[magill]

Originally Posted by Digital_Utopia

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.

What is needed is the classic "Lewis and Clark" method.... (compass and pacing)

I doubt that "height" is a meaningful measure -- just because visually there looks like a pass there, doesn't mean that it isn't simply a "pretty backdrop painting. --- at any rate...

I just stumbled across your WP blog (chasing OSX and LOTRO "stuff") and noticed a comment about /loc in "Of Coordinates and the LotRO Client"

I believe that the comment "For each complete cycle, lx and ly will increase by 8 points. So essentially, every 20 points ox or oy increase or decrease, lx or ly will increase or decrease by 1. Even understanding that, it’s not very handy to attempt to use a 2-part x and y coordinate, so for actual placement purposes, it’s beneficial to convert these into a single x/y coordinate set. Now, there’s really no “official” method of doing this – or at least, no way of telling what that method is. " relates to Land Blocks. (That is what they are called in LOTRO.) Which is to say, somewhere in a discussion of "Distance Imposters" I encountered the explanation of how Turbine only reveals what's in the next or next two (I forget) land blocks, hence the "pop-up" effect seen with distance imposters. That said, I believe the reference in /loc is to "tiles". Put another way, "/loc" is so that the Devs can pinpoint the specific tile which has the "bug" in it. --- I don't really know anything more than this as I've never really bothered to investigate the issue... and to see where it is all explained.

... so I just went and looked through the Forums a bit and found this description...

High resolution rendering is limited to the landblock you are in which 160 x 160 meters. Plus the surrounding land blocks. I believe the maximum render range is 160 meters. That all you have when you are at the edge of a land block looking across the next one. -- Yula_the_Mighty

BTW, I've been playing LOTRO (and DDO before that) on the Mac using Codeweaves CrossOver Games (CXG) [which is basically the folks who provide the home (computers, storage, staff support, etc.) for WINE] since the pre-betas of both. (I'm a lifetime/founder). I also happen to be a retired Unix SysAdmin, so I have never had an issue using the Unix underpinnings of OSX to link various things around, independent of the Mac GUI. It's pretty trivial to generate a symbolic link between the Bootcamp and OSX partitions so that the same LOTRO files can be accessed by both.