Heart of Thorns and the tiles service
Tanis.5134:
Will the Heart of Thorns maps be in the tile service at (or before) launch?
Specifically, I’m curious about the desert borderlands tiles, but it would be good to know if the Maguuma maps and new PvP maps will be in there right away.
I know that historically the tile service has been slow to receive updates to existing maps (such as Lion’s Arch), but I’m hoping that new maps will be there!
smiley.1438:
See https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/community/api/New-WvW-Map-API/
Tanis.5134:
Based on Lawton’s response there a month ago, it sounded unlikely, but I’m hoping that has changed.
To support the desert borderlands, I need one of two things, both of which unfortunately look unlikely right now:
A) Confirmation that the tile service will support the desert borderlands. This means that I can rely on the coordinates in the objectives endpoint to place the markers on the maps from the tile service. Yay for not hardcoding and manually finding coordinates!
B) The objectives endpoint to start showing desert borderlands information prior to 10/23, a map of the desert borderlands, and some way of seeing where each marker is supposed to go on the map. All three components are critical because we don’t know the IDs of any of the desert objectives, so thus even if we had a map we would have no idea which objectives on the map line up with which objectives from the API.
If someone else has a clever solution for supporting the desert borderlands using a different strategy, I’d be eager to hear it! Otherwise I will be updating my app this week to notify users that I cannot yet support the new borderlands due to waiting for API data. Then I’ll have an all-nighter on the 23rd to start supporting it (when I would much rather be playing!).
smiley.1438:
I’m pretty sure for A, given that Lawton and Pat find a solution to return the correct marker coordinates.
For B: Why the haste? Sure, it’d be cool to have a site up on launch day, but y’know: when it’s done™.
Tanis.5134:
Why the haste? Sure, it’d be cool to have a site up on launch day, but y’know: when it’s done™.
Because I have users who I know will complain, and I would like my application to continue working anyway.
It will be hard to recover from the wave of negative Play Store reviews that will inevitably come on October 23rd from users who can’t see WvW data any more. I don’t particularly blame them either- if an app I use suddenly stops working, I tend to be annoyed as well.
Lawton Campbell.8517:
A) Confirmation that the tile service will support the desert borderlands. This means that I can rely on the coordinates in the objectives endpoint to place the markers on the maps from the tile service. Yay for not hardcoding and manually finding coordinates!
The tile service will be updated to have the desert borderlands. We’re going to regenerate all the map tiles (finally) once HoT ships. The desert borderlands currently replaces the classic borderlands so it’ll be a bit wonky.
B) The objectives endpoint to start showing desert borderlands information prior to 10/23, a map of the desert borderlands, and some way of seeing where each marker is supposed to go on the map. All three components are critical because we don’t know the IDs of any of the desert objectives, so thus even if we had a map we would have no idea which objectives on the map line up with which objectives from the API.
The new objectives might start showing up the day before, but since the data for them is read from the .dat file (and it isn’t currently in the .dat file) we have to wait until that data gets pushed out to the live environment. I wrote a quick thing with leaflet that grabs all the objectives and plops ’em on the map to verify that the coordinate location fix going out with HoT works, so everything should be fine once we release (famous last words, I know).
I wish the timeline was less all-at-once but that’s just the way of it.
Tanis.5134:
Thanks Lawton, that makes me feel better about shipping everything I’m reasonably confident will work with the new APIs!
The tiles was definitely my biggest remaining concern, so knowing that they’ll be there is fantastic.
You also answered a question I didn’t ask- I will avoid caching the tiles for now since the desert borderlands are replacing the existing ones.