Guild Wars 2

thebigredone.1269:

I agree that we should have more people work together for one awesome project instead of several less awesome ones.

I would love to help out! Have a server available which should be able to handle the development stages at least.

Excellent! I also have a server we can use. I haven’t had time to start working on this yet, but should be able to do so this weekend. I’ve figured out how best to implement an API to request player positions (which third-party tools can then build off), and hope to have a working prototype by the end of the week.

Gronfir.6170:

Had a glimpse at it in the morning, the reference plugin is a bit of an overkill, but it looks fairly simple. Feel free to share your work wish me anytime
As a little side questions is GW2 only mapping your characters position or also those of your teammates? Because as far as I can see every single player needs to adjust the other players relative to him, so you would otherwise need to share the positions between the players.

This position-sharing is exactly the problem I plan to tackle. I have in mind an API where you can request the position of a player, the positions of all players (running the client, ofc) on a map, and the positions of all players with a given tag (which may be a guild tag). Players will optionally be able to make their data password-protected.

Perhaps we could all collaborate on a really great player/event/guild tracking and monitoring system using a combination of this data and the GW2 API. GW2Link looks like a nice client-side tool which we can use, and so the bulk of the work would be in making a nice website/overlay.

edit: Actually, a really nice starting point would be to make an API where you can request the (optionally password-protected) map and coordinates of a named character. If such an API were publicly accessible and fairly standardised (as GW2Link seems to be becoming the standard client-side tool), we’d solve a massive problem of interoperability and data access.

Don’t have time to work on this now, but I’ll look into it later.

multivira.7925:

HAI JDGE

you know we want it.

Definitely gonna have some fun with this and see how we can make it work for us :P

Have you started working on this? A WvW overlay would be a really useful tool, and I’d love to make such a thing.

Here are some thoughts for an initial implementation:

- Website (easier to implement) which shows the map of interest and the positions of all players, updated every second or so.
– Such displays (“rooms”) have a name and are password protected. Players run a small client where they enter the room name and password, and it proceeds to stream their position to the server.
– A player can create a new room by simply joining one which doesn’t yet exist.
– Checkbox in the client which a player can toggle to display a commander icon over their position on the online map (unless commander status could be extracted from the game in an allowed way, somehow)

Further developments after this:

- In-game overlay
– Support for non-WvW maps
– Support for multi-map rooms
– Display events happening on the map

For the client-side part, I’d suggest a C# program, as that’s obviously made for graphical Windows stuff. For the server, Python, as it makes a lot of things very simple – although, the server itself should be fairly small, little more than a registry of player positions with a pretty JavaScript front-end. To encourage participation from more people, development should be done via GitHub, and the de facto styles for each language followed (so, PEP8 for Python).