Welcome to the Volume II: Book 9 Siege of Mirkwood update to the Lorebook. We are pleased to provide you with several new features to support the Lorebook Siege of Mirkwood release.

New Features

Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.15

This release gives the Lorebook a long overdue upgrade of the MediaWiki software. This update will generally improve performance and stability, but is otherwise very similar to previous versions with some specific differences below:

• The Log in / create account message is now just Log in
• After successfully logging in, you will no longer be taken to an interstitial page indicating that you successfully logged in. You will be immediately taken back to the page you were viewing when you clicked the login link.

Skirmishes

In support of this new feature introduced in Siege of Mirkwood we have added a number of new features:

• Quest Advanced Search now has an option to find skirmish quests.
• Skirmish traits are now in the Lorebook
• There is a new Skirmish namespace that holds high level details about the skirmish -- difficulty, # of players, etc.

• Additionally, any individual quests tied to that skirmish are shown

In-Game (Parchment) Map Tiles

LOTRO has two types of maps it uses in the game; the first is the in-game "radar" map that is visible while playing. This shows the terrain the player is currently traversing; the Lorebook's Google maps currently uses this map for its tiles. The second type is the "parchment" map brought up by the map hotkey. This shows the entire area the player is currently traversing.

The Lorebook will now allow the player to switch between the two types of maps. A drop-down control will be in the upper right corner of the map; it will have two options -- Terrain and Parchment. Selecting terrain will switch the map to the game geography map tiles; selecting parchment will switch the map to the parchment map tiles.

However, zooming all the way into the map (zoom level 7, pushing the zoom slider bar all the way to the top) will automatically switch to the terrain tiles regardless of the drop-down setting. This is done as the parchment maps at that level provide no useful information, but the terrain maps still do. Once you zoom back out, the map will switch back to the parchment tiles if the drop-down is set to parchment.

Parchment Map Tiles

Expanding Maps

The maps on articles for quests, NPCs, etc. now have a control that will allow the reader to expand/contract the map. This control is located in the upper right hand of the map. Initially, the map is the standard size the reader is accustomed to seeing. Clicking the control will expand the map to fill the entire width of the content column. Clicking it again will reduce the map back to its original size.

Rate Article

A new MediaWiki extension will allow users to rate articles on the Lorebook in the same manner as they would rate blog articles on my.lotro.com. The rating control will appear at the bottom of the article and allow the user to rate the article on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (wunderbar!). You must be logged into the Lorebook to rate an article. You can only rate an article once.

Enhancements

Homepage Redesign

The homepage of the Lorebook has been redesigned to improve ease of access to key resources.

Quest Objectives

Quests will now list the same "objectives" text seen in-game. If any of the objectives have a mappable entity, we will show it on the article's map and add the appropriate icons to open the markers on the map.

http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Quest:A_Hunter%27s_Charge

Update to Weapon Tooltips

The stats for weapons are changing with the release of SoM and the Lorebook has been updated to match.

Update to "Possible Legacies" on Tooltips

The design of "Possible Legacies" on a legendary item has been condensed. We now show each possible legacy with a list of possible tiers it could have on item ID.

Maps for Quest Advanced Search

Quest advanced search will now have an option to display a map that has the locations of the NPCs that bestow the quests returned. Each result that has a NPC that can be placed on the map will have an icon to the left of the quest name; clicking on this icon will pop up the caption for the appropriate map marker.

Quest Advanced Search Map

Advanced Search AJAX Results, Pagination, and Sorting

A new JavaScript library has been integrated into the advanced search; this library will fetch advanced search results via AJAX and display them in the tabular form familiar to the reader. However, pagination and sorting is all done via AJAX avoiding a page load when the reader wishes to sort the results or page to the next set of results.

Barter Items

As an example, you must give 30 gold leaves and 50 silver branches to receive one Galadhrim horse from a Lothlorien barter NPC. However, the Lorebook was separating this one line into two -- a line where 30 gold leaves = 1 horse and a line where 50 silver branches = 1 horse. It now properly groups all barter items.

Before:


After:

MediaWiki category for Titles

Titles like Doom of the Stalwart are now categorized with their in-game category, in this case "Slayer Titles".

Jewellery category

Jewellery items now appear in the "Jewellery" MediaWiki category.