Template talk:Map Point Plus

Markers

Tlosk, I noticed if you click the markers on the map, they go to that image's page. Is there any way to have the clickable marker take you an article related to the POI? Just an idea. --Atarax 16:58, 20 January 2009 (CST)

It would certainly be possible to construct a single map that behaved that way. As a template I don't know of a way off hand (because the objects get reused for every page that uses the template. But I seem to remember seeing something like that before, so there's probably some sneaky way of doing it, I'll see if I can find the page where I saw it. On a side note, the 30 points isn't a hard limit, if anyone runs into a situation where you need more let me know. --Tlosk 19:36, 20 January 2009 (CST)

I found the page and it's an extension that lets you hyperlink various areas of an image to other articles or external links, which wouldn't work here. But it turns out that the extension author is a Mediawiki developer and has expanded on the functionality and it will be incorporated into the next quarterly release of the wiki. It lets you add a link= tag to any use of an image. So once it's released and we upgrade it will be very easy to have the points link to articles, etc. --Tlosk 20:15, 20 January 2009 (CST)

Cool, that sounds nice. I thought if they were variables or something, you could just link to the title of the label. When the upgrade comes out that would be nice though :) --Atarax 21:00, 20 January 2009 (CST)

If it were a straight html page it would be easy to do, but the wiki parsing engine only allows a subset of straight html since anyone can edit it. If there were unique images you could just redirect each image to it's respective topic like we do with icons. I'm looking at the source though and it might be possible to apply our own patch that adds the link tags. --Tlosk 05:00, 21 January 2009 (CST)

Point Maps

To: An Adventurer I just finished mocking up a coordinate map for your Points of Interest pages. It takes the coords and generates a map showing the location. Take a look at Template:Map Point and let me know if you'd like anything changed about it. I've also added a format button for it on the swiss tool so you can just copy coords and it will stick the loaded template onto the clipboard to be pasted (the piping is a little awkward to type). --Tlosk 13:04, 17 January 2009 (CST)

Looks like the map point template doesn't handle multiple locations near each other well. I tried to put all the various sites of Edelbar on one map. Its not a really big issue. Edelbar is really one POI, and marking each smaller POI within it doesn't really help. In fact, the only time I can think of where it might be helpful to have multiple points on the same map would be for things like the locations of the shadow spires when there were active, where their current craters are, and other content that is similar and spread throughout dereth, so overlap would not be an issue. Still, one thing that may help is doubling the size of the map, and if possible specifying the point to be displayed on the map. I don't know anything about wiki template creation, but maybe something like this: {{Map Point |43.4|N|27.0|E <<if left blank, it uses the default point - yellow/red star |42.5|N|26.8|E|Blue << uses a marker like standard but with blue tips. Multiple colors available |43.3|N|26.6|E|Small << uses the small yellow dot marker }} Would anything like that be possible? --An Adventurer 19:05, 17 January 2009 (CST)

To: Tlosk Very nice work on those two map templates. When I get back from class tonight I will update the POI template and the few POIs I had redone recently. I can see the map point plus being very useful on many quests like the blighted moarsman temples, ley line nodes, and so on. I think we should begin adding it under the maps section for those types of quests. --An Adventurer 16:29, 20 January 2009 (CST)

I had another idea for map templates. The Map Point Plus reminds me of ACexplorer, and I thought it would be very cool to have our own wiki version of ACexplorer available. However, a single map would either be too small to be useful or too large to fit on most monitors. Then there is the issue with many objects being listed, likely 500+. And finding and editing a single item in that list would be a pain. So I thought of another idea. We take a large map of dereth, at least double the standard MakeMeAMap file size, which is 2041 x 2041. Then we divide it up into maybe a 10x10 or 20x20 grid. Only a single square would be displayed at any time - each square in the grid would have a unique wiki page. For naming of the map image files and the pages themselves, we could use a number/letter grid system (1A, 14F, etc) or use the map coordinates, using the NW corner coords as the name. Each square would then be very similar to the Map Point Plus template. There would be multiple icons to choose from, etc. If possible, clicking on the point would redirect to its page. If not links to all points on the map can be listed below. For navigation, there would be options to move one grid N, S, E, or W, as well as return to an index. The index would be rather simple to create. We just take a smaller size image of each square, which redirects to the square's page, and we place these thumbnails into a table in the correct order to construct the full map. I don't know anything about wiki template construction, but I imagine the template would look something like this: {{Dereth Grid | Current = 10N, 30W | North = 20N, 30W | South = 0N, 30W | East = 10N, 20W | West = 10N, 40W | <Coords> | <N or S> | <Coords> | <E or W> | <Marker> | <Caption> | <Coords> | <N or S> | <Coords> | <E or W> | <Marker> | <Caption> | <Coords> | <N or S> | <Coords> | <E or W> | <Marker> | <Caption> }} Would something like this be possible with what you know about wiki templates? --An Adventurer 21:03, 20 January 2009 (CST)