Marker Editor Feedback Release

Hi!

Got some great feedback on the marker editor. It took a while and I fixed the bugs that were reported and I added some additional features (hello undo/redo!). Some other generic reported issues have also been fixed in this build.

You can download the new build from here.

Change notes:

• Added bindable undo and redo keys to the marker editor submenu
• Marker editor undo buffer resets on map change
• Fixed TacO not shutting down with GW2 any more
• Added option for TacO to show up as a windows taskbar window
• Fixed default markers in Frostgorge Sound
• Keys can now be bound with the combination of SHIFT and CTRL
• Editor fix: hidden external trails can't be clicked any more
• Marker editor now shows the guid of the edited object
• Marker editor now shows if the edited object is external or not
• Editor fix: Replaced some text with icons
• Editor fix: Switching the behavior of a marker/category now functions as expected
• Fixed a menu crash

This update brings some changes to the localization strings, non-English translations must be updated by their maintainers.

A Proper Marker Editor, Finally.

Hi.

This one is more for the marker pack creators, but it should benefit the community as a whole, since what makes the work of marker pack creators easier is something that should result in better quality marker packs faster. In short: TacO now contains a proper marker and trail editor with all the bells and whistles.

The new editor complete with what I always call the "UberTool"

This has been a long time coming, let's see the features (all this is only available when the marker editor is open):

• Rearranged the marker editor ui and added a lot of functionality
• Markers can be clicked (either in-game or the minimap) to be selected. No more running to the marker to edit it.
• The ubertool shows up on the selected marker and allows you to move it around
• Trails can also be clicked, and the closest point on the trail is selected to be moved around with the ubertool
• Ctrl+Clicking a trail doesn't select the closest point but creates a new point exactly where clicked
• All marker and marker category parameters can be edited on the new editor ui
• Marker categories can be edited separately and their changes propagate everywhere appropriately (adding them is still a manual job though for now)
• Category and marker level overriding of attributes is supported
• Markers that have ranged behavior have a range indicator (as depicted above) when selected
• Added the ability to copy markers with a bound button
• Added additional hotkeys to set up to 5 default marker categories to be placed
• Default marker categories are now saved in the config
• The marker editor only saves changes to your own markers (stored in poidata.xml), so there are convenience features to avoid editing markers you can't (hide external markers and don't allow selection of external markers)
• Export now exports all the required categories for the markers in the file as well
• Added the option to export all your personal markers from the current map into a separate file
• Saving a trail now automatically creates the appropriate poi entry for it
• Ubertool has right-click undo (hold right click while releasing the left to undo the current movement)

Some things still missing: festival support on the ui, undo/redo, tabbed ui (if there are many complaints)

Trails can be edited too!

A fuller writeup of how to use the editor is coming later.

For now you can download the latest build with the editor here.

Change notes (except what's already been listed above):

• Added an option to disable hiding irrelevant markers
• Fixed a corruption issue that happened on marker export sometimes
• The TacO menu should now stay open most of the time when clicked (except where it doesn't make sense)
• Added marker pack status indicator text to the online marker pack list
• Fixed issues with the automatic downloader constantly trying to download marker packs in some rare cases
• Added fallback url support to the marker pack json

This update brings some changes to the localization strings, non-English translations must be updated by their maintainers.

Never Commit Blind!

Hi.

Ok, quick bugfix release for festival tracking - turns out that the GW2 API doesn't always function as it's documented, and since there wasn't a festival up until a couple hours ago I couldn't test the tracking properly. Rule one of programming: NEVER COMMIT BLIND! Oh well. New build is up, Tekkit's SAB markers should be visible with it.

You can download the new build from here.

Change notes:

• Added option to force toggle festival markers on/off
• Changed the way festival tracking works - it's still bugged for now and will report every festival running, but that's a GW2 API issue that's being worked on
• Made the online marker pack list's items not close automatically
• Fixed not working auto-download-toggle option

This update brings some changes to the localization strings, non-English translations must be updated by their maintainers.

Default Marker Pack Cleanup

Hi.

With the auto marker pack download and update functionality introduced yesterday it became quite apparent to me that the default TacO markers are in a bit of a messy state, so I took the time to clean everything up a bit. This release also has some minor fixes. While most TacO releases don't require much care when unpacking and you can simply overwrite your previous install with the new one, if you'd like to reap the benefits of the marker cleanup you'll need to clean up the contents of the POIs folder in your original install before unpacking this new one.

You can download the latest build here.

Change notes:

• Win 8.1 support should really be fixed now (please let me know!)
• The defaulttoggle setting was propagating to child categories, which made it impractical
• Cleaned up the default markers that come with TacO
• Added additional thread safety around marker pack loading

Automatic Marker Pack Updates!

Hi!

Marker packs are a bit of a hassle. Over the years the most frequent questions I got all related to missing markers, where to download marker packs, etc. This ends today. The latest build of TacO adds support to download and keep updating marker packs from a curated and ever growing list of packages. The overlay automatically checks if a newer version of a pack is available and updates everything seamlessly.
Best of all, the list itself isn't baked in to the overlay, which means that additional packs can be added without the need to update TacO itself. (The always up to date list itself can be found here.)

If you're the creator of a marker pack that's available for download and would like to see it supported natively in TacO with automatic updates, contact me and we'll make it happen!

You can download the latest build here.

Change notes:

• Added online marker package support
• Added new submenu to the tactical menu where the online sync feature and the sync of individual marker packs can be turned on/off
• Fixed a minor crash that could happen when the map timer's api check was running during shutdown
• Fixed an issue where routes weren't progressing correctly
• Fixed copypaste triggering on invisible markers as well when pressing the action key
• Toggling marker categories now happens only once even with overlapping markers that would toggle the same category
• Marker triggering no longer stops at the first found marker at the player's location
• Fixed invisible markers being able to be triggered

This update brings some changes to the localization strings, non-English translations must be updated by their maintainers.

Note: release archive updated due to a debug feature disabling keyboard input (2022-03-28 8:30 CET)

Context Menu and Compatibility Upgrades

Hi everyone!

With the recent news that the End of Dragons isn't the end of the GW2 story (and also playing through the excellent expansion finally) I'm feeling the TacO development vibe again. Since I made the overlay open-source and I was away a bit, there have been various developments, and there were some people (mainly the Blish-Hud devs) who took some of my original ideas and ran with them. Various excellent additions have been implemented to the marker pack format, and I took a couple days to bring TacO closer to the current state of the marker platform.

The latest build adds support for clipboard handling, default marker category disabling and festival tracking. I also loved the idea to hide irrelevant marker categories to help with the clutter in the category context menu. This build also reaps the rewards of the Bugsplat crash tracking already with a bunch of rare crashes fixed. There have also been further performance optimizations around the TacO menu and the startup time.

Map aware context menu decluttering

You can download the latest build from here.

Change notes:

• TacO menu performance has been significantly boosted
• Marker category list now hides irrelevant categories (that don't contain markers for the current map or that are related to completed achievements/achievement bits)
• Hidden marker categories can be selected to still show the full category tree
• Added TacO menu setting to opt out of crash logging to Bugsplat
• Compatibility: Changed XML parser to be case insensitive
• Compatibility: TacO now supports the automatic clipboard copy functionality
• Added TacO menu setting to disable clipboard use
• Compatibility: TacO now supports default enabled/disabled settings for marker categories
• Added EoD map timers (thx Eclipsetech)
• Added Dragonstorm map timer (thx Taschenbuch)
• Fixed a crash that happened when there wasn't enough GPU memory to create a trail
• Fixed a crash that happened on exit due to the double deletion of a logging backend
• Fixed log file not always flushing containing data on exit
• Fixed a crash that happened on exit when the API was being queried during shutdown
• Compatibility: TacO now supports festival related markers and automatically hides them when the festival isn't active
• Fixed a minor crash on exit that happened when an empty marker file was to be saved
• (Hopefully) Fixed windows 8.1 issues that came up with the last builds
• Rearranged all of the TacO menu's toggle indicators to be on the left side
• Fixed some issues with the lost golden badge markers
• Optimized loading time a bit

This update brings some changes to the localization strings, non-English translations must be updated by their maintainers.

Performance Boost

Hi!

Pre Super Adventure Box TacO development is ramping up, this time with a bunch of stability and performance upgrades. The Bugsplat integration in the previous build already pointed out some previously unknown issues, proving its worth. There have also been dramatic performance upgrades. Running with uncapped framerates, with some large popular marker packs loaded the uncapped framerate of TacO has jumped from 120fps to ~2k fps, for a performance boost of about 16x.

Change notes:

• Fixed the handling of the Characters API endpoint - this should no longer crash if the API returns unexpected results
• Added additional checks to avoid a crash related to toggling menus in rare cases
• Added warning popup windows for when TacO is missing important data files (mostly happening when the overlay is run straight from the archive without unpacking)
• Performance: replaced strings with string ids in the marker category system
• Performance: trail textures are now cached more aggressively
• Performance: the small fonts now have outlined versions as well and the outline doesn't need to be rendered separately using a 3x3 display
• Performance: Teamspeak integration is now only ticked if the TS3 window is open
• Performance: category visibility settings are now more aggressively cached
• Performance: trails and markers are now bucketed for each map id, meaning a lot fewer checks per frame
• Performance/Stability: TacO now waits for the mumble link to update more aggressively

The new build can be downloaded from here.

BugSplat crash tracking

Hi!

In order to better be able to track unreported and rare crashes, I've integrated the BugSplat crash tracking system into the latest TacO build (#53). This system sends crash reports (basically the same information that has been logged before) into the cloud for easier sorting and analysis. As crash reports from the overlay have been few and far between lately I don't expect there to be too many reports for now, this is more a convenience feature for me to track down any Schrödinbugs that may rear their ugly head.

The information that is sent is the TacO process dump file and the TacO log file of the crashed session. No identifying or GW2 account related information is sent (since the overlay doesn't have access to that anyway), however I'm anticipating that there will still be some, who'd like to opt out of sending crash info my way. In order to turn off crash reporting all you need to do is to set the SendCrashDump value in the TacOConfig.xml to 0.

You can download the new build here.

Minor bugfix release

 Hi there!

With new marker packs coming out for the expansion I finally managed to take some time to play the game again and of course found a bug that made achievement hunting an issue.

This minor release should fix the problems regarding achievement tracking and poi visibility.

You can download the new build from here.