Couple of information on how this new profession is going to work has been released a few days ago and it seems it is now available for testing on the Beta realm.
I watched a video on how to perform a survey posted on MMO-Champ.
This works mostly via trial and error by summoning an object, which points in a certain direction (looks like a spy glass) with a light bulb indicator (red= far away, yellow = getting closer, green = pretty damn close).
Once you are close to the artifact and hit the survey button, it'll spawn and you can loot it.
This trial and error method makes it a little bit time consuming.
Ghostcrawler already talked about the two main strategies:
There are two main strategies to surveying. You can attempt to triangulate by moving around the outer edge of a digsite. (Like quest blobs, the digsites are not necessarily circular.) Other players just keep surveying, heading in the direction the tool points until they strike paydirt.
The idea for this addon relies on the first strategy.
Suggestions for the addon will be in green (Note that I am not yet very familiar with methods on which data can be actually retrieved via AddOns, so some suggestions might not work) :
What is known about Archeology:
- On the continental overview map you will see dig sites via an icon in each respective zone, which are available to you. They are random for each character and based on your current skill level
Suggestion: Listing all available dig sites on the UI in a quest watcher/tracker style by fetching the zone names which contain such an icon.
- Going to a zone with a dig site will show you a red area where the artifact can be retrieved only. Perhaps it is possible to see this red area when you are in another zone and just open the respective zone map (e.g. Standing in Durotar and looking at Northern Barrens map; needs confirmation though, cannot test this by myself.)
- Hitting the Survey Button will spawn the survey tool object which behaves as mentioned earlier (Here the core task of the addon will come into effect. ).
Fetch the coordinates of you/survey tool.
Fetch the facing of the object (This what is most important and needs testing if Blizzard provides data for the facing of this survey tool!)
Based on the coordinates and orientation, draw a straight line on the zone map, which stops at the dig site border (needs to be found out, if this is possible; a way to perhaps check this would be to see if an event is thrown by moving the cursor over the dig site on the zone map)
Repeat this step at different points within the dig site to determine the position of the hidden artifact.
Perhaps it is possible to determine the intersection between the lines by following the coordinates of each drawn line. But I can't say for sure, as I am not yet too familiar with coding.
If possible, show an arrow on the interface which points to the intersection coordinates.
What also needs to be checked is, if the position of the artifact will remain the same, whenever RNG decides that you get a previously visited dig site again or another player (I believe there is only a predefined amount and position of dig sites in each zone; needs confirmation though), which you already have looted. If that's the case looted artifacts can be saved in a database similar to GatherMate and distributed.
[color=green][LIST]
[*]Fetch the coordinates of you/survey tool.
[*]Fetch the facing of the object ([B]This what is most important and needs testing if Blizzard provides data for the facing of this survey tool![/B])
[/color]
You can't have any of these. However you could have the user turn in the right direction and then press a keybinding to record his position and facing.
What also needs to be checked is, if the position of the artifact will remain the same, whenever RNG decides that you get a previously visited dig site again or another player (I believe there is only a predefined amount and position of dig sites in each zone; needs confirmation though), which you already have looted. If that's the case looted artifacts can be saved in a database similar to GatherMate and distributed.
I believe there is a finite list of dig sites on each continent. I'm not sure this the case of the fragments within each sites. Moreover, the first or two surveys seemed to give random indications as if the fragment was moving.
List tags are malformed.
Thought about the manual character orientation but wanted to check out, if the survey tools would provide that data to get exact triangulation results. Feared that it won't, but I was hoping^^.
For the manual method I think it would be good to use an angular view instead of a direct line for each point to account for the slight inaccuracy of human input so the intersection provides a small area instead of a point.
But perhaps that *might* be negligible, if in the green zone the artifact is in has no fixed X,Y coordinate but rather can be dug up in a small area.
We have determined roughly that when the survey tool is red, the arc of the angle the instrument will point towards the artifact fragment is about 90 degrees. When the instrument is yellow, this arc of angle is about 65 degrees. And when its green, its even smaller.
So what you really need to do is really just stand at a single spot, and spam survey about 5-10 times, determine the extreme ends of the arc of angle (say you determined the left and right most ends of the 90 degrees), and go towards the center of the arc in a straight line - the artifact is there.
Red is > 60 yards, yellow is > 30 yards, and green is less than 30 yards.
I know triangulation is the first thing that always comes to everyone's minds, but honestly, triangulation is going to be the slowest thing you can do to reach an artifact due to the 90 degrees arc of inaccuracy.
Yes, an addon can be written for triangulation, but we (we being the team that is making GatherMate2) think its not the best way. However, we do think there's only a limited number of positions artifact fragments can spawn from initial data and this combined information can be useful.
Seems like most of the time you would be better off just surveying two or three times without any form of triangulation and without surveying the same spot ten times to find the exact line.
Shouldn't they be given their own category? Artifacts?
I second this suggestion. Treasure should be chests and whatever else it is on Live. Having a separate Artifacts category would mean that we could import the nodes if we wanted to and could only show the minimap circles if we actually had the profession.
GatherMAte2 now has full archaeology support, and its a seperate tracking from treasure. right now its a shovel icon on the map, if you got a better one, lemme know.
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I watched a video on how to perform a survey posted on MMO-Champ.
This works mostly via trial and error by summoning an object, which points in a certain direction (looks like a spy glass) with a light bulb indicator (red= far away, yellow = getting closer, green = pretty damn close).
Once you are close to the artifact and hit the survey button, it'll spawn and you can loot it.
This trial and error method makes it a little bit time consuming.
Ghostcrawler already talked about the two main strategies:
The idea for this addon relies on the first strategy.
Suggestions for the addon will be in green (Note that I am not yet very familiar with methods on which data can be actually retrieved via AddOns, so some suggestions might not work) :
What is known about Archeology:
- On the continental overview map you will see dig sites via an icon in each respective zone, which are available to you. They are random for each character and based on your current skill level
- Suggestion: Listing all available dig sites on the UI in a quest watcher/tracker style by fetching the zone names which contain such an icon.
- Going to a zone with a dig site will show you a red area where the artifact can be retrieved only. Perhaps it is possible to see this red area when you are in another zone and just open the respective zone map (e.g. Standing in Durotar and looking at Northern Barrens map; needs confirmation though, cannot test this by myself.)- Hitting the Survey Button will spawn the survey tool object which behaves as mentioned earlier (Here the core task of the addon will come into effect. ).
Perhaps it is possible to determine the intersection between the lines by following the coordinates of each drawn line. But I can't say for sure, as I am not yet too familiar with coding.
What also needs to be checked is, if the position of the artifact will remain the same, whenever RNG decides that you get a previously visited dig site again or another player (I believe there is only a predefined amount and position of dig sites in each zone; needs confirmation though), which you already have looted. If that's the case looted artifacts can be saved in a database similar to GatherMate and distributed.
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Curse PremiumYou can't have any of these. However you could have the user turn in the right direction and then press a keybinding to record his position and facing.
I believe there is a finite list of dig sites on each continent. I'm not sure this the case of the fragments within each sites. Moreover, the first or two surveys seemed to give random indications as if the fragment was moving.
List tags are malformed.
For the manual method I think it would be good to use an angular view instead of a direct line for each point to account for the slight inaccuracy of human input so the intersection provides a small area instead of a point.
But perhaps that *might* be negligible, if in the green zone the artifact is in has no fixed X,Y coordinate but rather can be dug up in a small area.
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Curse PremiumWe have determined roughly that when the survey tool is red, the arc of the angle the instrument will point towards the artifact fragment is about 90 degrees. When the instrument is yellow, this arc of angle is about 65 degrees. And when its green, its even smaller.
So what you really need to do is really just stand at a single spot, and spam survey about 5-10 times, determine the extreme ends of the arc of angle (say you determined the left and right most ends of the 90 degrees), and go towards the center of the arc in a straight line - the artifact is there.
Red is > 60 yards, yellow is > 30 yards, and green is less than 30 yards.
I know triangulation is the first thing that always comes to everyone's minds, but honestly, triangulation is going to be the slowest thing you can do to reach an artifact due to the 90 degrees arc of inaccuracy.
Yes, an addon can be written for triangulation, but we (we being the team that is making GatherMate2) think its not the best way. However, we do think there's only a limited number of positions artifact fragments can spawn from initial data and this combined information can be useful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVZ9pkD6-v8
Seems like most of the time you would be better off just surveying two or three times without any form of triangulation and without surveying the same spot ten times to find the exact line.
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Curse PremiumHe's using about an average of 4-6 digs to reach each fragment, and that's just simply by moving in the general direction pointed by the instrument.
Edit: To add more comments.
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Curse PremiumShouldn't they be given their own category? Artifacts?
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Curse PremiumI second this suggestion. Treasure should be chests and whatever else it is on Live. Having a separate Artifacts category would mean that we could import the nodes if we wanted to and could only show the minimap circles if we actually had the profession.