Talk:Freemarch artifact locations

O have added a number of Coords and many seem to be off the map. We may need to review the script or the coord to see which is off. I will start on the in game coords for what I posted over the next few days.

I have this all in excel to make for ease of copy paste remove duplicates ext.

Nice work on the interactive maps.

--Sarcandosa 21:27, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's possible for those locs to be within Freemarch. The coords are universal, so no matter which zone you're in when you hit /loc, the resulting values are the same. The westernmost x-value of Freemarch is something like 5000. Maybe some things got mis-typed?

You'd think the universal coords would be helpful, but since the zone boundaries are irregular, there'd have to be an inside/outside test to determine which zone a given set of coordinates belongs to. I haven't tried and I'm really not a web person, but I have the feeling that the computation costs would be prohibitively expensive for pages that can contain hundreds of different spawn points.

Worth looking into, though. I'm putting together a personal use script to process Rift's Log.txt files and generate easy copy/paste wiki-formatted stuff, and it looks like I'll need to implement an inside/outside test regardless. If that effort produces any useful algorithm I'll bring it up to the person who developed the coords template and see what comes of it.

Psiharis 05:56, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I think you are right there. I am looking at problem coordinates, time permitting, but there appears to be some variations in what zone a particular coordinate is actually in and what set something actually belongs to. I'm an excel person so I have the code generated from the various columns I log the data into. This allows me to quickly use a temp tab to take all inputs currently listed, combine it with my complete list, eliminate duplicates and then re-post. Still time consuming though.

As for the log.txt, I tried to see if that would work, but it doesn't show a position, just the item that was received. I was going to see if there is a slash command for getting position that would show in the log. If so then harvest an artifact hit the slash command macro, move on and parse the log would definitely work and be more accurate. Problem still is the description of the area, but I suppose we could make a special chat channel and then just do a say in it or something.

Do you have your own site or are you just using the Wiki?

--Sarcandosa 15:30, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Yep, you do have to manually type /loc each time you harvest an artifact in order for it to show up in the log. Unfortunately the /loc output doesn't specify a zone, hence the need for a test. There is a chat message when a user zones into/out of a zone, but it's not useful if they hunt in the same zone they logged in to or start the /log after zoning in.

I develop on my own machine and use a free site to test things out, I don't really keep a web site. Once I have the processing script in a more user-friendly state, I'll find a place to stick it and hopefully save all the artifact hunters a bit of carpal tunnel.

Psiharis 23:24, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

So I did some validation last night, stated using the /loc to get my position. This is better in that I don't have to open the map, just macro'd to my 0 key. The /loc gives a 3 part number, x=east west, y=elevation and z=north south. And I have yet to figure out a way to get area without referring to the mini map. Be nice if they gave us a /posit that gave loc area and zone in a chat line. Anyways, as I validate the coords, I will only load those that have all 3 numbers. I have gotten rid of everything on this list that currently is off the map, with the except of Lake Solace. You may want to expand the Freemarch Map to include that area. As we get this process better defined, I will start to populate other areas.

I was thinking that we may want to organize the list by area once all coords have one defined. Then that will help us validate coords are accurate because we would be able to draw a circle around all in a defined area and thus defining the map in area. For example The Rill Pond, how far from the pond does it actually cover before it switches to the next area. Then we could make an overlay to show for those areas. Either just shade that area or have all coords tied to that area show at once. Thoughts?

I don't want to have to many different maps, but the ability to have different types of things show on a single map shouldn't be to resource intensive, at least I don't think it would be.

--Sarcandosa 12:45, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Hang in there, I have a zone test nearly working. Just tweaking some of the borders now. All in php and I don't think the number of calculations it does make it a very good candidate for converting to a template, but it can at least help with log processing and checking lists on the wiki.

When you're mousing over the map, it's pretty easy for the client to flake out and pull bogus coordinates for some reason, especially if your cursor's near the edge of the frame.

I haven't been storing the Y (altitude) value myself, just XZ, since it all goes onto a 2D map and for the majority of areas the altitude is self-explanatory.

As for smaller areas like the Rill Pond... yikes. Theoretically the exact same process would work fine. Practically, somebody would have to go running around the game collecting all the coordinates for a polygon the shape of each and every area. Not me!

I think a better solution would be to have translucent png images for those areas, just a solid color in the shape/size of the area, and a top-left x,y position. Then it could be overlaid either during image generation or as a div with mouseover information. But somebody would still have to make all the overlay images.

EDIT: Zone test is working, you can play with it at http://psiharis.x10.mx/artifacts/polytest.php?x=5000&y=2000 (link is also on my user page, replace 5000 and 2000 with whatever coordinate x/y values). Needs a few border tweaks, but let me know if it fails to find the correct zone for any nodes that aren't right on the edges. Later will add an interface to test more than 1 coordinate pair at a time.

Psiharis 00:57, 17 March 2011 (UTC)