MobMap development blog

More bugfixing (and a little polish) to the quest tracker in this version. I really hope to have this new feature finally stabilized now, with no more new bugs popping up.

If that turns out to be true, I can start thinking about adding more features. I have read a lot of suggestions with good ideas from people who like the idea of the new tracker (and those who don't or already have a quest tracker which they like more can disable the MobMap one with a single click now), and I will most probably integrate some of those. But because I wanted to do that on a stable basis, I had to get the bugs sorted out first. The suggestions and general feedback though tell me that I did do the right thing by creating the tracker in the first place - even though some people understandably don't have any use for it.

Be sure that I will have a close look at the memory footprint of the tracker during development, just as I always have on any MobMap component. If the tracker should later become too much of a memory hog, I will separate it from the main MobMap database browser into a new Load-on-Demand-AddOn just like I separated the database parts long ago first from the browser itself, then from each other, in order to just load what's absolutely necessary. But I don't want to further clutter peoples' addons directory if it's not really necessary and worth it.

The new version is already online for download via the MobMapUpdater, the manual download packages and the installer package are created automatically and will be up in a few hours, too.

Oh, and there's something some people have noticed and told me about: MobMap lacked knowledge of some NPCs, even when those were mainstream and should have been in the database. This was mainly due to a bug in the data collection routines of MobMap which has been fixed in MobMap v3.10. The data uploaded from 3.10 versions of MobMap had to wait in a processing queue though, as the MobMap server is currently still running on full load and catching up on the big amounts of data uploaded past the WotLK release. But right now the first several thousands of 3.10 uploads should have been processed, adding a lot of the missing NPCs to the database - you might notice the jump in the NPC counter :o) To get to the point: I highly suggest updating your database when updating to v3.14.

----------------------------------------------
v3.14:
- fixed: The error that has been shown when switching to the pickup database manually has been fixed
- changed: Quest targets (like "Kill 10 foozles: 0/10") will now line-wrap in the quest tracker to always allow you to read the full text
- changed: Scrolling in the quest tracker has been changed from line-based scrolling to pixel-exact scrolling
- fixed: Displaying pickup item positions in multiple zones simultaneously does now work again

v3.15:
- fixed: The scrollbar issues in the quest tracker have been solved somehow. Unfortunately hiding the scrollbar and using the space to make the text a little bit wider didn't work out as desired with the line-wrapping quest targets, so I switched to a static text width for the moment, still only showing the bar when it's required though.

Another bugfix release - squishing more bugs in the quest tracker. I want to get that thing running smooth before I even think about adding new features (though I do have some on my list, like making it scalable or allowing to ignore certain quests).

I hope that this is the last bugfix-only release for some time, though ;-)

See also MobMap v3.10 changes and MobMap v3.11 changes if you are upgrading from 3.04.

-------------------------------------------

changelog v3.13:
- fixed: the indentation of the right side of the quest tracker window does now work correctly if a scrollbar has to be shown
- fixed: toggling the quest tracker window does now work correctly again in any situation
- fixed: some general performance improvements considering the quest tracker

DAMN! I must have missed a little bug in v3.11 that had devastating consequences: it pretty much fucked up the tradeskill frames, the quest completion frames and quest acceptance frames.

I'm very sorry for this - usually I do run more testing on new releases in order to find at least such horrible bugs, but I did skip most of that for 3.11 since I felt a release ASAP was more important - well, shouldn't have done this.

The new v3.12 fixes the bug and is online for download. The v3.11 has been up for about 10-15 minutes though, so unfortunately some people have gotten this buggy version :(

Phew...okay, so bigger changes always tend to grow disagreements. I'm sorry for the disturbances I might have caused with some people in the 3.10 update, but unfortunately you can't do it right for everyone when it comes to changes - though I am always open for suggestions and have been looking into the biggest issues. I have read the comments in the MobMap v3.10 posting and extracted some changes from them which I could integrate rather quickly to improve the user experience with the newly added quest tracker.

First of all: many people didn't seem to find the option to completely disable the tracker. I understand that this is an important option, as there are many different quest tracker addons out there and quite some people already have a quest tracker which they like and don't need another right now. The option is actually there, it's in a new sub-tab on the Interface options screen (Interface -> Addons -> MobMap -> (click the "+" to open the sub-tabs) -> Quest Tracker). But I have now added a shortcut: by Alt-clicking on the "triangle" button you can immediately deactivate the quest tracker. It'll then be entirely gone from your screen and won't use up any processing power, too.

A new tooltip that's being displayed when hovering over the "triangle" explains how to move, toggle and deactivate the tracker. That should help people find out how this new instrument is to be used. Some bugs have been fixed and I have added some more options in the options screen, but read the changelog for yourself...

v3.11:
- fixed: An issue with Carbonite that caused the Carbonite map to flicker in certain situations
- added: A new tooltip to the MobMap quest tracker toggle button that explains how to use it
- added: A shortcut to completely disable the new quest tracker by alt-clicking onto the toggle button (can be reenabled using the regular option in the MobMap configuration sub-panel in the interface options)
- added: New options for the quest tracker: Option to hide finished objectives, an option to hide finished quests, an option to hide the "turn in to..." objectives and an option to hide the distance to quest targets
- added: new tooltips when hovering over quest names in the tracker that show the short quest description from the questlog
- added: Finished quests are now colored in a bright green color to indicate their finished status
- added: Quest levels are now being displayed in the quest titles, as well as minimum group size suggestions from Blizzard
- fixed: Reenabling the quest tracker now works without an interface reload

Oh, and of course I'd still like to read suggestions, opinions, bug reports and stuff about the new quest tracker. That feature is far away from being perfect, and I know that, but you always have to start somewhere, don't you?

But please - before you ask "how can I turn this off?" just alt-click the triangle in MobMap 3.11 ;-)

[edit] Big flaw found in 3.11, 3.12 fixes it.

A new version of MobMap has just been released - and it's a bigger release, as the version number jump from 3.04 to 3.10 indicates.

The most significant new feature in this version is the new MobMap Quest Tracker.



It's basically meant to be a full replacement of Blizzard's quest tracker, as you won't need it anymore if you feel comfortable with the MobMap tracker (if you don't, you can completely deactivate the MobMap tracker, though I really suggest to try it out first). First of all, the MobMap tracker automatically tracks everything in your quest log, you don't have to add quests to it. To keep your monitor from exploding though, quests are grouped by region as they are in the quest log. The region you're currently in is automatically moved to the top!

Then, there are of course the usual "questionmark buttons" from MobMap to do quick searches for quest details or quest targets. But those buttons have gotten significantly smarter: their behavior has been tuned for offering a much better "flow" when doing many quests. First of all, if a quest target as, for example, an NPC you have to kill, is only found in one zone, then its locations are immediately displayed on the map, and if you have TomTom or Cartographer Waypoints (I highly suggest installing TomTom if you haven't already, it's really useful) installed a waypoint with an arrow to it will automatically be created for you pointing into the direction of the quest target. You can even completely suppress the map display if you wish so and have just the waypoint being created, though I personally find it rather informative to glance at the dots and see which area they cover to know the exact area where the quest targets can be found. In addition to the quicksearch stuff, clicking a quest title will open the Blizzard quest log with the selected quest being displayed.

The new quest tracker frame also shows an estimated distance from your current position to each quest target, in order to help you decide which one you could do next (and yes, the data that allows this would even be suitable to create a full-blown routing feature, though that is a veeery big and complex thing which I might add some day in the not-too-distant future, but not tomorrow or such, as it really takes time to develop such a biggie in a way that doesn't suck). And another nice detail: the guy where you have to turn in a quest is added to the quest targets, so even quests which usually don't have a target now have at least this last "turn this quest in at [npc name here]" target (which you can of course quicksearch with MobMap).

The new quest tracker window is of course freely movable and sizable, to suit your personal needs and interface configuration. You can also pin it in one location once you have found the perfect place, just shift-click onto the arrow in the upper right which you should grab to move the window. This arrow is also used to toggle the quest window on and off, so you can hide it while not questing. And of course MobMap won't load its quest databases into memory until you actually show that quest tracker for the first time, so if you don't need it in a WoW session, it won't chew on your resources.

Okay, so there've been some more minor fixes in MobMap itself and the data collection routines besides this feature addition, but that's nothing big. This release is focused on the quest tracker, which is meant to be the basis of some more feature additions I've planned to streamline questing with MobMap. And I'd of course like to hear what you think about this new feature, if you like it or not, if there are problems with it (detailed reports about new bugs are greatly appreciated!) etc. - just leave me a comment.

Oh, and don't forget to update your database if you move from MobMap v3.04 to 3.10, as there has been a DATABASE FORMAT CHANGE!

----------------------------------
changelog v3.10:
- added: The new MobMap quest tracker was added. This tool allows you to track all your quests at once like with the Blizzard Quest Watch, but it has multiple improvements like showing quests which don't have a target, showing an estimated distance to the place you have to go to for each target MobMap knows about, allowing quick access to the questlog page of a quest and showing the NPC where a quest has to be turned in as a "quest target", all complete with MobMap quicksearch buttons of course.
- added: A new MobMap options sub-panel on the Blizzard interface options screen to configure the new quest tracker (or disabling it entirely, if you wish so)
- added: An option to directly create TomTom/Cartographer waypoints when searching for a quest objective via the new quest tracker
- changed: when using the quicksearch buttons to search for quest objectives, the MobMap window will not pop up anymore if an objective is found that is only located in one zone, if a quest drop is found which only drops from one mob in one zone or if a pickup item is found which can only be gathered in one zone. Instead, the locations you need are directly shown on the map.

Some people have reported crashes of the MobMapUpdater while trying to upload. The reason for these crashes should have been fixed now, I'm sorry for the disturbance (please report if you have any more problems though).

And there's currently a bug concerning the boss loot tables included in the MobMap database. I know about this bug too and will fix it as soon as possible.

And then there's a new MobMap version, v3.10, lurking around the corner - it'll contain some quite nice feature improvements specifically concerning quest stuff, so stay tuned :)

In a few hours the MobMap server will be unavailable for a short period of time (I hope it's only for 15-30 minutes, might extend to an hour though as I want to use this planned downtime for some software updates) because of an hardware upgrade. Databases like lots of RAM, and the latest content additions in WotLK pushed the size of my database near the current memory limitations of the machine. So in order to keep upload parsing performance at max I have to throw some new hardware at this problem :o)

[edit] The upgrade went well, only about 20 minutes of downtime.

[edit2] And it not only ensures enough space for the database to grow, but it also allowed me to expand my a-little-unusual-but-freakin-fast-RAMdisk-strategy, increasing the queries per second from an average of 2.300 qps to 3.400 qps (yes, that's more than three thousand SQL queries per second on standard consumer-grade hardware - anybody here who wants to claim that MySQL is slow?) with even more space to grow - I'm thinking about putting almost all the tables where data is being written to into RAM now that I have enough of it. Maybe I'll then be able to sustain those 11.000 qps peaks...

[edit3] Oh cool, my query speed monitoring seems to be a bit off. For some reason which I still have to investigate it doesn't count all the queries. MySQL itself says it's running at an average of 8.800 queries per second right now :D Now that's FAST!

A new version just got rolled out. Besides numerous minor fixes this new release adds something that might prove very useful if you want to do all the quests you can get in a zone: automatic quest progress tracking! This means: MobMap will now track whenever you've completed a quest, and display that information in its quest database. A new quest database filter for this has been added, too, so you can quickly filter out quests which you've already finished.

Unfortunately, addons don't have access to the server-side information about which quests you've finished in the past, so MobMap will only be able to track all future quests. But it is possible to manually mark quests as "finished" or "unfinished". And it is of course possible to disable the automatic quest progress tracking, if you wish so.

The new version is already up for download via the MobMapUpdater, but the installer package and the manual download packages will be updated soon, too.

[edit] all the various packages are now at version 3.04

changelog v3.04:
- added: Quest completion tracking! MobMap can now track which quests you have finished and show that information in the MobMap quest list. You can also search for quests you haven't finished yet.
- fixed: Various minor issues

Some of you might have noticed that while the MobMap databases built yesterday were already quite well-stuffed with information about mobs, many quests were missing, as well as quest pickup and quest item drop information. The reason for all this was a nasty bug (one involving multithreading and several threads getting in each other's way, which pretty much is one of the nastiest class of bugs in existence) that prevented many of the new quests from being included in the database builds, and since that is a requirement for the quest pickup and quest item drop data to be included correctly, those were affected as well.

The bug has been fixed last night, no data was lost at any time, and the database that's online for download since a few hours does now include all known quests. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and I suggest everyone to download a fresh database copy (it's a good idea anyway to update your database frequently during the next days, as there's a whole lot of new data being added right now).

Okay, so it seems as if quite some people haven't had much sleep last night, as there's been an unusually large amount of data uploads - more than 3.000, to be exact. Those are just going through the pipe and should be integrated into MobMap in one, maybe two hours maximum.

But that's great, as more data means better and especially faster Northrend covering :-) so let me throw out a big THANK YOU to you guys constantly uploading stuff and ensuring that MobMap is as up-to-date as possible!

I'm now going to pick up my own WotLK copy in order join into the fun tonight :o)