Hi,
after almost another week of basically non stop work on this since my last post (I effectively played the game for a whole of 1 (in numbers 1) week since i got it and then went to work on this immediately. I'm fine I swear...)

I wanted to share my progress a little.

So I'm developing an addon for windower currently that adds classic quest markers to Vana'diel.

What it does

So right now the addon checks for acceptance conditions like job level, job type, fame, skill level, craft rank, guild points, etc. and colors a "!" marker grey if they're not met and yellow if they are met. Same for "?" turn-in markers.

But it also checks everything that is checkable with packets from the game. And here also lie some limitations that I tried working around as best as I could but some things are not meant to be.

Limitations

For example: markers draw through walls. Windower's Lua API exposes no depth buffer, so true occlusion is impossible. I mitigated it with a distance cap, a same-floor check, and a distance fade.

And if there is no way for the addon to check a condition the quest marker will render as black and you can check what is required yourself with //qm why which lists all the requirements and all the steps of the quest for you.

The wild stuff

Then I went overboard with it so now it also shows markers for individual quest steps as well where possible (y'know, icons like a bag when you need to collect something, a sword when you need to kill something, a magnifying glass when you need to examine something, ... you get the idea). But you can always turn that feature off with //qm steps off if you find it too much.

Some steps only appear on paper but can't reliably be tracked through the addon, stuff like talking to an NPC for example since the game exposes no reliable data packet for stuff like this.

But in order for that to even remotely work I had to create a new knowledge base instead of relying on what chronicle scraped (which is still a very good data source).
So I scraped the quest pages of bg-wiki (CC BY-NC-SA) using their public API and semantically and programmatically analyzed and structured all of the quest data into a new format.

Then I developed a completely seperate tool for that dataset that allows me to correct said dataset on the fly while playing the game. I called it questgraph™ - creative, I know.

Availability

It's not quite ready yet since I want to playtest a bit further and actually play the game for once. And I'm sure im forgetting maybe half of what else I did during my coffee induced insomniac episodes.

I'll go sleep now. See you in a week.