Position filtering rocks!
Friday, March 30. 2007
I finally implemented the first version of position filtering in the database builder software, something I wanted to do since I've released MobMap to the public, but I first needed a decent number of people uploading data on a regular basis (which I've got now - big thanks to all you guys uploading data to the database!!!) to make this work.
Basically this filtering does two things. On one side, mobs/NPCs which are noted to be in two or three zones, but in reality are only present in one zone are now being filtered - or, better said, these "ghost" positions in the other zones should be excluded from the database. On the other hand, the wild "scattering" of position dots around the fixed position of an NPC should now be filtered too, with just the true position of the NPC being included in the final database.
Because this filtering stuff is fully automated, it might not work perfectly well for all mobs and NPCs. I did some random inspection ingame after I set the filtering parameters to reasonable values, and for me everything looked good, but the next days will probably show if this works out as desired. The filtering is implemented in a "non-destructive" way, meaning no single position entry in the backend database is being deleted when the filtering is applied, so if it turns out that this thing needs some serious retuning at least no valuable data would be lost.
However, time to see what's gained with this new "feature": the position database needs around 510 kbytes less memory ingame (measured with the german database version, but should be similar for the english version), and many NPCs that weren't clearly locatable because of too many scattered positions are now much easier to pinpoint :-) definitely an improvement!
You'll just have to download a new copy of the database to profit from the now much cleaner position database. There's no addon update needed for this.
While I wrote all this filtering stuff I stumbled over a tiny bug in the MobMapUpdater that caused it to upload erroneous data to the database in some special cases. I fixed this bug and cleaned the database of the erroneous data already uploaded. And because that was just a good opportunity to include proxy authentication support in the Updater, I also added that functionality before releasing MobMapUpdater 1.21. If you need this feature: add the command-line arguments "--proxyUser [username]" and "--proxyPass [password]" to the MobMapUpdater command line to enable proxy authentication and supply the necessary credentials.
Basically this filtering does two things. On one side, mobs/NPCs which are noted to be in two or three zones, but in reality are only present in one zone are now being filtered - or, better said, these "ghost" positions in the other zones should be excluded from the database. On the other hand, the wild "scattering" of position dots around the fixed position of an NPC should now be filtered too, with just the true position of the NPC being included in the final database.
Because this filtering stuff is fully automated, it might not work perfectly well for all mobs and NPCs. I did some random inspection ingame after I set the filtering parameters to reasonable values, and for me everything looked good, but the next days will probably show if this works out as desired. The filtering is implemented in a "non-destructive" way, meaning no single position entry in the backend database is being deleted when the filtering is applied, so if it turns out that this thing needs some serious retuning at least no valuable data would be lost.
However, time to see what's gained with this new "feature": the position database needs around 510 kbytes less memory ingame (measured with the german database version, but should be similar for the english version), and many NPCs that weren't clearly locatable because of too many scattered positions are now much easier to pinpoint :-) definitely an improvement!
You'll just have to download a new copy of the database to profit from the now much cleaner position database. There's no addon update needed for this.
While I wrote all this filtering stuff I stumbled over a tiny bug in the MobMapUpdater that caused it to upload erroneous data to the database in some special cases. I fixed this bug and cleaned the database of the erroneous data already uploaded. And because that was just a good opportunity to include proxy authentication support in the Updater, I also added that functionality before releasing MobMapUpdater 1.21. If you need this feature: add the command-line arguments "--proxyUser [username]" and "--proxyPass [password]" to the MobMapUpdater command line to enable proxy authentication and supply the necessary credentials.
