[Maps API] .zip'd tiles possible?
smiley.1438:
First of all: maps API – pure awsomeness – thanks for that one!
Would it be possible to zip the map tiles and have them as a seperate download? This would make life easier for developers on a slow internet connection (like me… coughs)
Cliff Spradlin.3512:
First of all: maps API – pure awsomeness – thanks for that one!
Would it be possible to zip the map tiles and have them as a seperate download? This would make life easier for developers on a slow internet connection (like me… coughs)
What is your use-case for wanting to download all of the tiles vs. just referencing our servers directly?
Our servers will stay up to date with the latest map changes, etc.
smiley.1438:
It’s just for development purposes – having the tiles on localhost would keep me sane when i’m reloading my local dev page – i’m on a 384kbit connection, so it would take ages to reload and zoom etc… from a remote server.
Cliff Spradlin.3512:
It’s just for development purposes – having the tiles on localhost would keep me sane when i’m reloading my local dev page – i’m on a 384kbit connection, so it would take ages to reload and zoom etc… from a remote server.
I think you’d find it would take forever to download a zip file too — the total size of the maps is more than 5 GB, and it will likely grow in size over time.
The map tiles have cache headers, so you shouldn’t be having to download the tiles each time you reload the page.
smiley.1438:
Hmm, 5G is huge, yes. :o
So i’ll give remote a try… Hand me some tranquilizers…
Polarbear.5896:
How about a reasonably official tool, to extract and assemble the uncompressed map tiles out of the DAT file? Currently need to use Photoshop and hand assembly. As a personal hobby, I like to assemble the maps for games, did it for the first Guild Wars, as well as WoW and all its expansions. Memory, disk space, and bandwidth are no issue for me either.
multivira.7925:
How about a reasonably official tool, to extract and assemble the uncompressed map tiles out of the DAT file? Currently need to use Photoshop and hand assembly. As a personal hobby, I like to assemble the maps for games, did it for the first Guild Wars, as well as WoW and all its expansions. Memory, disk space, and bandwidth are no issue for me either.
Aren’t the ones you can get from the zoomed API good enough? Haven’t looked into the DAT file an awful lot so can’t really say if they’re different :P
Dr Ishmael.9685:
The official map tile service is not the same as the Gw2.dat textures. The textures are split between background and foreground – bg being the base map that you see prior to discovering a zone/area, fg being the detail that appears when you discover it. The fg textures have some odd stuff on them outside of zone boundaries, but this gets masked out when the game composites the fg onto the bg.
By contrast, the map tile service presents a complete composite map.
I’ve been able to extract the map textures from Gw2.dat and use the corresponding PIMG (paged image) metadata files to reconstruct complete maps, but I never figured out how the masking worked.
ozma.3498:
I’ve been able to extract the map textures from Gw2.dat and use the corresponding PIMG (paged image) metadata files to reconstruct complete maps, but I never figured out how the masking worked.
The map textures from the DAT look normal if you delete the alpha channel from the image (at least in the ones I experimented with).
Polarbear.5896:
I wouldn’t want to use the served maps because they are JPEG compressed. Currently I have to extract the map textures and go through several steps to convert them into a workable format(24bit non-alpha bitmap), and I don’t have the knowledge to sort out the mostly random numbering system that they are given, so I manually have to sort through several thousand textures to find updated ones, paste them into Photoshop and assemble them as a massive file. that’s why I would totally be happy with something more official to even convert them properly into say a bitmap file.
Dr Ishmael.9685:
I’ve been able to extract the map textures from Gw2.dat and use the corresponding PIMG (paged image) metadata files to reconstruct complete maps, but I never figured out how the masking worked.
The map textures from the DAT look normal if you delete the alpha channel from the image (at least in the ones I experimented with).
I know about the alpha channel, that’s not what I was talking about. Check file ID 474252: http://i.imgur.com/whFjBog.png (last time I extracted these was last December, so it may look different now).
Lil Puppy.5216:
That portion of the map doesn’t exist in the world, that’s why it looks like that.
Dr Ishmael.9685:
That portion of the map doesn’t exist in the world, that’s why it looks like that.
Exactly. It’s the “doesn’t exist in the world” part that I didn’t know how to process. If you re-read what I wrote:
The fg textures have some odd stuff on them outside of zone boundaries, but this gets masked out when the game composites the fg onto the bg.
[…]
I never figured out how the masking worked.