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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
No worries - I enjoy a good design discussion as well, and that was the spirit in which I posted...to some degree playing devil's advocate to offer food for thought.
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Ok cool
. Just wanted to make sure.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
I assumed as much about quest tracking - not perfect, but limited by platform, and if the list can be filtered by level range or area, and searched by name, it wouldn't necessarily be too bad to find the appropriate quests from a list.
You know though...it would be extremely cool if we could take screenshots of our quest log and map with quests tracked, have them loaded by the windows agent and then processed into the app. You know, simple binary image comparisons, adjusting for screen resolution, pulling out the quest rings and area shading from the maps, OCRing the quest names from the log screenshots. No problem, right? |
I've actually thought about that; but LotRO's bitmap fonts would make OCR a bit more difficult than normal. Not saying it isn't possible; but it would probably have the best chance of working if it was done with the quest log, as the varying colors of the world, combined with the ability to resize/reposition the quest tracker would introduce far too many variables. That is of course, as long as the player is using the default background skin.
At any rate, I was going to use existing sources to build a quest list, so at the very least, a smart search should be more than possible
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
Zone vs. seamless - I have to say at this point I'd probably draw the same conclusion you're leaning towards. The navigation with seamless probably isn't as bad as you think though, and it's a paradigm we're used to with other apps, like Google Maps. Pinch to zoom out, double tap on another area to zoom in and center...not too bad. I still don't see a clear winner either way, but because some instances will have to be in "zone" format, it seems to lend itself to using zones for everything - but maybe zones that are aware of their relative position in the world, so that if you're trying to display quest objectives for a location outside your current zone, it could possibly display arrows pointing out of the zone, like the radar map does, rather than just not showing the location indicator at all like the in-game parchment map does.
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The one thing that troubles me about it - more than anything else, is the tendency of a lock-up happening. Although this won't be using the Google Maps API, you can observe a similar thing with the lorebook map. Attempting to do massive changes, like zooming or panning, will result in a situation where too many tiles are attempting to load at once, causing a traffic jam of course. Now with a web based map,it's simple enough just to refresh it - with an app, not so much. Maybe that's one of the reasons why the Google Map API for Android doesn't support custom tiles.
I'm not entirely sold on the necessity for the arrow indicators though. This is the way I'm thinking of it. If you're in a zone, and you look at your quest tracker, you generally want to know two things. First, do I have any quests in this zone to do and Second, if not, where do I need to go? So the first key is to indicate which quests on the tracker are in the current zone (maybe by using a color-code icon, set the quest name in bold, or both), and the second is to provide that long-press functionality I talked about previously, that shows what zone(s) that quest takes place in. Then, if the player doesn't know where that zone is, they can look on the overview map. This way they can see for themselves where they have to go - which, at least in my opinion, is a lot more helpful than an arrow pointing in a linear direction, that pays no attention to how many zones are between the current and the target, nor does it take landscape into account. However, such arrows would certainly help a lot more within the same zone.
Of course, those arrows would only be visible if you're in "GPS mode". Similar to the Google Maps implementation, and provided you have the Windows app running, you can either choose free navigation, or have the map center and lock on your current position. Enabling it, at any time, will automatically switch to your current zone, and center the map (if possible) on your position. Zoom control of course, would work regardless. I'll have to play around with the behavior, but another solution would be, while locked to your position, that any panning done would work, but after letting go, it would snap back to your position.
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Originally Posted by K1R4D3L
I understand the neighborhood problem, and agree with the basic idea of personal vs. shared/submitted points. The only issue with neighborhoods is that you'd need to be able to flag, at least with a note or something, which neighborhood that point is in. Even then, they might overlap/collide, which could be troublesome. Let's say you have two friends with houses at the same address in different neighborhoods....
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That really might not be as much of an issue as one would think. Although the Google Map app switches to an info page when clicking the ">" arrow on a map marker tooltip, I was thinking more of a pop-up window. But either way, if you have more than one marker at a specific point, there's nothing stopping me from indicating how many points are at that location, and cycling through them within the info page. Something as simple as a single bar with the text (1 of X) and a forward and back arrow (also could have swipe support of course), could let the player cycle through the points to find the specific item they are looking for. All they'd really need to do is add the neighborhood/server name to the note, and they could easily get the info they need. Since it's very unlikely that someone would know an excessive number of people that all live at the same house, that should be easy enough to work with. Of course, player added notes won't necessarily have to have a world coordinate to place them, allowing the player to simply long-press on the map where ever they want - so there's nothing stopping them from adding multiple markers in different spots on the same house. Maybe a "add note to current marker" option would also be available when a player long-presses a marker.
At any rate, thanks again for the reply - it's nice to get some of these finer ideas a bit more concrete by being introduced to situations I haven't thought of.