[Eloa]

After pondering the subject all day, I have come to a reasonable way that this could actually work.

Let me be clear when I say that I WILL NOT be working on this.
Taco-man, you're welcome to take this and run, or anyone else for that matter.

This is my gameplan of how to do it.

1. Have a program other than eq2map where you can input information on a POI that you want to add to your 'personal' POI list.
2. Have a database to which you add each of these points and it would simply be saved in database or even text format on the user's computer. The only thing is with text only you would have to figure out a system to read and right all the information, without the user being able to corrupt it with a badly placed character or word.
3. Run the updater prior to playing the game to download all the new files.
4. After getting all the files, do not autorun the game, instead, run a 'patcher' to patch the files that the updater downloaded.
5. Convert the user's POI's into xml format in preparation of insertion into the interface .xml files.
   
6. Insert the user poi's with a NEW POI Style dot (New color). From here on out 'patcher' refers to this program to update the updater interface files.
   
7. The patcher would have to have a record of the first POI in each zone and insert the personal POI's prior to this line. This is due to all new POI's get tacked onto the bottom of the list of POI's in the file.
8. This patcher would have to update EVERY zone every time you start the game, since the updater checks the md5 (File signature, basically) of your PC interface files, and compares them to the webserver MD5's. Since you add personal POI's into your PC files, the MD5's would conflict.

That should pretty much be all there is to it. Just writing that up and seeing in writing how easy it would be to do makes me WANT to jump right on it, but alas I could never test it, nor do I have the time. Having this 3rd party insertion system and patcher would open up a whole new world of what people can do with POI's. One idea would be a list of all the POI's in the updater files, which the user would be able to select and view details on each POI (even the website ones). They could also choose to show or not show certain POI's ingame and they could be deleted from the .xml files at the time of patching.

I hope this will jump start a member or two of the community that sucks at mapping and wants to get in on the greatest original 3rd party project to ever hit an MMO, the great, the wonderful, the almighty -- EQ2MAP


Eloa