MobMap

If you're trying to use the MobMapUpdater, you'll notice that it will do a self-update to v1.41. This update doesn't bring any new functionality (at least not yet ;-) I do have some plans about new functionality for the updater, but implementing those will definitely take some more time), it just contains some minor modifications for patch 2.1. And it should improve compatibility on Windows Vista machines with activated UAC (User Access Control).

[update] I have just released another new version, v1.42. This one will hopefully fix the problems that some people running Vista have experienced with 1.41.

I know - it has been silent around MobMap during the last weeks. But development continues, so I proudly present MobMap 1.40!

The update integrates another set of new databases centered around items you "pick up" in the world. At the moment this includes quest items (which are of course automatically searched whenever you use the questionmark buttons), fishable items and items gathered by mining and herb collection. This addition now fills the last big gap in terms of questing information.

Aside from this big change, a few other useful additions have been integrated. There are two new options to turn off the questionmark buttons in the quest tracker and the quest log - although I can't imagine why somebody would want to do this ;-). And if you have Cartographer with waypoint functionality installed, you can quickly create a waypoint by clicking a MobMap dot on the world map now (if you don't have Cartographer, I highly suggest you to try it, it's a really useful mod).

MobMap 1.40 also integrates some minor changes and additions for the upcoming WoW patch 2.1.0. These were mostly changes "under the hood", the most visible changes are probably the new quest type "daily" that's being introduced in patch 2.1.0 and a new memory usage tracker that's using the new memory profiling functions.

But I have to admit, I made a mistake - when I was halfway done with releasing MobMap 1.40 (which has become a pretty time-consuming process by the way, depending on the amount of changes necessary to the backend systems a release can take between 1 and 2 hours) I noticed that I forgot to look into some minor bugs with MobMap 1.30 (specifically several errors related to linking items into the chat) and the whole Windows Vista issue that disrupts some functionality of the MobMapUpdater in some cases. I will look into those things in the near future and probably release MobMap v1.41 to address these issues together with the new bugs in v1.40 that might emerge.

Quite some time has passed since the last update to MobMap. After the Add-On and the corresponding backend systems have reached a state now that could almost be called "stable", I didn't want to completely break that fragile stability by releasing the next version too early.

This update does - again - change several things in the database format. This was necessary to incorporate a new type of data into MobMap: drop rates. For the start, MobMap contains drop rate data (if available) for all known quest items and for all recipe reagents.

This should make questing even more easier because now MobMap can answer the question "Who drops those 20 [xyz] I need for this quest?" - and of course you can have MobMap then display the location of the mobs dropping your quest items. The quest objective quicksearch buttons (also known as "questionmark" buttons) have been consequently enabled to search the quest objective for known item names besides checking it for known mob names.

So in terms of questing there's only one big thing left: items that aren't looted from dead mobs but picked up from stashes/chests/etc. This one is now pretty much on top of my to-do list, and since I already collect the necessary data together with the loot data, this functionality will probably find its way into the next bigger update.


And now, for the sake of completeness, the 1.30 patch notes (because there have been some more additions than just this new database...):

- added: display of skill level required for recipes
- added: possibility to sort recipes by skill level
- changed: item name helper database format changed to reduce memory usage by 15%
- added: several help text tooltips
- added: possibility to disable item detail data requests to the server (only recommended if you permanently get disconnected otherwise)
- added: New drop rate database! It currently contains drop rates for all items necessary for the quests known to MobMap and the drop rates for recipe reagents.
- added: quicksearch buttons for recipe reagents to quickly search for mobs dropping the reagent or merchants offering it
- added: the questionmark buttons next to quest objectives now also search the drop rate database if the quest objective is to collect an item obtainable by killing and looting mobs
- fixed: using the MobMap check box on the world map does not cause a lua error anymore if the MobMap position database has not been loaded yet

Nothing big in this release, I'll just let the patch notes do the talking:

v1.22:
- added: dynamically scaling position dots to improve visibility when only one or two are displayed
- fixed: some problems with crashes occuring when trying to export larger amounts of data
- fixed: loot data is now properly deleted when the 'clear data' button is used

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.

Just released MobMap v1.20.

The focus in this update was mainly on performance/memory optimizations. The MobMap addon with its now almost 4000 lines of code had just went through its first code refactoring phase, in which I modularized the addon much more than it was before. The code and UI parts for the individual databases were taken out of the main addon and placed into separate files which get loaded together with the according database on demand. In addition to that, I changed a few things in the database format to support this modularization.

All this does result in two improvements:
- The MobMap core addon (the one which is always loaded on startup) memory use dropped to 190 kilobytes from 627 kilobytes before the refactoring. The loading time at startup also improved from 0.164 seconds to 0.093 seconds.
- The biggest database part, the position database, had to be loaded at the first use of MobMap before v1.20. This was necessary because this database contained some information that all the other databases relied upon. The new database format now splits out those parts from the raw position data, which now only gets loaded the first time you really want to display a position. So if you just search for a recipe, a quest or a merchant, the position data won't get loaded anymore.

In addition to this code refactoring, the data export routines were optimized to be much faster (especially with bigger amounts of data).

Besides those performance-related changes, another "functionality" has been added to 1.20 - though you won't see much of it right now: MobMap now also collects loot data. I plan to use this data in several ways: on one hand, I want to provide a database that contains the positions of quest items you get from chests, boxes and similar objects in the WoW world. On the other hand, I might one day add a loot table database to MobMap, however this is not definitely sure yet because I first have to see if and how these big amounts of data can be compressed to fit nicely into the limited amount of WoW addon memory.

I'm sorry, due to a bug in the database builder software a corrupted version of the MobMap database was online for download during the last 4 hours. The bug has been fixed, however if you downloaded a copy just in that timeframe you will have to re-download it again.

The error manifests itself in the MobMap addon in a big error frame that pops up the moment you try to open the quest tab.

I did just put MobMap v1.13 online for download.

First of all, the changelog:
- fixed: token icons on merchant items which are bought in exchange for tokens are now correctly displayed
- added: support for Extended Questlog
- added: partial support for UberQuest
- added: item tooltips for the recipe list entries
- fixed: tooltips in various MobMap menus are now correctly displayed whether the world map is shown or not
- fixed: the quest detail frame is now displayed correctly whether the world map is shown or not
- added: another alternative position for the MobMap button on the world map frame (below the actual map)
- added: the option to completely hide the MobMap button

Originally I wanted to add full support for MonkeyQuest, Extended Questlog and UberQuest ("support" in this case means that the little questionmark-buttons which allow to quickly search for quest titles or quest mobs also appear when using these mods instead of the Blizzard default UI). MonkeyQuest and the UberQuest quest watch frame however are internally constructed in a way that makes it somewhat impossible for me to get MobMab to add those buttons to their frames. So v1.13 will now add full support for Extended Questlog and support for the UberQuest quest log frame (but not for the quest watch frame).

Another error in the MobMapUpdater has been fixed. This one could cause the updater to get stuck in an endless loop at the initialization phase if specific data was collected by the MobMap addon in the SavedVariables file.

The new version 1.11 is online and should be automatically downloaded the next time you start the updater.

Just uploaded MobMap v1.12 which corrects an error that caused the quest and merchant tab to not display any quests/merchants if no zone name was entered in the zone filter box.