everyone else's without having to use the interface editor or edit xml at all.

The maps that are shown ON the website are just a little added bonus since we have all the information on the site anyway.

So in conclusion, it is not just the unwillingness of the site owners to cooperate, its also that our site is providing a much more useful purpose for everyone in EQ2.

Just wanted to put in my request to get that in game Runnyeye map made :nana:. Plan to spend a lot of time there on my alt and it'd be great to have a reference for all the spawn and quest locations.

Thanks

These things dont make themselves. We make maps, not all the POI's. That's what the website's for, submit a few, maybe someone else will submit a few, then before you know it theres a whole collection. It dont take much work, if you're in game and come across something, just jot down the zone, name of it, and the /loc. When you log out, just hit up the site and paste it in. Posting 1 a session is still very helpful.


Site status: The site has gone through very few visible changes in the last week or so. The reason behind this is that I'm working on making it generate all of the files so they have no need to be updated by hand anymore, though with the recent inclusion of z axis map changing, things are getting stretched out a little further.

Stormhold Level 4 has been added.
Nektropos Castle Level 1 and Level 2 have been added.

Various issues..
 

The zonerects for antonica (and the other game-map zones, I suspect) are somewhat off.. I just submitted Keep of the Ardent Needle today, so I know that is a good loc, and it's way off on the mapview. Is this a zonerect problem, or a website problem?

Also, stormhold zones are too stretched out.. you can really tell on Stormhold 3. The map ingame doesn't look like it does on the site - the POI placements are more or less correct as to where the map should line up.

Is there a check for duplicated POIs? Ive seen a couple of duplicates added, but under different names.. these would have to be manually filtered, but I'm just wondering about dupes in general..

There's no automatic check, people will need to vote duplicate POIs as bad and we'll remove them.

As for the BFZ (black fogged zones, the outdoor zones SOE provided maps for), yeah their zonerects aren't perfect and the website display of icons and in-game is a little different. We'll eventually get them perfected but right now we're just happy to have decent approximations.

The stormhold maps that are stretched on the website are just outdated versions; we'll get them updated soon.

Quib

I've thought about this a while and dont think we can automatically filter out dupes. These are the ways I could do it and reasons why not to do it:

• Keep 2 names from being the same on each map
  • if there are 'darkpaw gnolls' on opposite sides of the map, they couldnt both be submitted without a name change to one of them.
• Dont let the same /loc be entered for two on one map.
  • Very unlikely 2 people will get the same loc in the first place, I could do a proximity check but that might lead to problems with like a group of NPCs huddled together.

All in all. Theres no feasible way to do it that I can find. We'll just have to keep encouraging people to mark them as bad. One automatic way of doing this is as soon as they mark them as bad, they arent in their game anymore, nor anyone elses.

What about making POIs approvable by admins before they actually show up on the map? At least then we could have a quick human eye to give them a once-over before they get placed.

Personally, I'd rather cull out bad ones than approve an avalanch of them. It's not that big of a deal if there is a duplicate, it'll get fixed eventually, and having them auto-added to the database means people will get new POIs as soon as someone submits one.

Hm, Eloa or taco-man, what about adding a proximity check that just pops up an alert? It won't stop a new icon if it's too close to another, but we'll be able to tick a "this one's ok" checkbox to get it off the alert list.

Quib

A few suggestions:

1) Allow the name of a POI to have carriage returns in it - check out POI 478 for an example of why this would be useful.

2) Change the Description field to be an optional field. Most people seem to be duplicating the name field anyway - but the description is nice for quest and activatable objects.

3) In the dropdown list of selectable zones, add an empty entry, for when you are not viewing a map.

4) When you are viewing a map, 'select' the proper name in the dropdown list (or select the empty entry suggested above) - currently the list always shows "Antonica (East)"

5) Please, please, please add the ability for admins to directly edit a POI :) There are so many POIs that I want to fix!! :D Please? :) :p

6) Stormhold level 3 still has the wrong picture on the website, but I am afraid to use the uploading tool to try to fix it..

1) Sounds good to me. This is something on the coding end Eloa or taco-man will have to cover.

2) I definately agree with this one. Like 3/4 of the icons have the same name and description and it drives me nuts. =D

3) For when you first go to maps.eq2interface.com or something? I'm not sure why an empty entry'd be useful.

4) Bugs me too.

5) There is a way for admins to edit them directly but it up to Eloa to disclose with you how. I don't know exactly all the access permissions different people have with maps.eq2interface.com. Earlier I cleaned up a couple pages of POIs (mostly ones with screwed up loc's).

6) I'm 99% sure the upload tool doesn't work for the website maps. The "Map Images" choice is for .DDS files. I want to know how or if I can help keep the website maps up-to-date too.

Quib

Only for the purpose of making it look a little more professional.. and also since I have a feeling that 4 won't be able to be done the way I suggested, having an empty field as the first choice will allow the box to default to an empty field.

- perhaps make eq2ui_mainhud_map.xml autogenerated somehow - help avoid dated versions of the file from showing up?

it is not auto generated, however, the updater still downloads the newest version(i have a manual upload system in place that all admins at maps.eq2interface.com can use to upload files that are not auto-generated, like eq2ui_mainhud_map.xml, map images, ect, it then does the computing it needs to do for each file submitted and the updater will download the new one as soon as it is run after a new one has been submitted) when you upload the file you choose what type of file it is so that it knows where to place the file and wether it should be just checking if the file exists or wether it should check if there is a newer version that way files that are used by mods can be changed and the updater can still be run, and files that are not changed by mods can be kept up to date. I also have a way to make the files that are check only update if there is ever a big patch and we need everyone to have the newer file. hope that answers your question :D

I'm pretty sure I can do this, let me talk with a couple people and check it out.
If description=name (dont include)
Will this be suitable?
On my todo list.
Done, thanks to taco-man.
This is a BIG thing that I'm currently working on. I'm trying to find out how the best way to do this is. If you look at the Admin options>pending POIs page, you will see that there is a section with a link to COrrect this POI. I'm getting there, through this type of access, and a direct way to do it.
I did not know there was a better picture of it done yet. I will get on this right now, followed by admin editing. Currently there is not a way to upload website maps. I'll get to this later on down the road when I redo the Zone management page.

Stormhold 3 has been replaced by the one that I have on my comp from the updater...Is it supposed to look completely out of place and tiny? If so this is something that should probably be fixed somehow.

i think i will spend what time i have this weekend on the website unless some new feature for the updater is requested that takes along time to do. so expect alot of the requests for the site to be done sometime this weekend.