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TriMoon

Markings on map

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Seeing how many marks i place on maps i was thinking:

 

Can this be changed so that you only see dots with popup info when hovered over them?

or at least make the font size smaller?

 

 

Some maps have somany marks by now it gets all blurry (unreadable)....

 

Maybe even a DropDown interface to select marks by name so they show up on map as dots...

This will make it more userfriendly and usable..

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While making a font a bit smaller is not bad idea, I wouldn't like to see any #goto commands - ever.

Good idea is also not marking every crap in area, but only most important ones.

Vanyel

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I have to agree on the "no" for the goto cmd...eeekk...

 

But about less marks...i got too much crap? o.O

Sorry but plant locations, animal locations, ore locations those are uhmm....not realy crap in my view...

And sry to say but i got a "auto defrag" running on my memory banks all the time, so i never remember location of things...especialy in games...

Making marks on my map is my way of implementing "map making", while exploring :P

Edited by TriMoonâ„¢

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Sorry but plant locations, animal locations, ore locations those are uhmm....not realy crap in my view...

There is no reason whatsoever to record every single plant etc on a map as its far more efficient to find the one closest to storage, or other resources you'll need. Therefore, it is likely that you'll only have 2 or 3 flowers on each map that you use... there are quite a few maps in EL you know... ;-)

Likewise for animals and ores.

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Sure thats kinda true atm, but i think you must have observed the amount of "camping" at certain locations?

Imagine how bad this will get when more and more ppl come play...

Then you will NEED more spots to goto....and thats when you need more marks :P

(As you guessed, im not only making suggestions as a default player)

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Imagine how bad this will get when more and more ppl come play...

Then you will NEED more spots to goto....and thats when you need more marks :P

That's why the known world is expanding (currently 2 continents). If you find one spot is too busy, then don't mark it... or if it becomes too busy, then remove the mark and mark it at your new location.

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Imagine how bad this will get when more and more ppl come play...

Then you will NEED more spots to goto....and thats when you need more marks :icon13:

That's why the known world is expanding (currently 2 continents). If you find one spot is too busy, then don't mark it... or if it becomes too busy, then remove the mark and mark it at your new location.

Im aware of the 2nd continent, not that i figured out how to get there yet but, and thats a good thing for so ppl have areas to explore more after some level.

(unless the monsters there are same level as C1)

 

But your solution to the marks is like saying just dont mark and keep wandering around till you find a resource thats not crowded.

I think you realise that thats something well...counter the idea of making marks at all...

Because to move easily to a next spot you need to know the location of it beforehand (each time), so you can go "check up" on locations and find a suitabe one at that moment...

At certain times one spot might get crowded, while on other times some other spot...

This doesnt mean you should delete your marks that you found....

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No offense, but what started as a simple suggestion turned into a flamin' load of picky minutae!

 

Smaller font size seems harmless and helpful, and maybe a darker font color for better readability.

 

Then again, there's always graph paper, scotch tape, colored pencils, and an empty ceiling......

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No offense, but what started as a simple suggestion turned into a flamin' load of picky minutae!

 

Smaller font size seems harmless and helpful, and maybe a darker font color for better readability.

 

Then again, there's always graph paper, scotch tape, colored pencils, and an empty ceiling......

...and calling friends/family/neighbors over to help you change maps... :huh:

 

"Mom, a little more to the left - I need the VotD map, not the EVTR one!"

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Seeing how many marks i place on maps i was thinking:

 

Can this be changed so that you only see dots with popup info when hovered over them?

or at least make the font size smaller?

 

Maybe make the font size configurable along with Name and Chat Text Size? If they were made dots with popups you would be having to check lots of marks to find the right one.

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Uh, do you use abbreviations for bookmarks or do you use full names?

Two/three letters bookmarks aren't consuming so much of map image...

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I don't use marks almost at all. Once I decided to mark whole DP with every single flower and other crap I found "worth" marking. I've finished up with wonderful chaos - absolutely senseless. After removing marks file from EL folder I just marked things I couldn't remember location and guess what - I had like 10 marks all over the map.

As I've said above the smaller font would not make harm, but making layers is shooting with bazooka to the fly - senseless. Once again, good idea is not to mark every single crap, but only ones you really need.

Vanyel

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More than that.

At some point you could have realised that giving out coordinates in channel 1 become forbidden. One can ask why. The reason is simply, players acted more like robots than people.

The #goto command was making it even worse.

It was like

#goto xx,yy

pick something

#goto xx,yy

put to storage

#goto xx,yy

etc.

Does it look like macro script? Sure... some used it as macro, some just typed it.

Not even speaking that it was discouraging people from exploring, what's good reason to get rid off such command itself.

Edited by Vanyel

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Guest papy

I have another idee for those who have, like me, a lot of marks.

 

those should be layered.

 

the map view contain an empty space at the right side, there we could have a "layer menu" to choose what

sort of marks should be displayed on the map (like flowers, minerals, npcs, ...)

 

every new mark will be add to the current layer

 

what do you think about it ?

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That #goto thing was ripped out for a reason, and is never goind back -and im glad of it-.

 

About the font size, im making the scalable interface patch, so I will try to integrate this into. If I can find where are those horrible marks witten, I ll have a screenshot in five minutes ;)

 

EDIT: Done:

 

Scaled to 0.87

882891.jpg

 

Scaled to 1.5

882892.jpg

 

More about my patch:

http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.p...=20#entry247346

Edited by m_bee

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My way of saving space is numbering things, and using the blank space at the right of the map as a key.

 

If you click just left of the map edge you will be able to type in the black border area. Clean, neat and does not make a mess of the map itself.

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Using the patch specifically for the text in the maps. It resets to 0.00 at the start of every game which is a pain, and I think it starts like that but I'm not sure.

 

Now if only the taxt wasn't *green*

Edited by Jack The Biscuit

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Guest baneazaghal

Here is the suggestion that I have (some of the ideas have been presented already - sorry):

1. Map marks should look different - green crosses are sometimes hard to see. Some kind of a little bigger dot would be better (it could look quite nice if you use image for it).

2. Map marks should consist out of two parts - mark and its label. There should be a button on the map screen to turn the labels on/off.

3. There should also be a button for turning the marks on/off (when you want to see the "clean" map.

3. Layers should be implemented (I didn't think of this originally), but in a way to allow users to add their own layers, and to name them. There would also be some kind of dialog with checkboxes which would allow you to select the layers that should appear on the map. On the map screen there should also be 1 drop-down menu or something similar to select the current layer destination when adding new marks.

4. Custom legends should be implemented in the following way: for each layer you would have one legend; legends would be shown in a separate dialog on the map screen; legend dialog can be turned on/off by a button on the map screen; entries in legends would consist of key - value pairs; if several layers are being shown, you should only see one dialog with all the legend entries for those layers, grouped by the layers (each group preceded by a layer name, for example). It might be a good idea to implement separate legends for each map as well. Those legends would appear under separate dialog, and could be turned on/off by a separate button in the map screen.

 

What is the main problem of implementing this?

 

Well, so far the map markings had a pretty easy-going linear structure - just a txt file with lines in format "x y label". Therefor, the system proposed above would complicate things substantially. It would require a new format to be used, maybe even XML. One more problem would be the way you write those marks to the file. So far, only 1 line needed to be appended to the file when adding a new mark. With a tree-like structure that above approach would require, this wouldn't be that easy any more. Saving after each change would probably create some overhead on the part of the client, since you'll need to write to disk the whole structure each time you make a change, but I don't think it will impact the performance badly (after all, those will still be relatively small files). Some overhead will also appear in keeping more data in the memory (again, I think this would be minor increase compared to the rest of the data kept in memory).

Also, one of the problems might be the implementation of the dialogs and additional buttons in the map screen. I have no idea how this could be done (I haven't read the source code of EL). Drawing more complicated marks (dots) shouldn't be a problem, I think.

 

Well, in any case, I'd like to offer my help in writing the part of the code that handles the format of new marks itself - structures, writing to files, loading from files (only if you wouldn't use XML, since I haven't ever worked with that thing so far :blush: ). As for the dialog part, I'm really not competent to do that one. Sorry ;) In any case, I hope I'll get some kind of answer on this one :)

 

P.S.

I haven't payed much attention, but is it possible to have horizontal scrolling bars in the EL client? I've seen the vertical ones (in storages etc). Those might prove useful for making legend dialogs which have long lines.

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I find ctrl-f to be sufficient when I have a jumble of marks on a map. I don't think it really needs any changes. At least, if it does, its not, in my opinion, high priority.

 

That might be just me though.

Edited by Mr_I3Lack

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