There is a new tool I made hoping it is found useful. It gives you coordinates for optimized area coverage with your individual finder radius incl. if you have it range enhanced and/or work in indoor conditions. There are three modes available: rectangular area and traversal along a Z-curve, square with Hilbert curve, and circle/hexagon along a spiral. It is entirely self-contained (HTML & JavaScript) in a single file, meaning it requires no outside resources and does not send any data to the server. You can download and run it locally or even offline. All it requires is a modern browser that interprets the HTML5 Canvas element. Testing is ongoing, but I believe it should be working so far short of deliberate play with crazy parameters. Checks will be added as seen necessary. It is currently pre-filled with a few numbers to play, these will ofc be removed eventually. Documentation is currently minimal, but I hope it is straighforward and intuitive to use. I'll put something more proper in this post later. Let me know if you run into any bugs or problems. I know the bounding box calculation is not yet correct in all circumstances, and reverse/mirror/rotate options are planned. Intended usage: - Create coordinate field with the tool (settings explained in instructions there) - Copy everything to a sticky note in game, split if too long - Move to each point in the order they are given as precisely as ground conditions permit - Press 'P' to create waypoint in chat - Copy & paste waypoint into notecard replacing the text - Delete point where mining is not possible or desired - When done, you have a string of waypoints for convenient traversal on repeat runs Link: http://sandals-eu.neocities.org/grid.html Cheers!
- Fixed rectangle bounding box, and it recognizes direction now i.e. you can also go from east to west and/or south to north. - Added straight line mode. - Added generic reverse option.
San, this is an interesting concept, but wondering how the current functionality or anticipated future functionality would compare to the existing LBML tool. I understand that this tool does not send any information to a server, so that is a difference if some people consider that a drawback. Interested to know your thoughts.
This tool is deliberately frugal. It doesn't replace LBML, since it doesn't do any data collection and sharing. It only helps with the coordinates for your solo game. And this is where LBML is overkill, if that's all you want. Some miners prefer to keep their information to themselves anyway. A downside of LBML (for me at least) is that you need to leave fullscreen mode or have a second screen.
San, Thanks for the reply. I totally get it as a less cumbersome (for those that typically play in full screen mode) manner of plotting your path for mining. Each player has their own style and that includes what information they want to share and what they do not, so the tool definitely can be useful to some players. Good luck with your continued development of the tool.
Not sure exactly what you are referring to. I am absolutely no expert in mining, there are far more competent people to turn to with questions. As for coverage of swathes of landscapes, the rectangle is probably the easiest and most popular. I want to add a few more possibilites, esp. rotating the pattern to enable better adaptation to ground conditions, like e.g. lining it up with mountain ranges. When I find the time. The Hilbert curve looks nice in the overview, but is a bit cumbersome to traverse since you're changing direction all the time, and you can only activate one waypoint at a time since neighbours are equidistant which would lead you in chaotic order through the in-game display of always only the nearest one. The spiral pattern is great if you know you can't cover the whole place anyway, so you start at a teleporter and go just as far as you can afford without having to make too many decisions. Or use it to carpet bomb pvp zones which are circular.
Fermat's spiral is not equidistant, and it has more than one leg. You'd have to travel back in between. http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ This link is mentioned in a source code comment as reference. The treatise is excellent and exhaustive. It is the basis for this program. The underlying hex grid is always the same, with a few modes of traversal which make sense.
Update pending with the ability to parse waypoints created in chat, and produce output as game-compatible waypoint commands.
