A question of zone yardage (perhaps calculated by TomTom)

Post by dpcollier123

Hi. In an ongoing project of mine, I have collected the coordinate data for most quests in the game using the lua files within the current version of the WoWPro Guides addon. The goal of this project is to determine what zone has the most clustered questing routes mathematically. This would be via calculating the rough travel length of each route from the guides.

I have one problem: the coordinate data I have is based on a 100x100 grid which disregards what scale each zone map uses. Unfortunately, this makes the data mostly unusable for my project as one coordinate unit could be anywhere from five to twenty yards of travel space in the game. However, I have found this addon's sort-of companion, TomTom, somehow shows the distance to a waypoint in yards fairly accurately at least from a bird's eye view, which is perfect for a rough estimate of clustering objectives.

My main question is this: how might I most easily convert each coordinate from the 100x100 grid system of the zone map's coordinates to in-game yards but within a spreadsheet?

I did some preliminary testing with TomTom by taking my character's current coordinates in the zone and adding a large number to the Y coordinate of that location. This lets me determine how far away my character is from the new waypoint far away from my character, and with this, I divide by the large number I added to the coordinate (around 10000 or so) in order to establish the horizontal scale for that zone. With that horizontal scale, I determine the vertical scale by multiplying by 1.5 (the ratio between horizontal and vertical for most zone maps).

This sort-of works... but it's not easy. At this stage, I would have to go into the game and perform these range-finding tasks for every zone.

What would be simpler is to determine how TomTom calculates the yardage and perform those calculations in my spreadsheet without the game. I haven't yet been able to identify TomTom's method, and I need help.

Is there some other method for converting 100x100 coordinates to in-game yards? Or does someone out there know how TomTom calculates the yards 'til destination for display below the crazy arrow?

Let me know your thoughts and findings either by replying here or sending me a direct message. Thanks in advance.

Post by quthar

TomTom uses a library called HereBeDragons to calculate the distance.
https://www.wowace.com/projects/herebedragons/pages/api/here-be-dragons-2-0
https://github.com/Nevcairiel/HereBeDragons/blob/master/HereBeDragons-2.0.lua

Post by dpcollier123

Thank you for this tip. Unfortunately, I found that the data was all wrapped up in a form that was difficult to export and decipher. So, I returned to a more refined version of my previous range-finding method instead, using a macro and chatcopy within Prat.

Thank you for letting me know about HereBeDragons.

A question of zone yardage (perhaps calculated by TomTom)

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