Routes: Official Thread

[Xinhuan]

Routes is now available on

http://www.wowace.com/projects/routes/
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-a...ls/routes.aspx
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...01-Routes.html

Description:
This is the Ace3 rewrite of Cartographer_Routes. It will create efficient routes of selected nodes (such as herbs and ore) and draw them on your minimap/world map/zone map so that you can farm your gold faster.

It uses the Ant Colony Optimization algorithms to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem. During route optimization, you have the option to do this in the foreground (your wow will hang until completion), or do this in the background (using coroutines).



What Routes does better than Cartographer_Routes:
- It is not dependent on Rock, Cartographer or any map addon.
- We got rid of the Tourist and Graph library dependencies.
- It no longer uses any Babble libraries because they are no longer necessary. We now rely on the addons supplying us the node and zone data directly.
- It supports creating routes using data from Cartographer_<Prof>, GatherMate and Gatherer
- It has been slightly redesigned to allow extension so that any addon can supply nodes data for creating routes with. This means in the future, it will be possible to make routes with questing data once the relevant plugin files are written for it.
- The configuration and route creation is a lot more robust, shows more information per route, and comes with a FAQ.
- TomTom support is added, on top of Cartographer_Waypoints.
- Full in-game help file and FAQ, guiding you step by step on what to do!

New Features
- Routes now has a Node Clustering feature which allows you to take a 567 node route and collapse it into a 196 node route by taking nodes that are near each other within a user-specified radius and turning it into a single travel point.

- Routes now has Taboo Regions. This is a feature where you can define areas (polygons of any shape/size) which you are not interested in by dragging/drawing them out on your map. These areas are called Taboo Regions. When you attach a Taboo Region to a route, that route will totally ignore that specified region, as though no nodes exist in those regions. Furthermore, when you re-optimize the route, we'll even make the route NOT fly/cut through any of the taboo regions! (Yes, we're that good.)

- Routes now allows you to manually edit routes. This allows you to take an existing non-clustered route and drag/create/delete travel points as you so desire, and then save the route. You can then reoptimize the route if you want, but chances are you don't. You can also now create an bare 3-point route as a starting point for creating your own route.
- HandyNotes is now supported.

- Taboo/route editing now uses the simple Google Maps style of creating regions/routes.


The coordinate system used is not compatible with Cartographer_Routes, so you can't port your routes over. Just recreate them, takes only a few minutes.



I highly recommend Mapster + GatherMate + Routes as a package.
The GatherMate thread is at http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=10990
The Mapster thread is at http://www.wowace.com/forums/index.php?topic=11282.0


Screenshots
Extreme example of how to use taboo regions
http://grum.nl/WoWScrnShot_020908_125251.jpg

Minimap, Zone map and Cartographer_Waypoints integration
http://pachome2.pacific.net.sg/~xinhuan/wow/temp.jpg

Screenshot of a route containing every node in SMV (654 nodes)
http://pachome2.pacific.net.sg/~xinhuan/wow/temp3.jpg

Screenshot of the same route after clustering at 100 yards (196 nodes)
http://pachome2.pacific.net.sg/~xinhuan/wow/temp5.jpg

Screenshot of a route containing just a few specific herbs
http://forums.wowace.com/attachment....2&d=1222822319


FuBar_RoutesFu

This plugin now works with both Routes and Cartographer_Routes. If both are present and loaded (why would you do this??), Routes takes priority. This plugin offers a quick and easy way to toggle the visibility of any routes in the current zone (if you use Auto Show/Hide, then those settings determine visibility when shown), and also offers quick access to start/stop Cartographer_Waypoints integration (if you have it installed).


KNOWN ISSUES:
- Routes currently does not auto add/delete nodes when used with Gatherer. This is because Gatherer does not supply any callbacks for node additions/deletions. Same applies to HandyNotes.
- The built-in Cartographer_Waypoints support will only work on the Rock version of Cartographer. Not the Ace2 override once. (NOT fixing this one)



Future Plans
- There might be plans to support cross-zone routes in the far flung future, but don't count on it.

[Stavmar]

Looking forward to using a mod designed by one of the best authors around.

Thanks for continuing your efforts Xinhuan!

[OttoDeFe]

Don't look forward to...

just do...

It's sweet...

[mulepton]

- It uses Ace3 for less overhead and performance.

Seeing as this was stated in the GatherMate thread as well - before making it an official Ace2 slogan, you might reword it, right now it implies (at least to me) that it uses Ace3 for less performance.
Anyway, I'll gladly give both this and GatherMate a tryout.

Slightly offtopic, but as a tie-in - if I wanted to replace Cart's other two main features, namely waypoints and instance loot information, what would be the recommendations? AtlasLoot and TomTom?

[Xinhuan]

Yes and yes.

and reworded that to "more performance".

[British]

Is it possible to track two types of nodes at a time ?
And the case being, are they... blended (words fail me for a better explanation) ?

[Terak]

Ok Works quite well would be nice to have a fubar plug in to save typing /routes for quick access

[Phanx]

Originally Posted by Xinhuan

- The built-in Cartographer_Waypoints support will only work on the Rock version of Cartographer. Not the Ace2 override once. (NOT fixing this one)

As a user of the Ace2 Cartographer, I'm curious as to why this is. Are there such major incompatibilities between the Ace2 and Rock versions of Cartographer_Waypoints, or is it just more a case of not wanting to spend the time adding the support?

[Xinhuan]

Originally Posted by Phanx

As a user of the Ace2 Cartographer, I'm curious as to why this is. Are there such major incompatibilities between the Ace2 and Rock versions of Cartographer_Waypoints, or is it just more a case of not wanting to spend the time adding the support?

I made extensive code upgrades to Cartographer_Waypoints in order to reduce memory use, and corrected a few major bugs in it, such as the "waypointhit" event never firing due to code logic, which meant in the old Ace2 version, an addon listening to this event would never hear it in order to insert the next waypoint in the route when reaching the current waypoint.

Another change I made was to allow a calling addon to change the "waypoint hit distance" to be considered as having reached the waypoint

Another change I made was that the original code didn't have a :OnDisable() at all, so the module couldn't even be turned off, and toggling it just churned out huge amounts of garbage and closures in the :OnEnable()

These updates were not backported to the Ace2 version, and I am not responsible for maintaining the Ace2 version of Cartographer and its modules.

[Ammo]

GIve TomTom waypoints support

-Ammo