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Hi.
As a long time player of GW2 I was very much looking forward to the HoT release, and the new legendaries in particular. When I started grinding for crystalline ore, I found myself searching for noxious pod maps on the internetz. Needless to say, the new maps being as complex as they are, the 2D maps offered on Dulfy don't really help much, especially with the post-boss time limit of Dragon's Stand.
So I started looking for a better solution, had a quick glance at Overwolf and some applications there, but they were slow, didn't do anything I was looking for or they didn't work at all and crashed on startup, mostly bringing down the Overwolf framework as well. Being an ex-game developer myself, I found this unacceptable, and looked into creating an overlay of my own. I'll spare you the details but it was not too much of a challenge, and after a couple days of work I could place 3D markers in the world, visible from anywhere on the map, as a sort of tactical display.
I've since expanded the functionality to include a configurable map-timer (set to show the HoT map rotation by default), and a fullscreen crosshair for the cursor, a very handy feature for raids.
I've been using this little tool with a couple friends of mine for a bit over a month now, and found it a most useful addition to the game. With the recent release of wintersday and the DR orphan locations presenting a very similar situation to what originally sparked the idea for my overlay, I thought I'd give this gift to the community. I know there are many people out there who will find it useful.
The archive contains my personal datafile, including all the noxious pod spawn locations I came upon, a lot of Crystalline Cache and Airship Cargo locations as well, and for the theme of the season, all the locations of the 30 orphans in DR, that also track which one you've visited today already. There's also a bit more detailed readme that you should read.
The obvious question: is this against the eula? To the best of my knowledge, no. I only use APIs documented on the wiki (most notably the mumble link API), and all the content that is displayed is user generated, not touching the game at all. Using this falls into the same category as using Overwolf, which is endorsed by Arenanet.
So, without further ado, the link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2h7q6zx6uq7bex/gw2pois.zip?dl=0
A note: the software requires dx11 to render the interface, so be sure to be on windows 7 or later to use it. Also, the UI is not yet interactive with the mouse. Instructions on placing and removing new markers are in the readme.
To satisfy the more wary: a quick screenshot from Dragon's Stand:
FAQ:
- I only see the overlay, but the background is black, the game doesn't show through, what's wrong?
You're probably using the classic windows theme on windows 7, which disables the transparency features that the overlay uses to render the interface. In this case this might not be the overlay you're looking for :)
- How do I turn off the annoying red crosshair following my cursor around?
Go into the ui.xml file and remove the line that says <MouseHighlight id="mousehighlight"/>, then restart the overlay.
- The map timer is partially off-screen or too large, how can I fix that?
Go into the ui.css file and in the #maptimer block change the bottom:700px; line to something like top:50px; you may also want to change the width and height parameters to something smaller if the timer overlay is taking up too much room on your screen. After you made the edits, restart the overlay.
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