Sunday 24 April 2016

Guild Bounties!

Hi!

I have some very good news for those of you who are always getting lost when trying to find those elusive Guild Bounties. If you ever ran around a map while constantly alt-tabbing out to Dulfy and tried to follow a Guild Bounty route from a jpeg and got turn around all the time, this one is for you.

The guys from the Oopsy guild, most notably Lulleh went a lap with each of the bounties and marked their route for TacO, a process which generated hundreds of markers across several maps.

Obviously, displaying these markers all at once would be a huge mess, so I also created a new feature for the overlay: Marker Tracks. Now markers can also be grouped into trails that you can follow. If you waypoint to a map that has such a trail, TacO will find the closest marker on the track and show that to you. When you get near the marker, it disappears, and the next one on the trail shows up, and so on. If you waypoint again, TacO finds the nearest marker again.

All the data that the Oopsy guild collected has been arranged into such trails.

With this, guilds should have a much easier time tracking down their targets. You can spread out on the map as you've done before, but instead of the alt-tabbing misery, you'll instantly know which way to run to follow the route. All of the routes go against the direction the target is running, of course.

Took me all of 3 minutes to find Poobadoo

Some notes:

  • Ander "Wildman" Westward can be anywhere, so there are no markers for him
  • Big Mayana, Sotzz The Scallywag and Yanoka the Rat-Wrangler don't have routes, but locations you need to inspect. For them, these locations have been marked.
  • Prisoner 1141 runs around in an unpredictable manner, picking routes randomly at certain intersections. For this one three color coded routes have been created that give you a good chance of locating 1141.
  • Trikksy Trekksa has two routes, both have been mapped separately, but otherwise they work like the normal tracks and are accurate.
  • Some of the barrels and rats might not be marked. There's too many of those to find them all :)
You can grab the new build here.

Change notes:
  • Added marker track system for non-cluttering, followable, intelligent breadcrumb trails
  • Added marker tracks for the guild bounties, courtesy of Lulleh and the Oopsy guild
  • Added color property to marker categories. Markers can now be colored for more diversity.

15 comments:

  1. Have you thought about making a new kind of marker that connects to another one through a visible colored line? That way we could make a visible path even more easy to follow!

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    1. I'd like to avoid doing anything that can get messy on your screen, and drawing lines between markers is one of those things. I can only draw _over_ GW2, so I need to take care to keep everything clean and simple.

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    2. I know this is complicated but If you had the collision maps of each GW2 map (like Tyria3D does), wouldn't it be possible to mask out not-visible paths and reduce screen clutter?

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    3. Besides the point that for that to run at normal framerates next to the game client it'd require me to write a pretty complete 3D engine, accessing the GW2 datafile and using the data you're talking about is against the EULA.

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    4. Awww snap, guess we'll stick to the PoIs then :P
      Ty anyway, your app is awsome :)

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  2. Have you considered adding a boss time with links to the corresponding waypoints? Thanks for the update btw.

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  3. Have you considered adding a boss timer with links to the corresponding waypoints? Thanks for the update btw.

    Sorry for the double post.

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    Replies
    1. Check the planned features list. It's literally on the todo ;)

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  4. Well, regarding the lines on screen - it doesnt have to be messy if you just restrict "line markers" to fade out starting at 2k units and have them disappear at 2.5k units for example. if you have a route, you dont need to have the complete route visible all the time at any distance.

    Just my two cents on that matter, because lines between markers in close range from your character would be very nice.

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    Replies
    1. I will experiment with it, but another concern is that the markers would need to be placed with this in mind. Then there's a performance question as well. I won't promise anything.

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  5. Thanks BoyC and Oopsy!

    Glad to have guild bounties in the overlay!

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