LotroMaps is currently a demo, or poof of concept if you will, showing the potential of a zone-based Google Maps style map plugin. Although there are serious plans to do whatever possible for this plugin to reach its potential, there are a couple of LotRO related limitations that could possibly reduce/eliminate it's feasibility in the eyes of some.

For that reason, I am releasing this as not only a preview, but to possibly gauge interest in the project - to see how many people believe the potential makes up for such drawbacks. If such interest is there, this project will move forward - perhaps influencing Turbine to address these limitations in the process.

Limitations


Due to LotRO's method of caching UI images - including those loaded via the API, every tile loaded will remain in memory.

Although the "load on demand" nature of a Google Maps style map certainly reduces the amount of tiles loaded, and under normal use - the amount of memory used should not be substantial, if you start browsing every tile, in both parchment and terrain modes, at the highest zoom level, you will have a noticeable increase in memory usage. Repeating that for multiple zones could result in running out of memory. Hopefully, at some point Turbine gives us the ability to clear this cache, but for now - you have been warned.

Installation

Simply extract the zip file to your Plugins folder

Use

After you're in the game, type the following in your chat window

/plugins load lotromaps


You will see a nearly transparent tab (similar to the chat window tabs) with the word "LotROMaps" going down the side. Clicking on this tab will cause the map to slide out, clicking again will return it to its original position

Everything else should be straight forward if you've ever used Google Maps before.

Known Issues

Nada