QuestHelper

Even in Wrath Beta, fish is not a vegetable.

What It Does

Compiles a list of waypoints for the quests in your quest log, and sorts them so as to minimize the distance between them, and so that they happen in the correct order.

Which is to say, it tells you how to complete all your quests while walking as little as possible.

Project Status

0.59 released. Again, no interesting new features, this continues to be Bugfix Central.

This version will work with both Wrath and Burning Crusade, it's the same package, just download it and it will work. Note that not all Burning Crusade quests may be in the database - this stuff is collected by you guys, and I rely on you submitting your collected data. ("/qh submit" for submission instructions, and thanks!)

FAQ

It doesn't work. What can I do?

Three things. First, if there's a major issue with QuestHelper, you can type "/qh error" and it will show you the first error it ran into. If you post that in the comments here, or open a ticket, I may be able to help you.

If it just doesn't work, "/qh hardreset" will reset all your accumulated data and preferences, hopefully getting rid of weird problems. If you still can't see the quest tracker, "/qh treset" will try to force it into a visible position on your screen. The combination of these two fixes most problems.

If neither of those help, disable your other plugins as a test - there are known incompatibilities with some plugins (Cartographer 3 is the one I know of the best, though if you narrow it does to any others, please let me know.)

What can I do about my framerate?

If you have any addons that enabled CPU profiling, turn it off, it greatly increases the amount of work WoW has to do. The command to do that is:

/console set scriptProfile 0

/console reloadui

If that doesn't make a difference for you, there's a slash command, /qh perf, that can scale the amount of work QuestHelper does per frame. Example:

/qh perf 50%

What can I do about my memory?

QuestHelper instrinsically uses a chunk of RAM. You can expect 25m-30m of usage. I'll reduce this when I can, but then I'll also probably increase it again as I add more data. There's really not a lot you can do about this.

Why aren't my quests showing up?

/qh hidden will list everything that isn't being shown, along with the reason for it being hidden.

If I send you my data, should I delete my copy?

It would be appreciated, since that way my gmail account doesn't fill up as quickly. It's not mandatory.

The file contains a random string created the first time you use QuestHelper so that I can easily find different versions of the same file and ignore all but the most recent.

How can I get rid of that arrow over my character's head?

/qh cartwp will hide the arrow. If you'd rather move it instead, you can drag it around by left clicking. . . unless it's been locked, in which case right click on it and unlock it first.

How do get that 3D arrow pointing where to go?

That arrow is part of Cartographer Waypoints. It should appear automatically as long as Cartographer is installed and running, and you haven't turned off that feature.

If you have TomTom installed, you can have TomTom display your waypoint arrow instead. Again, it should just work, unless you've disabled it.

The Icons on my map are huge! How can anyone see anything?

If you find the icons are too big for you, you may enter /qh scale X%, replacing X with some reasonable scale. I'd start with 80%, depending on how that looks you can try bigger or smaller numbers.

Future Releases

Everything in here is planned and not guaranteed. Do not yell at me if things get delayed or shuffled. Pushing versions back happens extremely frequently if unexpected new bugs crop up. You may also notice there are no dates listed - that's intentional, if I knew how long it would be I'd have fixed it by now. This is just to give you an idea of what my next major plans are.

I'm currently planning on a feature freeze and bug fix. Too many bugs, too many annoying exceptions being thrown. We'll get back to new features once I'm not being bombarded with "I did something reasonable and QuestHelper melted" comments.

0.59+: Bug cleaning time!

0.thefuture: Improved data gathering code

0.eventually: Route system rewrite

0.whoknows: Flying mount support (this will take longer than you expect)

Author(s)

ZorbaTHut is the new maintainer of this project, and hopes that he will bludgeon it into shape and continue maintenance well through Wrath. In other words, any bugs after 0.49 are his fault.

Smariot is the original developer of the package.

Nesher has been mucking around with the code and so probably deserves to be mentioned.

Vipersniper has fiddled a little and probably does not ;-).

How to avoid getting your account stolen.

• AddOns don't require you to install or run anything, aside from whatever program you use to extract their files. Don't ever run anything you find inside an archive.
• Make sure your web browser is up to date. Bugs can be exploited to install things on your computer without any confirmation or acknowledgment.
• If a web page asks you to install anything, don't. The only two extra things a web page might legitimately need are JavaScript and Flash, which you more than likely already have.
• Make sure the virus definitions for your virus scanner are up to date, and scan the files you download with a virus scanner.
• If you're connected directly to the internet, make sure you have a firewall of some kind. If you have a router or other device that does network address translation, these often work well in place of a firewall, since people on the internet trying to connect to your computer will end up connecting to the router instead, unless you set up DMZ or port forwarding.
• These files are often found inside AddOns, and should be completely safe:
  • toc, xml, lua: These files contain text which you can view in a text editor, and are instructions for your WoW Client to interpret. They are executed by Warcraft in a sandbox environment, and so shouldn't be able to do anything dangerous.
  • tga, blp: These are 2D images.
  • m2: These are 3D models, although they're sometimes used for 2D things like arrows because it makes rotation easier.
  • wav, mp3: These are sound files.
  • avi: Video. Believe it or not, AddOns can play video, although it's extremely rare.
  • txt: This is text intended to be read by humans. Likely you or other AddOn developers.
• If you find any other types of files, then you should be suspicious. The following files in particular have the potential to damage your computer, steal your account information, or get you banned for making modifications to the game client outside of the interface provided by Blizzard:
  • exe, com, bat, ocx, sys, src, msi, lnk, pif, sh, reg, shs, vb, vbs, and many others.
  • Depending on how Explorer is set up, file extensions might be hidden from you.
  • Be careful of filenames that contain lots of spaces. People sometimes name files such as 'file.txt        .exe' in order to trick people into thinking the file is safe. If you see '...' in a filename, then you should avoid trying to open it, it might have been intentionally made longer than could be displayed in order to hide its extension.
  • Don't trust file icons. Executables and shortcuts can have arbitrary icons, and use those icons to make a file look like something safe when it isn't.
  • pif and lnk files are shortcuts and their extensions are generally always hidden by Explorer. You might see the extensions inside an archiving utility or in the name of an email attachment, but have them magically disappear once saved on your computer. As they can have arbitrary icons and be named pretty much anything, all hope of correctly guessing what the file is or does by looking at it goes out the window.
• Don't follow links you receive in email, as the text displayed in the message doesn't have to match what its actually linking to. Type the address yourself or search for the site using Google.
• If you're not using your own computer, don't use it for anything that requires a login. Simply browsing the web is fine. Don't check your email from it, as you can't be sure it doesn't have a key logger, and it would be quite bad if somebody got a hold of your email account, as the passwords of most services are reset using email verification.
• Even if you are using your own computer, don't trust publicly available internet access points in places like hotels, airports, internet cafes, and libraries. With things like ARP spoofing, custom DNS servers, and transparent HTTP proxies, there really is no guarantee that you're viewing the pages you think you are. Even if it hasn't been altered, packets on a LAN can generally be seen by every computer on it, and HTTP doesn't use any encryption at all, so anyone can see the passwords you use.
• Don't use the same password for playing Warcraft as you do on internet websites. Especially websites related to Warcraft. If the people running the site aren't trust worthy, or their user database gets stolen, or somebody is watching your network traffic, it's likely to be used trying to login into your account.
• Secure websites, which have URLs beginning with 'https://', such as the login page for the official World of Warcraft site, are only secure if you verify the site's certificate, otherwise someone can make their own and pretend to the that site. Your browser should warn you if the certificate of a site you've visited in the past has changed. Don't ignore this warning! If someone pretends to be the website you're connecting to, you'll get their certificate instead (hence it appearing to change) and they'll be able to see anything you send or receive.
• Secure websites are only as secure as whoever or whatever is on the other end. You can use a secure connection to tell a serial killer where you live and feel confident that nobody else saw it (unless someone was looking over yours or his shoulder, or he tells his buddies), but it shouldn't make you any more confident that you'll still be alive in the morning.
• Use the 'Remember Account Name' option of Warcraft. If you don't type your account name, it can't be recorded by a keylogger.
• If your password can be found in a dictionary, then change it. Using 'password' as your password isn't clever, it's stupid.

So, some people claim that their accounts got hacked while using QuestHelper. In the interest of security, assuming I can be trusted, QuestHelper 0.45 includes a detached PGP/GPG signature, so you can make sure the file you downloaded is actually the file I uploaded, and hasn't been screwed with along the way. Hooray!

• The signature is detached and is in a separate file. This way people that can't be bothered to verify the file can still use it as normal without needing any extra software.

• The key I (smariot) signed it with is here, its ID is D95A5472. I can't actually prove that I am who I claim I am, so you'll just have to take it on faith.
• This is only a guarantee against intentional malice. Accidents still happen.
• To verify a file using gpg on the command line:
  • To verify the file with gpg, get my key by downloading it from a keyserver: gpg --recv-keys D95A5472
  • Then verify the file with the command: gpg --verify <filename>.sig
  • gpg should say something along the lines of 'Good signature from "Tyson Brown <smariot@gmail.com>"', along with a warning saying that the signature isn't certified, since nobody you trust has signed my key.

Important

The support for non-English locales is pretty new, so YMMV. There is a graph in the screenshots section comparing the various locales, if you're interested. You can improve your locale by completing missing quests while using QuestHelper, and submitting your saved data.

This program still has a few bugs, especially in Outland, where I haven't tested it at all, and where apparently routing code has a habit of spontaneously exploding, and QuestHelper knows nothing about flying mounts and the like. There are also some quests that QuestHelper will never be able to complete properly without a bunch of human intervention, which I'm unlikely to give it, mostly those where the NPCs can be in multiple locations depending on where in the Quest you are, and quests that have objectives that aren't explicitly written as objectives in the quest log.

Usage

For the most part, you just install it and leave it alone. It should hopefully be smart enough to do The Right Thing™, and not require you to meddle with it.

<video width=480 height=360>1308</video>

Minimap

The task QuestHelper thinks you should do first is displayed on your minimap, which you can mouse over for a description. If the task isn't in your current zone, then it will point towards where QuestHelper thinks you should go to get there, such as a flight master or the zone border.

World Map

All the tasks QuestHelper wants you to do are displayed on the World Map. There are 'marching ants' connecting the objectives, showing you the order QuestHelper thinks you should complete them in.

You can right click on an objective to get a list of options for it.

There is also a QuestHelper button in the upper right corner of the World Map. You can click it to hide QuestHelper temporarily, or right-click it for a menu of general options.

Menus

Using the menus should, hopefully, be obvious. The only catch might be that they don't automatically disappear if you click on something else.

You can right click anywhere on a menu to hide it, or select the Close Menu command from the end of the menu.

Priorities

There are 5 different priority levels an objective can have: Highest, High, Normal, Low, and Lowest.

Most objectives default to Normal. Objectives for timed quests default to High. User created objectives default to Highest.

QuestHelper will try to arrange the objectives so that higher priority objectives get done first. The only time this won't happen is when an objective with a higher priority depends on an objective with a lower priority, in which case QuestHelper will pretend it had the higher priority. You will notice a green arrow in the priority menu when QuestHelper isn't using the priority you assigned.

You can use priorities as hints to get the objectives in an order you'd prefer, without the need to micro-manage the route list.

Filters

There are 4 filters you can use to automatically ignore quest objectives, which you can turn on and off using the slash command /qh filter.

The first filter is level, which by default is on. It will cause QuestHelper to ignore any objectives that your current party probably isn't high enough to complete. You can adjust the level offset used by this filter with the command /qh level offset.

The next filter is zone, which by default is off. It will cause QuestHelper to ignore any objectives that aren't in your current zone. Note that this filter might not do The Right Thing™ for objectives that can be completed in multiple zones.

The third filter is done, which by default is off. It will hide objectives for any quests that aren't complete. You can use this if you don't want to quest and just want to turn the quests you do have in.

The fourth filter is blocked, which hides blocked objectives, i.e. ones that can't be done yet, such as quest turn-ins for incomplete quests. This is probably most useful if you prefer to hide the "ant trails", as the route it will compute will be somewhat of a lie.

You can force QuestHelper to show an objective that otherwise would have been filtered by typing /qh hidden and selecting Show from its entry in the menu.

Sharing

Sharing allows you to share your objectives with other party members, allowing you to combine your routes and work together effectively.

Note that sharing only tells your peers what objectives you have, your completion progress for them, and the priorities you have assigned to them. Information such as item drops and monster locations are not shared.

Each peer will take this information and calculate their own route from it. Assuming you stay together and work cooperatively, which was the whole idea behind this feature, your routes should end up being almost completely identical, and you can follow it and rest assured that nobody is getting left behide. Objectives shared by multiple users won't be removed until everybody has completed it.

User objectives, by default, aren't shared. If there is somebody available to share with, an option will appear in the right-click menu for that objective to allow you to share it manually.

Objective priorities are shared globally. If one user changes the priority of an objective, that change will be reflected in all peers. This, again, was done to ensure that everybody's routes end up being roughly identical, and so that peers would have the correct priorities for timed quests. And it's also a nice feature. Assuming the people you're partied with aren't ass hats.

Slash Commands

• /qh help
  Lists all the QuestHelper slash commands.
  • /qh help command
    Tells you about a specific command.
• /qh settings
  Opens the Settings menu at the current cursor location. Note that not all settings can be changed through the menu.
• /qh track
  disables/enables QuestHelper's Quest Tracker, which provides status on your nearest objectives, in place of the default Tracker.
• /qh hidden
  Displays a list of all the hidden objectives, why they are hidden, and depending on the reason, will allow you to unhide them.
• /qh ftime
  Toggles the display of the flight time estimates.
• /qh locale locale
  Sets the locale to use for displayed text., or lists possible locales if no argument is given.
  Defaults to your client's locale the first time you run QuestHelper. The only locale that is complete right now is enUS. Missing translations will be marked with red text.
• /qh share
  Toggles objective sharing on and off. When on, will share quest objectives and progress with other party members that are using QuestHelper 0.17 or higher, and also have sharing enabled.
• /qh solo
  Will disable quest sharing and ignore anyone you might be partied with, basically assume you will receive no aid from your party members.
• /qh comm
  Toggles the display of the data sent between peers. I use this for debugging, but some people just love to stare at streams of meaningless data. It's really quite hypnotic. . .
• /qh hide
  Hides QuestHelper's minimap arrow and World Map icons and paths, and suspends the calculation of routes.
• /qh cartwp
  Toggles using Cartographer Waypoints to display your current objective.
• /qh tomtom
  Toggles using TomTom to display waypoints for your current objective.
• /qh button
  Toggles the QuestHelper button on the World Map frame.
• /qh level offset
  Sets the level offset used by the level filter. Can be positive or negative. Invoke with no arguments to see the current offset and your effective level at various party sizes.
  • /qh level 0
    Only show quests at or below your own level.
  • /qh level +2
    Show quests up to two levels above your own level. This is the default.
• /qh nag
  Prints counts of all the new or updated quests, objectives, etc, that you have found that aren't in the supplied database.
  Note: To reduce memory usage, QuestHelper deletes static quest data that doesn't belong to your faction. So, if you play both sides, it will always think the quests you did for the opposite faction are new.
  • /qh nag verbose
    Displays the specific differences between your data and the static data.
• /qh find category query
  Allows you to create custom objectives by searching for known items, NPCs, and locations. The queries allow fuzzy string matching, and so should happly accept typos and partial matches.
  Note that if you attempt to create an objective twice, it will instead hide it.
  • /qh find item item-name
    Search for items.
  • /qh find npc npc-name
    Search for NPCs or monsters.
  • /qh find loc zone-name x y
    Search for a location in a zone. You may also use a comma, should you feel the need to.
  • /qh find loc x y
    Search for a location in your current zone.
  • /qh find search-string
    Searches in all categories.
  • /qh find
    Invoking the find command without any arguments will instead display all your current user created objectives, allowing you to easily turn them off.
• /qh filter filter-name
  Toggles objective filters on or off.
  • /qh filter level
    Shows or hides objective that you probably can't do. Note that this considers the the levels of everyone in your party, not just you. If you're partied with somebody higher than you, it might not hide a quest that it otherwise would have.
  • /qh filter zone
    Shows or hides objective that aren't in your current zone.
  • /qh filter done
    Shows or hides quests that aren't complete.
  • /qh filter blocked
    Shows or hides objectives that are blocked, i.e. require something else to be done first, such as turn-ins for incomplete quests.
• /qh scale value
  Scales the map icons by this amount of their default size. Will accept a number or a percentage, in the range of 50-300%.
• /qh perf value
  Scales the CPU workload for QuestHelper's route calculation routine. Will accept a numbere or a percentage, in the range 10-500% (although we don't recommend going above 100%).
• /qh recalc
  Recreates the world graph and location and distance information for the active objectives. You probably don't need to worry about this.
• /qh purge
  Deletes all your collected data. I'd prefer if you avoided using this any time other than immediately after sharing your collected data.
  Requires that you to enter a randomly generated 8 character case sensitive alphanumeric password, to hopefully ensure that people read the message that gets displayed.
• /questhelper
  Alias for /qh.
• /find, /qhfind,
  Alias for /qh find.
• /qh find monster
  Alias for /qh find npc.
• /qh find location
  Alias for /qh find loc.

How You Can Help

Data

I need data. If you want to share your saved data with me, that'd be great. The file I need is stored in the following location, assuming you're using Windows and didn't change the installation path:

C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\ACCOUNT_NAME\SavedVariables\QuestHelper.lua

Some have reported that for Vista their path is:

C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\<Account NAME>\SavedVariables

I use vista and it is in the normal windows spot for me, but apparently some of you aren't normal.

To make things even more difficult, it seems that Windows might try 'help' you by hiding file extensions. This makes 'QuestHelper.lua' appear as 'QuestHelper'. Warcraft makes backups of all these files, so there is a 'QuestHelper.lua.bak' file in there as well, and without its file extension, it appears as 'QuestHelper.lua', but it isn't really and it's not actually the file I want.

Be careful not to descend into the realm / character directories, we specifically want the SavedVariables directory. There are QuestHelper.lua files in the other directories as well, but they only store which flight routes your characters know, and aren't actually useful. On a similar note, I also don't want the file named SavedVariables.lua, which contains your UI preferences and is entirely unrelated.

You can email it to me at:

qhaddon@gmail.com

This address is NOT the proper place to direct inquires about the addon.. that should be done in the comments below. NO messages sent to this address are EVER read as it receives more than anyone could hope to read. The only thing that logs into that account is an AUTOMATED script to download all the attachements.

Many have asked how often to send in data. My personal preference is basically this: Look at the message QH displays when you first log in or do a /console reloadui... if it says you have updated information on X quests, these are quests that you completed an objective for in a spot that QH had not seen before. Unless you have many, probably not worth your work of e-mailing it. However if QH says you have information on X new quests, you have completed a quest QH didn't know how to do. Please share! Someone out there will have that quest and thank you!

Please note that the above has nothing to do with installing this AddOn. You install this AddOn the same way you would install any other AddOn, by unzipping it into the Interface/AddOns folder.

And, of course, a huge thanks to everyone that has sent me their data so far. It's very much appreciated.

Translations

Eventually, the text in lang_enus.lua will need to be translated into other languages.

If you don't want to edit the lua files directly, there's a web page you can use: http://smariot.hopto.org/translate

If you edit the files directly, please use UTF-8 encoding. That's the encoding the WoW client uses, I don't want to try to convert it, and in any case, I have a strong biased opinion that codepages are evil.

Development

There is a Git mirror for this project's code: git://cams.pavlovian.net/questhelper.git

It isn't in a very user friendly state right now, but if I waited until it was perfect, it would never be released. So here it is.

Tasks

Things that stand a reasonable chance of happening in the near future:

• Better support for flying mounts
• Remembering quest priorities after logout
• "Too Tough For Me" button, temporarily ignoring a quest until you've leveled

Things I'd like to do that may take a long, long time:

• Rewrite pathfinding to be aware of mountains and other obstacles.
• Track drop rate of quest items, estimate the number of kills you'll need to complete
• Better path optimization, prioritizing "easy experience"
• Addition of "quest-like goals", including vendor recipes, unadded flight paths, weapon/skill training, repairs/vendors, reagent/ammo restocking, and so forth
• Automatic tracking of followup quests

Version 0.59 10/10/2008

• Starting to fix issues involving flight paths
• A few minor patches to crash issues

Version 0.58 10/09/2008

• Fix /qh treset to actually reset more emphatically
• De-fork Astrolabe
• Improve error tracking a little, and add tracking of "minor errors" so I can fix bugs
• Clean up database a bit from corrupted data
• Fix the ceil-nil bug temporarily, and improve logging so I can figure out WTF is going on there

Version 0.57 10/05/2008

• Another fix to the pre-Wrath flightpath issues
• Clean up some obsolete function parameters
• Add system-version data to the crash log

Version 0.56 10/04/2008

• Added error logging and built-in error catching so I can find some of these damn bugs
• Added "/qh hardreset" so I can stop saying "please wander around your filesystem and delete random files, try not to delete the wrong ones plzkthx"
• Fixed huge memory consumption

Version 0.55 10/03/2008

• Filtered some data from private servers, and rigged the plugin to automatically cull data when private servers are detected
• Added a little instrumentation to hopefully provide easier future detection of private-server-polluted data files
• Made the plugin more tolerant of being updated while the client is running
• Fixed a graphical glitch involving multiple quests in the tracker with the same objective

Version 0.54 09/30/2008

• Fixed bug that made QuestHelper break if you *weren't a druid*. Oh man. Don't even ask. As a side note, I bet you can guess what class my standard test character is. (I will be testing on two characters in the future.)

Version 0.53 09/29/2008

• Fix the timed-quest crash, hopefully
• Merge in more wotlk data

Version 0.52 09/27/2008

• Add teleporter paths for Dalaran
• Add a bit of compression to static.lua. This probably won't reduce memory use, but may reduce load times and package size. Reduced size by about 25%

Version 0.51 09/25/2008

• Support for 3.0 and for Wrath! (you can stop reading now, it doesn't get any better than that)
• Another attempt at detecting the timed-quest crash
• French language update
• Fixed a bug involving zoning in the middle of flight paths
• Added detection for zoning flight paths so that old corrupt data can be removed

Version 0.50 09/22/2008

• Memory leak should now be fixed.

Version 0.49 09/21/2008

• Most importantly: project has been resurrected by me. Let's have it for regular updates again!
• Fixed code to remove "flicker" issue, though at the cost of some speed
• Re-enabled nagging
• Fixed a WoW client crash bug involving tooltips
• Merged in a huge amount of data
• Quite a few relatively unimportant small tweaks based around learning the codebase and fixing small issues

Version 0.48 07/16/2008

• Fixed a compatability problem with WoW patch 2.4.3
• Refined routing algorithms, hopefully reducing random fluctuations
• Changed strategy for timing the background work task: task defaults to 4ms per frame re-draw. The default perf setting (/qh perf 100%) should now work fine on most systems.
• Added new filter: /qh filter tracked, which limits routing to objectives marked in the Quest Log. This is for all the other cases of "I just want to see X quests".
• Many translations updated and added

Version 0.47 05/20/2008

• Added an in-game copy of the change log, to be displayed when an upgrade is detected.
• The zone filter has been fixed, and will consider whether any of the known locations for an objective are where the player is or is flying to. Before, only the most probable location was considered.
• Made some changes to the quest tracker:
  • The progress for objectives for which only one thing is required is omitted. It's either there or it isn't.
  • Option to add quest levels to quest names: /qh tlevel
  • Option to colour quest names by their difficulty: /qh tqcol
  • Option to colour objectives by their progress: /qh tocol
  • Option to scale the quest tracker: /qh tscale
  • Added a small button to quickly minimize or restore the quest tracker. The button will be invisible unless the cursor is over the quest tracker, and transparent when the quest tracker is minimized.
  • The quest tracker can be repositioned by dragging the above button. The tracker will be re-anchored to the button depending on where on the screen it is placed so that when it changes size, it will grow away from the edges of the screen.
  • The position of the quest tracker can be reset with this command: /qh treset
  • Hiding QuestHelper will now also hide the quest tracker.
  • Will now force watched quests to be put at the top of the list, with a small gap seperating them from the automatically added quests. You can use the builtin quest log, beql, or DoubleWide to manage quest watches. Other addons might also work if they hook Blizzard's original quest watch functions properly. I also tried to make this work properly with UberQuest, but your milage may vary.
  • Will include the quests of your party members, if sharing is enabled and they are also using QuestHelper.
  • Will display the progress of your party members as a comma seperated list, although the list will only include unique values, so if everyone's progress is the same, this will appear as a single number.
• Fixed a bug with objective icons inheriting their alpha value from the map frame, which Cartographer could hide.
• Fixed a bug in routing, was caching the objective locations.
• Assumes that if you die, you'll need to return to your body.
• QuestHelper won't try to track objectives for failed quests.
• Includes a submitted Russian translation.

Version 0.46 05/14/2008

• Replaced the COPPER, SILVER, and GOLD strings that Blizzard renamed.
• Added a replacement for the built in quest tracker that automatically populates itself and sorts itself to reflect QuestHelper's route.
  • It only includes your own quests and objectives.
  • Right click on a quest name to open that quest in your questlog.
  • It can't be configured and you can't manually add or remove quests from it.
  • You may disable it and restore the built in quest tracker by typing '/qh track'.
• Added objective information to the tooltips of items and monsters.
  • They include information on the progress of party members also using QuestHelper.
  • You may disable this by typing '/qh tooltip'.
• QuestHelper should dedicate less CPU time to routing when inside instances.
• The pathing resets and flight time calculations now happen in a coroutine, so as to not lock up the game while the magic is happening.
• Offended creationists by reimplementing routing using genetic algorithms.
• Menus were given borders, and made more opaque.
• Included an update for the Danish translation.
• Will verify that QuestHelper's files all came from the same version, to ensure you installed or upgraded it properly.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes broke the blocked objective filter an made objectives appear complete when there weren't.
• Fixed a bug involving factions that broke objectives involving buying things from vendors.
• Made some changes requested by the author of AlphaMap.

Version 0.45 05/06/2008

• Added new filter option: '/qh filter blocked' will hide objectives which can't be accomplished yet, such as turn-ins for incomplete quests.
• Resolved issue which caused route to change around repeatedly.
• /qh share and /qh solo should now be working again.
• Added support for using TomTom in place of Cartographer Waypoints.
• Warsky/Wars120 wants recognition for creating a Dutch translation.
• Includes submitted Turkish translation.
• Custom fonts can be placed in Fonts directory, see the readme.txt file there for information.
• Added Globe icon to locale menu.
• Added option to hide the map button '/qh button'.
• Includes update to the Spanish translation.
• Added performance scaling option to menu.
• Did some stuff to try to improve performance - some small, some drastic.
• Made menus one point bigger.
• Fixed translation name for Danish.
• Added slash command for settings menu '/qh settings'.
• Added 'Close Menu' to end of each menu.
• Number of players per quest was calculated wrong, should be fixed.

Version 0.44 04/24/2008

• Added World Map button to disable/enable QuestHelper.
• Added slash command '/qh perf' to set a Performance Factor: lower is better performance (i.e. frame rate), higher is more aggressive routing/updating.
• Added a right-click menu for the World Map button. It's probably only temporary and isn't translated.
• Made menus smaller, and they are no longer scaled when showing/hiding.
• '/qh locale' Now prints the language, and will accept just the language code (en, de, es, etc.)
• Includes a submitted translation for Danish, as there isn't a Danish version of Warcraft, you'll need to select it using the '/qh locale' command in order to use it.
• Includes an updated translations for German and Spanish.
• Made the Spanish translations for Mexico reference the Spanish translations for Spain.
• Possibly fixed passing a boolean to math.max in questlog.lua.
• '/qh locale' Now prints the language, and will accept just the language code (en, de, es, etc.)
• '/qh purge' will now reset the locale of the saved data, so you can use it if you change the language of your client.
• When using Cartographer Waypoints, if LibRock or LibBabble are missing, QuestHelper will avoid trying to use them to translate the zone name. This will probably still work if you're using an English client, otherwise your best best would be to make sure Cartographer is up to date.

Version 0.43 04/08/2008

• Spam, spam, glorious spam.
• Includes a probably very broken machine translated Spanish localization.

Version 0.42 Uploaded 04/02/2008

• Includes a Korean translation that was sent to me.
• Now uses the correct fonts so that non-latin characters display properly.
• Build script now uses the collected IDs from 0.41 to combine data between locales.

Version 0.41 Uploaded 03/29/2008

• Now collects the IDs of quests, NPCs, and items, using the new QuestLink and UnitGUID functions made availiable in 2.4. If I ever get motivated enough to rewrite QuestHelper, it will use these values.

Version 0.40 Uploaded 03/29/2008

• The previous version of Astrolabe apparently contained a minor annoyance in which it would lockup the game of anyone attempting to teleport.

Version 0.39 Uploaded 03/25/2008

• It appears that the 2.4 patch goes live today. Cross your fingers and hope this still works.
• Using the WoW_2.4_Data branch of Astrolabe until everything gets updated.
• I don't know anything about the new zone. QuestHelper has a dummy route linking the existing world to it, but this is just to keep it from breaking, you shouldn't try to follow it.

Version 0.38 Uploaded 03/18/2008

• Wrote a spider to copy quest data from www.wowguru.com, to suppliment the dwindling supply of non-English quest data.

Version 0.37 Uploaded 03/15/2008

• Fixed the route through the Dark Portal. The pathing data got calculated before the player's level was set, and thus the route was set to take 24 hours, which was my solution to prevent QuestHelper from directing low level players from wandering into OutLands.
• I think the previous version had all unknown flight times estimated as taking one minute, which I had done while debugging the lockups. It should now be back to reasonably accurate guessing.
• Talking to a flightmaster QuestHelper didn't previously know of should now recalculate the pathing data. This mostly applies to non-English users, where QuestHelper hasn't learned them already.

Version 0.36e Uploaded 03/13/2008

• Should now not lock up your computer.
• Should no longer suggest getting the flight point in Moonglade if you're not a Druid.
• Should hopefully not crash when trying to calculate flight times.
• An interrupted flight timer should no longer reappear if you lose control of your player.
• Added an approximation symbol to flight times that are just guesses. Although it won't show up for times that were guessed from taking a known path and reversing it, I didn't bother checking for that case.

Version 0.36 Uploaded 03/08/2008

• Added ETA to flight node tooltips, requires the display of flight times to be enabled.
• Fixed a problem preventing flight routes being looked up from the static data.
• Includes jeskeca's patch to give undoable objectives (incomplete quests for example) grey backgrounds.

Version 0.35f Uploaded 03/05/2008

• Added /qh ftime to toggle display of the flight timer. If you're already flying, it doesn't apply to the current flight.
• Added /qh purge to delete all your collected data.
• Removed some text I was using for debugging.
• Fixed indexing a nil variable.
• Hopefully fixed a little oopsie I made regarding factions and non enUS locales.

Version 0.35 Uploaded 03/05/2008

• Nag command will now only provide information for your own faction.
• Included the northern lifts in Thunder Bluff in pathing.
• Altered linkage between Blade's Edge Mountains and Zangarmarsh.
• Fixed bug with finding functions for processing localized text.
• Rewrote most of the stuff dealing with flight points.
  • Previously collected data regarding flight routes has been deleted, I'm starting over.
  • Should be able to make good guesses as to the flight routes the WoW client would assign you for a specific flight master, by talking to any other flight master on the same continent.
  • When flying, calculates routes from where you're flying to instead of where you are.
  • While flying, displays an estimate of the remaining flight time. Will probably be inaccurate until all the data I deleted is recollected.

Version 0.34 Uploaded 03/03/2008

• Added French localization.
• Fixed pluralization of German words.
• Added /qh version command.
• Not appending verbs to objectives that didn't match the patterns they were supposed to.
• Loading inside of an instance should no longer cause problems when interacting with NPCs and looting items.

Version 0.33e Uploaded 03/01/2008

• Hopefully fixed the cartographer waypoints interface to work in non-english locales.
• Added ability for translation strings to transform nested text.
• Includes a German localization.
• Changed the way localized strings are parsed.
• Nagging was broken, fixed it.
• Was printing 'HOME_CHANGED' when flight routes were updated.
• Text displayed while searching was wrong.
• Map overlays weren't hidden when starting if they were supposed to be.

Version 0.33 Uploaded 02/28/2008

• Moved more of QuestHelper's strings into lang_enus.lua.
• Missing translations are now marked using red backets containing the missing token and a fallback translation in English.
• Fixed a problem with determining the users home in non-english locales.
• Fixed a problem with sharing location objectives with peers.

Version 0.32 Uploaded 02/27/2008

• Fixed some bugs related to locales, static data contains a few translations for items and npcs but no quests.

Version 0.31 Uploaded 02/24/2008

• Fixed a problem with the peers you were sharing objectives with disappearing.
• Fixed a problem asking Astrolabe about a non-existent zone when using Cartographer Waypoints and switching continents.
• Started support for translations, although nothing has actually been translated.
• Should hopefully load with locales other than enUS, but as the existing static data isn't compatible, you'll need to start from scratch.
• Now tracks looted containers.

Version 0.29 Uploaded 02/08/2008

• Fixed some issues with map behavior.

Version 0.26 Uploaded 01/24/2008

• As might be expected, more updates to the static data.
• Added /qh hide command, will hide the map icons and stop calculating routes, but continue to collect and share data.
• Changed how the position weights in the static data were calculated, large values will decay, allowing less popular locations to catch up.
• Should now not suggest that players under level 58 walk to Shattrath City and use the portals there.
• Includes some changes based on a patch emailed to me to deal with AddOns that mangle quest names.

Version 0.25 Uploaded 01/15/2008

• Added a bunch of emails.
• Added /qh ants, will toggle the ant trails on and off.
• Added some asserts when calculating the player's position, let me know if they trigger.

Version 0.24 Uploaded 01/10/2008

• Removed the graph command. I suspect it caused some people some grief.
• Won't attempt to communicate with party members from other realms, i.e., in battle grounds.

Version 0.23 Uploaded 01/06/2008

• Menu positions now account for their effective scale.
• Ignoring a user objective will now delete it instead.
• Made dumped data more visually pleasing.

Version 0.22 Uploaded 01/05/2008

• Will restore your original quest selection after scanning your quest log.
• Will hopefully properly determine the faction of a vendor now, and not direct you toward someone that will kill you.
• Added solo mode, /qh solo, will ignore everyone else in your party and pretend you're playing alone.

Version 0.21c Uploaded 01/02/2008

• More data.
• You can now disable filters from the hidden objective list.

Version 0.21b Uploaded 12/29/2007

• Will try not to replace the waypoint to your corpse.
• Will remove the waypoint when you have no objectives left.
• Will try to keep menus from going off the bottom or top of the screen when making them appear under the cursor.
• Will refuse to run if it doesn't recognize your saved data; the format is probably going to be changed in the future.
• Menus have been switched over to use the new frame recycling API.

Version 0.21 Uploaded 12/28/2007

• Added support for Cartographer Waypoints.

Version 0.20e Uploaded 12/27/2007

• More data.
• Mirrored the repository here at http://repo.or.cz/w/QuestHelper.git, but it doesn't seem to be updating.

Version 0.20d Uploaded 12/24/2007

• As usual, the database has grown a bit.
• Some nice guy from the interwebs bought me a gamecard, so I got to play a little bit today, and spent a little time giving QuestHelper the ability to change its colours based on the current date. Now why on Earth might I have done that?
• Working on moving the project over to git.

Version 0.20c Uploaded 12/21/2007

• Tiny bit more data.
• Fixed a bug that occured when you didn't know any flight instructors for your faction. Or compounded it further. Only time will tell.

Version 0.20b Uploaded 12/21/2007

• More data.
• Wrote a script to detect obsoleted input files, such as when somebody emails me a newer version of a file that they had already emailed to me. Should prevent weights in the generated data from getting biased.
• Will delete references to quests and flight instructors that don't belong to your faction.
• QuestHelper would do bad things if need an item, it knew the monsters that dropped that item, but had no idea where any of those monsters were.

Version 0.20 Uploaded 12/16/2007

• Got quite a few emails on the weekend, so there should be a bunch of new quest information.
• Just because I can't play Warcraft doesn't mean I can't still improve things. Reduced the RAM used by static.lua by about 270KB, by removing duplicate tables, and having everything reference the first instance. All that searching also increased the generation time by a few hundred fold, but all well. It's a one time thing for code most people aren't going to run.
• Static data should no longer include monster that have been seen to drop an item, but had a probabilty so low that it wasn't actually included in the list of monsters that drop it.

Version 0.19e Uploaded 12/15/2007

• Includes data from two more people, and fixed a bug with the nag command. At least I think I fixed it, can't really test it.

Version 0.19d Uploaded 12/14/2007

• More changes to the static data, and the nag command is now aware that the static data filters improbable data, and shouldn't complain about things that aren't likely to be included.
• This will probably be the last update until I return in January, aside from keeping the static data up to date with whatever people email me.

Version 0.19c Uploaded 12/14/2007

• Objectives contained links to unconnected nodes, breaking path finding. I can't fix the problem right now, but I can try to hide the symptoms.
• Accidently averaged the y components with the x components when combining positions in the static data. All the positions were wrong. This is probably the kind wierdness that happens when you give yourself a deadline.

Version 0.19b Uploaded 12/14/2007

• Includes the staticmerge.lua script.
• In the process of writing said script, I noticed two more bugs in my merging code and fixed them, so static.lua should hopefully contain more accurate locations than the previous upload.

Version 0.19; Uploaded 12/14/2007

• The static data was missing the quest information for the additional quests with the same name. Oops!
• Did some more work to get QuestHelper to use its memory more effectively.
• Will delete references to data not intended for your locale and invoke the garbage collector on startup. If I actually supported multiple locales, this might have been a useful change. Maybe in the future.
• Menus weren't getting recycled due to a bug. Fixed.
• Will record where you've set your home to.
• Calculates most of the information needed to include teleport spells and the hearthstone in routing, but I don't think I'll have time to actually get the pathfinding functions able to use it before my account expires.
• When nodes are overlapping, they'll all glow, not just the one on top.
• Will offer to set the priorities of any objectives that are preventing you from using the priority you asked for.

Version 0.18; Uploaded 12/12/2007

• The portals in Shattrath City have been added to the world graph.
• Objective sharing can now be turned on or off with /qh share.
• Fixed an assertion error when objectives were removed while routing was still inserting them. Happened a lot with objective sharing, when a party member joined and then quickly left.
• Shared objectives now set the quest they belong to, quest specific item objectives couldn't be seen by peers unless they were on the same quest.
• The offset used by the level filter can now be adjusted with /qh level offset.
• Fiddled with the math for calculating your effective level for group quests, when you don't have the matching number of people in your group. You can see your effective level with /qh level.
• Using the find command without any arguments will now return your user objectives, so you can easily remove them.
• Tried to improve memory usage:
  • Flight routes which nobody has flown yet have been removed.
  • Hashes were removed for quests for which only one quest by that name is known to exist.
  • The static database has been purged of monsters and items that haven't been seen to be used in any quests so far. Sure, there's a non-zero chance I removed something important, but that's what you get for complaining about the memory footprint.

Version 0.17; Uploaded 12/09/2007

• If the following changes don't interest you, you might want to stick with 0.16, as this is a lot of new code and haven't spent a lot of time testing.
• Started on working cooperatively with other party members.
• Will automatically share your quest related objectives with your peers.
• Quest progress is shown in the tooltips.
• User created objectives can be shared using the right-click menu.
• Objective priorities are shared between users.

Version 0.16; Uploaded 12/07/2007

• New priority system for objectives.
• Timed quests automatically get an above normal priority, so that they will get assigned before non-timed quests.
• Right clicking on the objective on the minimap will now show a menu for that objective.
• Did a little more work on the menus.
• Can now hide objectives that aren't in your current zone, or objectives that aren't to turn in quests. Can turn filters on or off with /qh filter.
• Various bugfixes.

Version 0.15; Uploaded 12/06/2007

• Fixed the problem with the failed assertions that happened after pathing information was reset.
• Fixed a bug with my Astrolabe kludge.
• Game no longer freezes while searching, and displays multiple results via a menu.
• If you've discovered anything that I don't have in the supplied database, it will display a message when starting.
• Won't hide objectives to turn in quests to due their level requirements.
• Added some slash commands, try '/qh help'.

Version 0.14; Uploaded 12/05/2007

• Fixed the missing tooltips with AddOns that scale the world map, such as Cartographer and Metamap.
• Overlapping objectives in tooltips are now sorted by their estimated travel time.
• Icons have been separated from their backgrounds, so I can easily change their colours without having separate images.
• It seems the problem with the overly large menu items was caused by the menu being scaled at the time the size was calculated.
• Routing should be much more responsive to objectives being added and removed.
• The 'Make this objective first' option has been broken. It will probably be replaced by some kind of priority system later.

Version 0.13; Uploaded 12/03/2007

• Fixed the problem with the minimap arrow jumping all over the place.
• Minimap arrow will silently do nothing if it is changed to the same objective it's already pointing to (saves recalculating the waypoints to the objective.)
• Created more icons for the various objective types.
• Fixed yet another bug with missing quest items.
• Now includes a horrible kludge to figure out the correct zone the player is in, when you're looking at a neighboring zone and your character is still visible. Astrolabe would declare you to be in the zone you were looking at.
• Gave up on tracking zone transition locations. Too many special cases I don't want to deal with. They're now all hardcoded into pathfinding.lua.
• Can deal with overlapping objectives. In most cases, anyway.
• Menus seem to work better than before, it seems I wasn't changing the parents of the recycled items, and if their old parent was hidden, so too would they. Now the big problem with them is their size isn't getting calculated correctly. Probably something obvious that I'm too tired to see.

Version 0.12; Uploaded 12/01/2007

• List of known positions for something could be erased when trying to add a location that wasn't valid, a function was returning nil instead of the old unchanged list in this case.
• Created some icons. I'll customize the images for different objective types later.
• Will only show one menu at a time, will automatically hide the old one.
• Made the code for merging positions much more strict.
• Will go through your saved data and remove any locations that don't seem to be possible.
• Removed a whole lot of seemingly impossible locations from the static data.
• Will take the time to calculate a route the first time it checks your quest log, at the risk of making already pretty sad loading times even more miserable.
• Updating the route takes a stupidly long time to finish, so to keep you from having wait around for the objectives in the route to be updated, the arrow on the minimap will automatically point to the first objective on the route that isn't queued for removal.
• Route calculations will now occur even when viewing the world map.
• Recalculating the world graph will be deferred until such time as the routing co-routine is some place safe. If an objective wasn't in the route because it was being moved to another position, it would lose its pathing data, and bad stuff would happen.
• Added a sanity check that will prevent QuestHelper from running and corrupting itself in the inevitable event that Blizzard adds/rearranges the zones in the game. Because somebody is bound to try running it anyway, even with the version mismatch. I know I would.

Version 0.11; Uploaded 12/01/2007

• Wrote functions for creating menus. There seems to be some horrible bug related to recycling them, but I can't figure it out and I'm not going to worry about it for now. You can drag them around by their title or right click on their title to close them.
• You can right click on an objective on the world map to create a menu for it, and from that menu you can request that it be ignored for forced to the beginning of the route.
• For the people that couldn't zoom out of the map, that might have been fixed, too.

Version 0.10; Uploaded 11/30/2007

• Will ignore quests you're probably not capable of doing.
• Minimap arrow should now unhide itself when entering/leaving an instance or continent.
• Asking for the same objective twice will remove it.
• Route objectives contain an array of distances to nearby nodes, but they weren't being updated with the world graph. If new nodes were created, pathing would break when it tried to do math on a value that didn't exist.

Version 0.9; Uploaded 11/29/2007

• If you put the mouse over the an objective on the world map, all known locations for it will be highlighted on the map.
• Wrote a script to generate the zip file for me, which will save me from having to delete the unneeded bits each time, and also hopefully ensure that the directory structure remains sane.
• The player's position wasn't being updated while flying. When the player landed, it would think you were still where you took off from, think that was where you flew to, and crash and burn when it discovered that that wasn't one of the possible flight routes you could have taken.
• The routing co-routine will perform no more than 5 pathing operations per frame. Should prevent performance from degrading with lots of objectives.

Version 0.8; Uploaded 11/27/2007

• User waypoints can be created by typing '/find '. Begin with the word "item", "npc", or "loc" to only search for things in those categories. If you don't say what you want, it'll search everything it knows of. Locations can be prefixed with a zone name, to add the location in that zone instead of your current one. All text is compared using Levenshtein distance, so it should be able to handle typos and partial matches. It also makes it slow as hell. At the moment, you can't remove objectives or force them to be first, so this is almost useless.
• If an item can be purchased, it will always suggest this. No more telling you to kill the people you talk to, just because they were on your route and killing them is faster than walking to the vendor.
• Fixed bug with graph searching code, distance traveled was getting overwritten even when the fitness wasn't better.
• Routing us now done using A* pathfinding instead of straight line distances. Actually, that's a lie, my herustic isn't working properly, so until I fix it, it's technically Dijkstra's algorithm. But the point is, it should be able make more intelligent decisions now.
• The arrow on the minimap now points to the next place you should visit instead of directly at the next objective. So it might, for example, direct you towards a flight master.
• Graph nodes that got merged due to their proximity sometimes didn't appear in all the zones they should have.
• When a graph node was shared by more than one zone, and an objective could be completed in either of them, that node would be searched for twice, and couldn't be found the second time.
• Most of the internals have been rewritten, so odds are good that if something was broken before, it will work now. Of course, the reverse is equally true. So, cross your fingers.

Version 0.7; Uploaded 11/21/2007

• Started work on pathing, which is used on the world map display. Routing is still using straight line distance between objectives though, as I haven't programmed a proper heuristic for it yet, and I'm worried about performance.
• Records information about flight masters, and keeps track of flight times between locations. Note that for a flight point to get considered in pathing, you need to talk to the flight master there.
• Records the locations where two zones join together when you walk over the edge, for use in pathing.
• Tooltips for objectives on the world map now include travel time estimates. Naturally, that doesn't include the time required for killing monsters and collecting items, or using mounts, swimming through water, obstacle avoidance, or anything else that'll affect your speed.
• In the static data, quests without hashed objective text no longer get replaced by quests that do. Incomplete quests were hiding the imported quest data, so QuestHelper didn't know where to hand them in.

Version 0.6; Uploaded 11/18/2007

• Due to a bug fallback quest information wasn't getting found. Now that it's fixed, it can now tell you where to hand quests in.
• Fixed the bug with the vendor item objectives.
• The dots on the world map are now spaced evenly.

Version 0.5; Uploaded 11/18/2007

• Redid the routing.
• Fix a bug with the unneeded red dots not getting hidden, and littering the world map.

Version 0.4; Uploaded 11/17/2007

• Includes a lot more quest information, which was mostly imported from LightHeaded and EQL3.
• Item gathering objectives should be working.
• I think there's a bug in the routing, but I'll worry about that later.

Version 0.3; Uploaded 11/17/2007

• Discovered that quest items are often returned to you, resulting in QuestHelper thinking you can acquire then from the same place you finish the quest.
• Due to the above change, routing doesn't understand the way the data is organized now, so quests that involve gathering items are broken.

Version 0.2; Uploaded 11/16/2007

• Now parse objectives involving reputation correctly, although I'm not tracking reputation changes from kills yet.
• Keeping track of what vendors sell what items.
• Hashed quest text, so I have some way to tell quests with the same name apart.
• I think I fixed the bug with the empty item objectives.

Version 0.1; Uploaded 11/15/2007

• Replaces the AddOn 'TravelingTomTom', and dropped TomTom as a dependency.