Greetings, folks, I have returned from my vacation, and the hiatus that followed. (Vacation to recover from vacation? Madness!) Today, we’re going to take a look at an alternative navigation tool, an addon that provides some of the functionality found in the Cartographer suite. (We’ve talked about Cartographer before.)

TomTom is a mod that provides a few simple features that can supplement your adventures, especially while leveling. Combined with Lightheaded, (We’ve also talked about Lightheaded before.) TomTom can shave time off your travels between quest objectives.

The primary purpose of TomTom is to facilitate the creation and use of waypoints. Using this feature gives a player the option to have a Crazy Taxi-like arrow displayed that will guide them towards their waypoint. Combined with Lightheaded, which can be used to find coordinates for quest objectives via user comments on Wowhead, this addon can let you bounce between quest objectives with a minimum of wasted time and travel.

Unfortunately, it cannot be used to auto-run your character, so you can forget about grabbing a sandwich on your way to Marshall’s Refuge. TomTom will also display a coordinate frame that gives a quick visual reference to your current location.

There is more to see, come back after the break to get your addon fix for the day.So you’re back, just when we thought all the drama about Wrath leaks had chased you off. (For the record, some of us here at WoW Insider could care less about leaks and just want to play some World of Warcraft.)

Back to TomTom then! Using the waypoints is pretty intuitive, as the developer has included some thoughtful touches. You can configure the little features by using the following command:

• /tomtom

To create a waypoint via slash commands, use these commands:

• /way XX YY
  
• • example: /way 44 58
    
• /way XX YY Zone
  
• • example: /way 44 58 Nagrand (zone specific waypoint)
    
• /way XX YY Descripton
  
• • example: /way 44 58 Go here for swine love (waypoint with description)
• /way reset all
• • resets waypoints (duh)
• /way reset Zone
• • resets waypoints in a specific zone

The first of the thoughtful touches are presented in the “General Options” tab. Here you can adjust the distance at which a waypoint is cleared, and whether or not TomTom should save a waypoint until you remove them. It’s the good, old fire-and-forget technology we seem to love. In a nutshell, this means once you reach your waypoint, it will automatically clear. (If you’ve configured the addon this way)

The next feature I want to point out is the Coordinate Block (having its own tab in the options interface), which shows you your current location. The options here are pretty simple, you can toggle the display of the block, adjust its size and color and how accurate you want your coordinates to be. For the most part, I use one-decimal coordinates, but normally you can get by without the decimal and use the “XX,YY” format. Most Wowhead users provide coordinates in this way.)

You can also configure the Waypoint itself via the “Waypoint Arrow” tab. Here you can adjust features to show estimated time of arrival (kind of handy), lock the arrow, change the “Arrival Distance” and the colors use to determine if you are traveling it the correct direction. (Default: green for good, yellow for medium and red for bad.) Basically it means if you’re going in the wrong direction, the arrow turns red, right direction is green and anything in between goes yellow. Regarding the “Arrival Distance”; this distance determines how far you are from your current waypoint before the arrow points down, indicating you have arrived.

Next we have the minimap waypoints, which show your waypoints on your minimap, as well as showing an arrow, akin to the arrows that point towards towns and cities, which points towards your waypoint if it is not actually on the minimap. There is also an option to toggle tooltips on your minimap that display information about your waypoints when you hover over them on your minimap.

The “World Map” tab holds options for basically the same features found on your minimap, to include tooltip information for your waypoints. However, this is also where you can enable the display of cursor and player coordinates.

Finally, the feature I have come to love the most; the ability to integrate Lightheaded. Alright, so it may not seem big at first, but there is more. If you’re reading through the comments about a particular quest and come across the coordinates for your quest objective, they will be highlighted in blue. Clicking these blue coordinates will automatically create a corresponding waypoint, with the quest name as the name. For those of who not using QuestHelper, this is a great feature. Yes, I had to mention it, a lot of these features are integrated into the King Mukla of leveling addons, but at a fairly hefty memory cost in my opinion.

Thats it for now, check it out, or don’t, just spare me the “addon integrity” rhetoric. (I jest, and it you’re not sure what that refers to, you’re one of the lucky few.) Dismissed!

Tags: leveling-addon, navigation, navigation-addon, tomtom, tomtom-addon, waypoint, waypoint-addon, waypoint-setting

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Add-Ons, Features, AddOn Spotlight, Leveling