Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Projects/NPC Coordinates/Guide

Guide for NPC Coordinates Project

Generating coordinates

(1) GW2Navi

This is an overlay program that will display your current coordinates while ingame. It can be downloaded here.

Now, this software does a whole lot of things, but only one which we care about, so let's set it up.

Once you have the software downloaded (should come in a .zip file) extract and save it somewhere you can easily get back to it; where exactly you put it does not matter.

In general you will only want to run this while GW2 is running, but in order to set it up, let's only have GW2Navi open. With the program open, click on the "B" at the top of the bar in order to get the biggest possible screen.

If the timeline is present on the program, go to the top left of the screen (right under the "G" icon), and click the arrow button. Upon hovering over it you should see the text "Toggle the timeline".

Now on the bottom right of the program screen hit the arrow labeled "Toggle the dashboard".

With these steps done, you should be left with just a map, and three black boxes at the bottom left of the screen. From left to right, these boxes show: 1) The last coordinate hovered over by your mouse, or the last location you player cursor has been moved to (works only if a character is being played). 2) The coordinates of the clicked position on the map. 3) The name of the currently on screen.

In order to easily get the coordinates, we will be using the 2nd box. While in-game simply place your character pin on top of the desired NPC (by walking to it), and click on your pin. After clicking on the GW2Navi location, hit ctrl+c (for windows), or cmd+c (for mac), to copy the highlighted coordinates into your clipboard.

Note that while playing it might be more comfortable to resize GW2Navi (via the 1/2/3/4/A/B buttons) and place it in a non-intrusive portion of your UI. Personally I have it hovering perfectly over my usual mini-map spot.

(2) GW2Timer

You can also head over to GW2Timer to view the exact same map as GW2Navi without the need to download anything. It works in the same way as GW2Navi with the three black boxes at the bottom left of the screen except it shows your cursor position instead of your character position.

You can still click on the map to create coordinates in the second box. Then press ctrl+c (for windows), or cmd+c (for mac), to copy the highlighted coordinates into your clipboard.

(3) Basic coordinate reader

Written with Visual Studio and forked from somebody else's, User:Chieftain Alex has shared his coordinate reader:

• Download link

Copy both files into the same folder and then run "GW2 Coordinate Reader.exe" after having opened GW2. See the talk page for more details.

Dealing with the coordinates

By default, the copy-pasted coordinates will have the format [12345, 54321]. When entering them into the infobox, you will have to either manually convert them to:

{{NPC infobox
| ...
| coordinates = [12345, 54321]
}}

Or you can use a program to semi-automate the change (mentioned further down)

Map floor

It seems GW2Navi has a few issues dealing with the map levels, so this will need to be done manually by the players. Adding the map-floor value to the coordinates is as simple as adding another value to the | coordinates argument. That is, if you wish to add that the NPC is on floor 2, the example above would become:

{{NPC infobox
| ...
| coordinates = [12345, 54321, 2]
}}

This argument will need to be given as per the documentation listed in the Template:NPC infobox map. If no value is given for the map-floor value, it will default to 1, that is ground floor/surface.

Semi-automating formatting

Using Notepad++, I have found that my preferred way of doing this information gathering and transcribing is the following.

1. Gather multiple NPC coordinates into a text file in the format shown below.
2. Open the "Replace" window by opening the menu "Search"->"Replace" or Ctrl + H
3. In the "Find What" box, place the regex: (\[.*\]).
4. In the "Replace with" box, place the string: | coordinates = \1.
5. Make sure that the "Search mode" button in the bottom left is set to "Regular expression".
6. Click "Replace All" in the right side of the window. you should now have a format which can easily be copy-pasted into an infobox.

File format:

NPC name 1
[12345, 54321]

NPC name 2
[55548, 65893]

NPC name n
[11111, 11111]

Resulting text:

NPC name 1
| coordinates = [12345, 54321]

NPC name 2
| coordinates = [55548, 65893]

NPC name n
| coordinates = [11111, 11111]