Garan

Annotation sharing has been in the works for quite some time (long before RTPlugin existed). The idea actually arose from the multi-player version of the Cards plugin which uses chat to control dealing, betting, etc. Unfortunately, the Cards plugin was abandoned back in 2011 or 2012 (but may yet be resurrected). The annotation sharing in MoorMap will be very similar to the annotation sharing in TerrainMap, using the same mechanism to whitelist and blacklist, etc.

FWIW, I suspect the "slow and laggy" response you are experiencing with TerrainMap is due to your drive. It seems likely that you are still running on a HDD (Hard Disk Drive). If you are, I would recommend upgrading to an SSD (Solid State Device), they have gotten less expensive and more reliable and make a HUGE difference playing the game, especially when rapidly accessing many files like TerrainMap has to. The TerrainMap plugin is sluggish on all of my older test systems with HDDs but responds smoothly on all of my newer systems with SSDs. Just a suggestion, I know that not everyone can afford SSDs (especially just to play a game), but in this case, it would likely make a world of difference. One thing, you have to make sure that your "Documents" folder is on the SSD or at the very least, create a symbolic link to a folder on the SSD for the "Lord of the Rings" folder. The game itself will also run much smoother, especially load times between zones, if it is on the SSD as well (you can copy all of the game files to the SSD and then run "TurbineRegisterGDF.exe" from the new location to re-register the DLLs, no need to re-install, just update any desktop shortcuts to point to the new location).

jojobean

So will this sharing in Moormap be incorporating Google as well? Personally I don't want to be connected to Google any more than we already have to which is plenty everywhere else. Hopefully this is something that will be dealt with in game rather than using external sources?

As for the Harddrive, yes, I'm on an HDD drive, but I'm on a laptop which I doubt very much will be able to be updated (maybe, not sure so I'll check on that). It's not very old, but I want to check on Ram to see if that can be updated too. Not so much for this particular game since this game is so very old I can't imagine it needing more than 8 gb of Ram, but I do have a lot of other games I play as well so I'll look into all of that, thanks for the tip.

Garan

I'm not sure what you mean by "incorporating Google". Neither MoorMap nor TerrainMap are connected to Google. Are you referring to the Google map from http://lotromap.net/terrainmap/google.html ? If so, that is a totally separate project, based on the tiles (with SSGs consent) and data files from TerrainMap but not actually integrated in any way and has no support for custom annotations. The MoorMap annotation sharing will be via chat channels the same way that TerrainMap annotation sharing is currently implemented.

Many laptops have a second bay for an SSD, I have a couple with M.2 slots (a special form factor SSD that looks like a small circuit board rather than a 2.5" drive). If you don't have a second bay or special SSD slot then you could always replace the HDD with an SSD but that takes a little more time and may cost you more than a simple SSD install - however, if you show your laptop specs to any local PC shop they should be able to explain your options easily enough. If you do replace the HDD, you can get an adapter to run it externally via a USB port (it'll be slow but still useful for document storage, etc.).

jojobean

Ah I see, well I'll check it out again then and see what the deal is on the Terrainmap. Not sure why we need 2 plugins for the sharing is what I think the confusion is on my part and a few others in my kin that are wondering too.

I'll also check into the SSD drive, hopefully they aren't as expensive as they were a few years ago. That's what stopped me from adding it to my Mac, they were horribly priced for small sizes and since my laptop is my gaming computer with a lot of games on it (solo and mmo) a small drive isn't going to cut it lol. Thanks again for that info ..

jojobean

Hello,

I'm not sure which plugin is causing this issue so I'm going to post it on both of your plugins forums and hopefully between you you can work it out.

Since the last RT Plugin update a few days or so ago (and of course the last LOTRO update that made plugins update the LOC's) there is a strange conflict going on. It's not horrible, but I'm sure it's not good.

When I use the RT Plugin (which is pretty much a daily thing right now)
- Each time I change to a new map when we run our RT Runs, and I click the little green button to locate myself on the map, it opens the Moor Map. This only happens that once upon map change so far.

- Then all is fine until I change maps and do it again for a new map.

I'm sure it's some conflict in the loc's that were updated but don't know which plugin is causing it so please check this and see what's going on. Thanks!

Garan

Hi,
Thanks for reporting this. This is due to how MoorMap behaves when it detects the response to a /loc chat command. This is not actually due to a conflict with RTPlugin or any other plugin, for instance, you could do the same thing by simply walking/riding to a new map and manually typing the "/loc" command in chat. This is instead a bug in MoorMap - it isn't checking the prior display state when switching maps in response to the /loc so when the new map loads it is automatically displaying. This logic was not affected by the change to the /loc command (this bug has apparently been lurking for quite some time), but you may have co-incidentally made a change in your default display options at or near the same time as the /loc change which may have exposed this undesired functionality (bug), I'll have to look into how the various options interact with a reload due to a map change. This particular bug probably crept in back when custom annotations were implemented.

Garan

Since shared annotations were meant to affect both map products, it had to be initially implemented with one of them but with the ability to affect both. I happened to randomly select to initially implement the maintenance of shared annotations in TerrainMap - no real reason, it was just the plugin I was working on at the time so it got top priority for this particular functionality. The intent was always to implement the same capabilities in MoorMap so either plugin could share with users that were using either plugin - i.e. MoorMap to MoorMap, MoorMap to TerrainMap, TerrainMap to MoorMap and/or TerrainMap to TerrainMap. That way it wouldn't matter which plugin you personally chose to maintain your custom annotations, you would be able to share them with everyone (once it was fully implemented).

jojobean

Thanks for clarifying all that, I will definitely try using the setting to sync then. Appreciate the info.

Glad to hear you are aware of it, hopefully it's something fixable.

I do have a question for you. I am wondering why your Moormap (as well as some other plugins that others have developed) are not updated fully in the Plugin Compendium. Is that app going away or is there some other reason we're unaware of that the updates aren't in there? There's a handful of plugins that we use that don't get updated in there and most people don't even realize they can come to the forums here and get the updates, or that there even is an update. Just curious is all.

Garan

I will attempt to explain the process:
When an author publishes a plugin there is a checkbox that determines whether other authors can publish patches for the plugin. Those patches show up in the "Patch & Add-on List" section of the plugin's listing. This is a good feature for plugins that might otherwise become truly out of date when the game updates, it just requires the user to manually check the "Patches and Add-ons List" section.

Compendium uses a feed from lotrointerface.com (anyone with a registered account can set up a feed, on your 'Favorites' page there is an RSS button that will generate an RSS feed of your favorites) to determine the available downloads. I will use Crafting Companion as an example since I know that Thurallor uploaded a patch for the Ironfold crafting tier. If you go to the actual download page you will see the patch in the "Patches and Add-on List" section. The favorites RSS feed for Crafting Companion is:You can see where the feed shows information for the plugin, but does not include the available Patches. It seems Lunarwater is parsing the version info from the title tag, but all of the other info is easily distinguishable. Unfortunately, the patch information is not in the feed, only the info for the plugin itself, so patches are not available to Compendium.

Now, I am a bit confused since you said that Compendium does not show the current version of MoorMap - it should. MoorMap is not set to allow other authors to upload patches since I am still maintaining it so the version on the download page (and thus the RSS feed) is always the latest version. The feed for Compendium should automatically update the available version whenever you restart or refresh the view in Compendium. If you are not seeing the latest version of plugins then it would seem that Compendium is not getting a new RSS feed on your system for some reason - that would be a question for Lunarwater.

jojobean

My mistake on how I asked that last question. Moormap is fine and updated as it should be in the Compendium, but RT Plugin still shows last update in 2015. There's also a Pets plugin by another dev that is not up to date and hasn't been in at least 8 months or more. That's why I was curious. I should have posted that in the RT Plugin forum I guess. Thanks so much for the explanation of how that all works though, that is helpful.

RhaegarG

I am curious about how to bind quick annotation to a quickslot. Every time I try to do it, the game doesn't understand ;loc is a string literal for the plugin's command and just uses current location as an argument instead.

What exactly am I supposed to type in order to have my annotations be visible on the maps?

Here is an example of what is happening:
https://i.imgur.com/A5yRxPR.png

The mod is really cool. I'm new to LOTRO and I am using it to mark all resource nodes, but I really don't want to have to click an icon that I could hotkey instead!

Garan

Ah. This was answered a looooooong time ago somewhere in this thread but is now quite buried. I will add it into the readme.txt file, but for now, here's the original note:
FWIW, resource nodes do not always spawn in the same location and multiple resources can share the same spawn so they may not always be the same type. Noting resource locations is good to determine the general area where a certain type of node can spawn, but it isn't really useful to try to tag them all.

RhaegarG

Thanks for the speedy reply. I also had the idea to use an alias to resolve the problem but made a syntactical error, which prevented it from working at all.

And yeah, I plan to use it to judge density of nodes in an area to determine where I should spend most of my time looking while I gather to level all my crafts since I'm starting over from scratch. Your plugin will help me immensely to get back into the swing of things.

Ohio2Texas

Is there a tutorial on how to build overlays?

Thank you

Garan

There is not yet a tutorial on Overlays. They are explained in the readme.txt file and there are a couple of sample Overlays provided with MoorMap. They are actually incredibly easy to make once you understand the process, the hardest part is creating the actual .tga file. I have found that Paint.net works great as an editor for this as it supports multiple layers in an easy to learn UI (and it's free).

Basically, you pick a map for which you want to create an overlay, then create a screenshot of that map. It is preferable to use the native resolution of the map - all parchment maps are natively 1024x768, the interior maps vary but you can get the map size from the defaults.lua file included with MoorMap (most map entries have a comment with the name of the map). The easiest way to get the screenshot is to change your client resolution to the desired map resolution (full screen) and use the in-game screenshot function. Then open your picture editor and load that screenshot as the main layer for a new image (create image and paste the screenshot). Then add a layer on top of the main layer and draw whatever it is you want the Overlay to display. Once you have drawn your overlay, simply remove the main layer and you are left with just the overlay which you can save as a transparent .tga file. Follow the instructions in the readme.txt to save the file in the Overlays folder and to set up the overlay attributes in the overlay maintenance window in the plugin.

I did not incorporate any mechanism for publishing overlays since they are just an image that can be shared as a zip file with instructions to fill in the overlay maintenance window values. Unfortunately, Turbine's implementation of Lua does not make importing/exporting of user data easy so the simplest mechanism is to let users maintain them.