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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Sounds good...this should certainly be sufficient as long as the quests sources are accurate, up to date and have the necessary details. If you're just searching by quest name, it's probably fine. Sometimes I may want to go the other way though - look for available quests that I don't yet have. In that case they would need to be filterable by level and party size, exclude limited-time or retired quests that aren't currently available, etc. The Compendium plugin demonstrates some of this, but often the filtered list is still so long as to be unusable.
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Sounds like a good idea for a separate activity - meaning something one doesn't mind switching away from the map for (but still remain in the app). It could provide a better UI for such advanced search criteria, as well as a method to add multiple to the tracker.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Darn technical limitations...you're right though - I'd rather have it work well in zone format than be seamless, but work sporadically. Requires quick navigation short-cuts to be well designed, as you've said, but that's completely solvable.
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Yeah, basically I think that there's just a lot of room for improvement in the parchment UI in the first place.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Agreed that your color-coding and other ideas address most of the concern here. My main frustration is when I'm looking at the parchment map for the rings and can only find 4 out of 5, only to realize after scouring the entire map several times that one of them is in another zone. The color-coding, provided it's visible while I'm looking at the map, should address that.
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Another limitation of LotRO's quest tracker - one that the "MMO-which-must-not-be-named" does a little better at, at least to the point of showing when a particular quest isn't within the current zone.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Thinking of GPS for a moment, I wonder how feasible it would be to develop some kind of path-finding algorithms for travelling between points. I realize this wouldn't be easy, but it would be extremely helpful to see a dotted line on the map indicating the most direct, reachable route between two points. I can't begin to count the number of times I've headed towards a point on the map only to realize that the direct route is impassible, causing me to have to backtrack around half the map to find another route. Could possibly even allow users to manually adjust the line with waypoints in order to manually plot out a path to follow that avoids known areas of certain death. This would also enable a much-improved version of the in-game Track Nearby Quests feature, since it could take actual travel distance into account.
Of course, another aspect of the navigation idea would be to consider nearby stables and their destinations, swift travel options, etc., but that would complicate things by a large degree, as it would depend on the character what options would be available. Just having wayfinding by foot/mount would be huge.
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Oh wow, you're starting to make me shudder here.
Awesome idea though, but collecting the amount of data required to even hope to make such a feature, let alone doing the actual pathfinding code itself, would be a nightmare. First a height map of the entire zone would need to be created, then determining what is and what isn't passable variations in height, and finally doing what would probably be starting with a linear path, and continuing to attempt that until an impassable point is reached, then going to the nearest passable direction, before attempting a linear path again and so on, until the objective is reached. At least that would be my understanding of how to do such a thing.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Another idea as food for thought, though perhaps way down the road - could character coordinates be shared across users, such that I could authorize members of my fellowship/kin/friends to see where I am, and vice-versa? Could be a nice community-building feature.
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Y'know, the funny thing is - that the "performance testing" I mentioned in the first post, has a lot to do with this idea; before realizing that player position itself could be handled separately and far more directly. At any rate, the basic idea is a separate web based account setup, where "friends" can be added mutually (i.e. it requires confirmation from both parties), with the option (at least currently - due to the limitations of the Lua API) to display your location to fellowship members. This way, you could sign up (for free obviously) on a web site, and log in via the helper application and the mobile device. The helper application would then broadcast your position, and current character to the web server, where anybody that has permission to do so could view your location, and whether you're on/off line. Of course from there, the options and possibilities are practically endless - but it could be a really cool social tool. Of course, first priority is the actual map/quest-helper functionality; but yeah, I definitely see the potential for it to be much more.