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New WoW Map Uses Google Local API 58

Lord Satri writes "The WarCry Network lead me to the world's only ultra-high resolution map of the World of Warcraft universe. From WarCry: 'The site leverages the powerful Google Maps API to create a revolutionary scaled map with detail and precision never before seen on the Internet. A user can display any number of ore, herbs, or, treasure. Currently there are more than 15,000 resources in the database. All this, on one easy to navigate page.'"
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New WoW Map Uses Google Local API

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  • Site FARK'd (Score:3, Informative)

    by llamalicious ( 448215 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:46PM (#14599748) Journal
    Site was FARK'd [fark.com] before it could be slashdotted (at least the map images are).
    Good luck trying to view anything now.
    • Re:Site FARK'd (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Redundant? This was the second post on the article.

      Holy jeebus, meta-mods start your engines!
  • mapwow.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by MapWoW.com ( 950670 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:46PM (#14599749) Homepage
    Thanks for the /.! We just got digged and then farked. We've disabled all dynamic php content, so much of the useful functionality isn't available right now. If you want to see how useful the site is normally, please feel free to bookmark/delicious the site and come back tomorrow. :)

    The site is up for now, let's see how we last!

    -- MapWoW.com Team
    • Re:mapwow.com (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TeamSPAM ( 166583 )

      This looks pretty cool. I didn't think you could use alternate maps with the Google Map API. I would love to do something similar for the BattleTech Universe. Would you mind giving pointers on how to get your own map setup for this?

      P.S. Any other BTech players interested in trying to develop a Google Map for the Inner Sphere?

      • Re:mapwow.com (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KiloByte ( 825081 )
        Well, the Google Map API isn't that complex.

        I've once created a simpler thing for my T2T map page [angband.pl] -- it doesn't have zoom and uses only one image instead of a bunch dynamically fetched, but generally it works in a similar way. And I'm a complete beginner in JS.

        I would say, an experienced programmer would be able to recreate the API in less than a week. It's not the complexity what is cool -- it is the idea.
        • I developered the IS Atlas [teamspam.net] and along with help from another keep the data updated. If you have the SVG plugin, you can see the maps [teamspam.net] that I made on the site. Similar to those maps, I would like to have the ability to zoom in/out as well making the map point links to the planet's info.

          • Hmm... SVG... it would be just _great_, except for the fact that most people use a certain poor excuse for a browser.

            Just a technical note: why would your page force people to get a SVG plugin if most modern browsers already can handle it natively?
            • Mostly because I wrote the code about 2 years ago and have not paid much attention to SVG since then. A quick google and I found out [mozilla.org] that I was using the wrong content type in the embed tag. The map [teamspam.net] should now work just fine in Firefox 1.5.

    • I would also be very interested in how you used external maps with the google API
      • You'll get lots of info by looking at the page source. For example, this is in the code:

        (Sorry, I had to remove the formatting to get around the slashdot whitespace filter)

        yourMapType.getTileURL = function (x, y, zoom){
        if (zoom>13) {return "http://mapwow.com:4382/gmap/zoom_in.jpg";}
        else if ( (x0) || (y0)) {return "http://mapwow.com:4382/gmap/water.jpg";}
        else {return "http://mapwow.com:4382/gmap/zoom"+zoom+"maps/"+x+ "_"+y+"_"+zoom+".jpg";}
    • Well if there is any way possible to get "better" hosting and add back in the herb/ore/etc information, that would be great. This is something that is really _THAT_GOOD_ and with about 5 million subscribers, the WoW fans around the world will flock to this place if they knew it existed.
    • Nice idea. I don't like the gold selling ads though, and there's also an in-game mod named Yatlas that does something similar.
      • Re:mapwow.com (Score:3, Informative)

        by Ryan Amos ( 16972 )
        The gold selling ads are from AdWords. One of the few profitable businesses built around WoW (other than selling boxed copies of the game itself) is selling gold. Gold probably has a higher profit margin than selling the game. So obviously gold sellers are going to pay the most for the keyword "World of Warcraft." It sucks, but these guys have to pay for hosting somehow.

        Preventing gold selling in an MMO is next to impossible anyway, and WoW is far better at mitigating its effects than any other MMO I've pla
    • The site is up for now, let's see how we last!

      Yeah, just wait until Blizzard sees you have used their graphics ;-)
  • by Yst ( 936212 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:51PM (#14599780)
    The site leverages the powerful Google Maps API to create a revolutionary scaled map with detail and precision never before seen on the Internet.

    But does it leverage the power of insufferable marketing lingo to pro-actively develop a synergistic user-oriented information transaction? Yes, yes, I think it does.

  • No (Score:5, Funny)

    by lbmouse ( 473316 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:54PM (#14599802) Homepage
    '... All this, on one easy to navigate page.'

    All this, on one smoking server.
  • Hmm.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by SeekerDarksteel ( 896422 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @12:55PM (#14599809)
    Resources, herbs, thats great...but what I really want to know is...

    Can I zoom in on Darnassus to look down Night Elfs' shirts?
  • Wonderful. Next, could we have high-resolution maps of instances?

    -Loyal
  • CL (Score:5, Funny)

    by photojunkie ( 903749 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:13PM (#14599948) Homepage
    "Gnomish Spy Satellite" Crafter Lvl: 335
  • Is it just me, or does the main continent look like a big chicken head, red dangly thing under the beak and all?
    • It was just you, but now I see it too.

      In fact, I can't stop seeing it that way.

      Thanks!
    • If you zoom way out, you'll see that there are actually 2 continents.

      The resemblance of the continent on the right to North and South Korea is just too much to be coincidence. It even has a DMZ. (a very straight waterway between North and South.

      Not being a WoW player, I have no idea of the place's name.

  • I wonder if even Google's servers could've handled the load fired at that poor site. Then again, I wonder what they were thinking, to make a WoW interactive app, post it on the internet, and then allow just everyone to go use it. Of course, now that all the WoW people know about it, it'll just be slammed forever. I'd love to see a graph of their traffic:
    satuday: 9 hits
    sunday: 10 hits
    monday: 9999999 hits
    tuesday: 999999 hits
    wednesday: 9999 hits + holding, ka BOOM! goes the server...

    • The site got on Digg, Fark.com and /. all within the same 2-3 days. I went to it sunday following a link from someone in WOW, and they already had a "help us pay our bandwidth" banner, without having even been hit yet. Hopefully the exposure will produce someone who want to host them...
  • Donate (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Onan ( 25162 ) on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:22PM (#14600026)

    If this seems like a cool idea, and something that you're glad someone did, give 'em a few bucks through that donation link on the right. Encouraging and facilitating nifty things helps produce future nifty things.

    (And no, I'm not affiliated with the creators or ISP here. Just sayin'.)

    • Re:Donate (Score:3, Informative)

      by dswensen ( 252552 ) *
      This is Slashdot, we'd much rather sneer at them derisively for having too much time on their hands and / or no girlfriends (actual facts concerning social or sex life notwithstanding).
  • by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Monday January 30, 2006 @01:42PM (#14600212) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone considered the legal ramifications of them ripping media from the game and distributing it online? Unless I am mistaken, this map is generated from the minimap's textures. Problems arose in the same sort of online maps for other games (EQ, DAOC, AO).
  • I found the face on Mars! Okay, so it's a different face, but you know what I mean. It's in the Eastern kindgom, just south of the big ice area and north of a pentacle island in the middle of some magma. You can see it best at the second or third highest zoom level.

    If that site had bookmarking, I'd post a link.

    • Re:Face on Mars (Score:3, Informative)

      by MapWoW.com ( 950670 )
      The site does have bookmarking, but it's half-way disabled for now because of the load.

      To use the bookmarking, first scroll to your face on mars or where-ever. Then at the bottom of the right-hand menu, you'll see a small "Link to this Location" link. Copy the URL for this link (vis right-clicking, clicking on the URL, or reading the Ethereal dump). Once the site is back to using PHP, then this link will take you to the location you visited. For example, this is the future-link to Darnassus:

      http://mapwo [mapwow.com]

    • For anyone in WoW, the face he's talking about is in the Searing Gorge. Go to the blocked off cave (Blackchar Cave) in the extreme southwest of Searing Gorge, and look at your minimap.

  • Ok so the next question is, Who wants to do this for Guild Wars?

    ..Says the lazy guy that doesnt want to take the time
    • I was thinking about doing this for Guild Wars months ago, but I don't have the time or the knowledge/skill needed. I have a friend who has the knowledge/skill who was willing to help, but he doesn't have time for it either, so it never got done.
  • ...WoW Cartographe [scribe.free.fr]. French-made tool with fabutastic feature set.
  • Er, I guess it could be flying directions.

    I should be able to click on one place, then click on another (after specifing alliance or horde), and it should show me the Boat/Zepplin/Flight paths to most efficiently get from one place to another. :-)
  • Is it just me, or does that map look a LOT like Asheron's Call?
  • Something moderately similar to this was made awhile back, and a friend of mine clued me into it about a month or two ago. Don't ask me where it came from, or anything else about it, really... just, showing.

    http://www.kaldorei.com/worldmap/ [kaldorei.com]

    Granted, it's not ultra high resolution, but it was the best I'd seen before this.

  • They got Hygel and got it right, at this time the only way to get into that area is on a self run server. But alas they did not find GM island... Also looks like pre patch 1.4 the AQ section has more stuff in it now and extends farther east. Hacked server, but missed one crucial location.

Every cloud has a silver lining; you should have sold it, and bought titanium.

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