Patch 5.4 has brought us two major map changes.

Timeless Isle

A complete new zone with loads of quest, read more about it on WoWPedia.

Destruction of the Vale

Garrosh devastated the Vale of Eternal Blossoms.

Last night I’ve pushed v10 of the map to the content servers adding some overdue and new map features added in patches 5.1 and 5.2.

Isle of Thunder

Landfall

It all started with a comment by Rioriel on WoW Insider and a push in the right direction from Marlamin. With an older bit of code that does a rough implementation of what we wanted for this (and something I already had in mind), work started.

Fast forward to today. New system for static map generation supporting different renderers (will be opensourced), static map creator on the website. Rioriel had a shot with it, became very enthusiastic about the tool and started adding location data to his posts on Postcards From Azeroth.

So from today Postcards From Azeroth are visible on the World of Warcraft Map and Postcards From Azeroth show their location under the postcard:

Nearly a month ago I’ve pushed the new site online. The new site has an updated UI featuring a search bar and a resources fold out. For me the site has a whole new way of beeing continuously updated. The moment I push an a new feature into the source code versioning system the site is automatically rebuild and updated online. This allows me to push smaller and more updates to the site in a shorter amount of time.

Resources

The resources fold out is a restyle for the old resources modal. It uses the same backend tech and has the same node sets. For Mists of Pandaria complete new tech has been designed for more then 1 kind of nodes. The old system only allowed static pregenerated node files. The new system allows for the same kind of static nodes but also dynamic nodes with a balloon containing extra information. And on top of that moving nodes for zeppelins, boats and turtles.

Search

Searching for zones is just the start. Subzones will be added in the upcoming weeks after I completely the integration of the new zone system, converted and checked the zone location match information by hand. Once the new zone system is in place. Subzones will be come available on the site and you can search for them.

The beta Pandaria has been included on the map. And an update will follow with the latest version (revamped Jade Forest)!

A while ago Robbie Alexander suggested to create a comparison map between WOTLK and Cataclysm.

@WyriMaps is there anyway you could lineup the different map layers so you can easily switch between them to quickly compare them? Thanks! — Robbie Alexander (@robbiealexandr) May 16, 2011

At that time I decided not to do it cause I didn’t have the old WOTLK map extracts anymore. Now I’m happy to make public I’ve been working bit by bit on this the past few weeks (it takes time to generate the needed map tiles). After aligning the continents, cutting the map into tiles and a bit of coding for the map it’s now up on http://compare.wyrimaps.net/ for your comparison adventures!

The past few days I’ve been busy preparing a facebook page. It will be used in connection with this blog and the rest of the site in provide news and way to communicate with our users. You can visit the facebook page at facebook.com/WyriMaps.