Evony community info

Finally, after so many weeks of hard work and frustration, the evony map is going into open beta!  That means that all of you can go to the map now and start entering data.   Yes, it is time for you to work now.  What? You think I’m meant to suffer alone for this great tool? 

Truth be told, you and I would have been spared a lot of headache if Evony had allowed us to access their map data.  There are preliminary indications that we will be allowed to do so soon, hence all your hard work may be for nothing!  Hahaha! 

Wait.  What are you doing?  Go back to work on entering that map data!  Do you have anything better to do while you’re building another cottage now that you’ve discovered you need people to recruit armies?  Maybe you think you’d better take up blogging?  Nah, it takes a special caring person like myself to do that.  I’m not judging you… You care too, it’s just that… you care about the map more.  Which is good for everyone!

My cottage is nearly done building, and I’m thinking of taking a short nap in there, you know to test it out for my residents.  So let’s wrap it up:

Currently all the map is, is a fancy game map.  You can see the real Evony world and you can see how it zooms to the small Evony map, and you can actually see about 10 times the detail that you can see in that small Evony map.  That said, it gives you no additional advantages.

But if you enter the data here is what the map will be in a week’s time:

• The map is integrated with EvonySocial.  By default, only your friends from the Evony social network will be able to search for your name and find your cities.  The permissions can be changed by you in EvonySocial, so that for example all you EvonySocial alliance members will be able to search for you.
• At the moment city markers are only visible on the grass patches.  Later on, when you login to EvonySocial you will see all the icons of your friends and others who allow you to see them on the world map at any zoom level.  So you can see your friends right away at different states with a global map zoom level.
• You will be able to enter enemies and friends coordinates manually, and share them with your alliance members by default.  The enemies and friends will be visible on the world map and you’d be able to search for them by name.
• You will be able to customize flags and assign them to enemies or friends, say one flag for one enemy alliance, and another flag for another one.

I believe this will be a greatly enhanced set of map feature, long overdue for this game.  It should be out in about a week my time.   Given that my brain calculates at the speed of light most of the time, it means about 10 days for you ground folk due to time dilation.  Hey, blame Einstein not me. 

I’ve also worried quite a bit about security here, and I hope you find it adequate.  Like it?  Hate it?  Have suggestions?  Please leave me a comment - unless you really do hate it, then just go away, why do you need to insult me?  What did I do to you?!

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With the latest nix by Evony on the access to their servers (voluntary on our part) we are forced to do business blind to in-game data.  Mostly, nothing will be affected in terms of functionality, however, you will have to help us enter the data in instead of getting it automatically.  No biggy right?  Really?  You really think so?  Great!  Go ahead and you do it, but send me the code afterwards, I want to take credit for it.  Pretty please.

The way the map stands now, you, the user, will get to click a grass patch area and tell the map what exists there.  Is it a forest, a lake or a city?   You will also specify its level.  Sounds simple enough, but it’s a lot of clicking so start saving your clicks from now for the map.  

When you add cities to the map, you would be able to specify the lord for the city as well as the alliance and other information visible in the Evony map.  This information will not be searchable due to Evony’s concern over unfair game play using 3rd party websites.  One of the most desirable features in building such a map is showing all the alliance cities on one world, and actually searching for alliance members city coordinates (one of the biggest peeves by Evony players). 

Ideally, we would want to show such information only to players in that alliance, however, now that we can’t access Evony servers, we cannot verify a person indeed belongs to an alliance she claims to.  Since the feature is so useful that we have to implement it, essentially Evony has created an unfair gameplay problem for themselves by restricting us from doing our due diligence and securing the map browsing.   If you’re as concerned as we are, please write to them and complain.

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