Tuesday 29 March 2022

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.

Monday 28 March 2022

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

Sunday 27 March 2022

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)

Saturday 26 March 2022

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




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.

Wednesday 23 March 2022

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

Monday 21 March 2022

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.

Sunday 20 March 2022

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.