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Board » Technical Support » Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.

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Posted by
jf44


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2009-06-19 08:26:04
2017-02-26 11:25:30 - Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
Hi SOLers.

I am trying to improve a lot the SOL's Google Earth interface. The idea is to display each Soler boat at course in 3D in G.E. with the right direction, speed, sail and trajectory...
Very fancy and absolutely useless.
All what I like so much in the RKN's spirit.

It's something I was used to do with Virtual Regatta and I thought it was a lot more easy with SOL very open philosophy.

But alas it's not.

1) Collecting data with NMEA Proxy from Brainaid's toolbox, I get the name, direction, speed and state of each boat.
Perfect.
But nor the TWA nor the TWS of each "friend" boat.
Yes I know that I could get them from Grib, but it's a lot of work for such a few data.

2) For each boat I need also the type of sail used at the positions collected.
That too could be derived from TWA and TWS and the boat polar.

3) And for the sake of realism, I need for each boat the hull and sails colors.

They don't exist anywhere because SOL does not need them, so I could invent them. But would'nt it be better to give the opportunity to solers to choose their wardrobe ?

So my questions :

It is a way to get the TWA / TWS data for each boat on course directly from SOL server (is that possible and how ?)

OR

get them from the AIS sentences sended by the Brainaid's NMEA proxy server (they need to be added to the flow of data).



Jean from Nantes.
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Posted by
Rod


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2010-06-24 22:30:48
2017-02-26 15:07:07 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
May I refer you to an existing program called VirtualSailor 7.5, by Ilan Papini, which produces a much more realistic sailing experience than SOL. It does not, however, have a lot of the SOL features, such as polars, predictor lines, NOAA Wx, or as many sailing sites. It also cannot handle more than about 20-25 boats at a time.
It does have a free demo feature, and is entirely self contained within your own computer.
While these are definitely deficiencies from the point of view of SOLers, it has many features which would increase the sailing experience for those who are less "competitive", and gives a greatly improved 'visual' look at sailing and racing. It has small freighters, small submarines, motor cruisers, speedy racing run-abouts, guns, torpedoes, lighthouses, navigation buoys, harbours, houses, old castles, etc.. along with waves, rain, hail, and snow. It even has men jogging for exercise along the piers in the harbours. Most of these things may be ignored for our purposes in SOL.
Perhaps Mr Papini might be induced to collaborate with SOL to produce a much improved and much more extensive sailing experience.
The VirtualSailor 7.5 program costs about $35.00 Can. but volunteers have designed extensive additions to the basic program in terms of boats, scenery and sailing sites.
There is no need to "re-invent the wheel" when so much of the work has already been done.
One aspect that may be helpful to SOL is that this could be a program that could be purchased from SOL, and this would help markedly in the overall finances of the SOL operation.

--- Last Edited by Rod at 2017-02-26 15:10:42 ---
If it breaks, it's not strong enough--if it doesn't, it's too heavy.
Posted by
jf44


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2009-06-19 08:26:04
2017-02-27 01:05:59 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
Thanx Rod. I know of course that there is a lot of very good virtual sailing games, like for exemple Vieux Loup de Mer (VLM), Ocean Virtuel, Liveskipper, VSK, etc.

My purpose is not to program nth on-line game but to display our SailOnLine boats on Google Earth maps.
No more, and just for the fun.
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Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2017-02-27 02:14:23 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
That would be marvellous! For TWA/TWS from other boats you need to get the weather and determine TWD/TWS at the other's position yourself. If you're already retrieving fleet positions and heading directly from sol, this should not be much of a problem.

To use different hull/sail colours for the each boat, you can initially use the one colour automatically and randomly assigned when you register (again, not much additional trouble to retrieve these colours). Later we could use flagpole* to have users change their hull/sail colours.

I can probably help you in the right direction if you're stuck.

*) http://sol.kroppyer.nl/flagpole/
You can create flags, and activate them for your own boat. The meaning of each flag is up to the interpretation of the users. Basically, flagpole let's solers add arbitrary data to their boat, for everyone else to see. If I think it's worth it, I could extend flagpole a little so that people don't have to create a flag for every colour of the rainbow.
Posted by
jf44


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2009-06-19 08:26:04
2017-02-27 02:48:44 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
Thanx Kroppyer.
Actually I do not retrive positions directly from Sol but by the Brainaid's Toolbox NMEA server.

How can I access to the boats colors ? Is there any Web service like
http://node1.sailonline.org/webclient/boat.xml?token=xxxxxxxx

BTW I have set up random colors for the boats.

regards.
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Posted by
Kipper1258


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2015-06-18 22:08:49
2017-02-27 03:27:29 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
You need this file http://node1.sailonline.org/webclient/race_1018.xml?token=xxxx which has for each boat

<boat>
<id>285746</id>
<name>simon_148</name>
<color_R>225</color_R>
<color_G>197</color_G>
<color_B>33</color_B>
<type>TP-52</type>
<dtg>576.196679386</dtg>
<dbl>210.385518882</dbl>
<lon>114.2</lon>
<lat>22.3</lat>
<cog>0.798365726218</cog>
<ranking>179</ranking>
<current_leg>0</current_leg>
<log>0.0</log>
</boat>

Note that it is a compressed file and your code needs to uncompress it when you receive it.
Posted by
jf44


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2009-06-19 08:26:04
2017-02-27 09:14:17 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
Thanx Kroppyer Kipper,
This piece of code works "à la perfection" :).
But this is only hull color. So I think the best will be to publish a form to allow Sollers to choose their sails.

BTW is it a mean to get old messages from race 1018 chat because I have missed the comments about my pictures.



--- Dernière modification par jf44 le 2017-02-27 16:08:03 ---
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Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2017-02-27 13:15:00 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
The last post was not me but Kipper, he knows his way around this tech side as well. Have a look here to see some of his work.

Sailonline only uses one colour for boats (no separate sail colours), and people can't choose their hull colour either (well, RC can, but she's special). My suggestion is to get everything working with just this single colour, and then indeed use some kind of form where people can change their hull/sail colour.

Chat messages are stored but we don't normally check old messages, it something I'm only prepared to do when investigating possible rule infringements, which luckily doesn't really happen in sol :)
Posted by
jf44


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2009-06-19 08:26:04
2017-02-27 23:35:54 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
Thanx. If course I know (and use) DC Checker.

I am implementing the direct access to Sol server. It will more effective than to depend on NMEA sentences which require un local server.

I hope that the beta version will be on line this evening or tomorrow.

I'll use my own server, but if you think that it would be better to use a SOLFan one, I can FTP the sources (PHP) (Creative commons / GNU licence of course)

Jean.
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Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2017-02-28 00:12:45 - Re: Getting TWA and TWS of "friends" boats.
I think javakeda (hosting solfans) would be happy to host your code on solfans. I'm also happy to host it on sol.kroppyer.nl. But it's probably easiest if you use your own server, at least while beta testing. I'll link to it from sol.kroppyer.nl though! :)

Looking forward to the beta!

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