A sense of direction

[Nikodemus]

Oh, if had more time, i would comment.
But you are fast,  won't say ;> You are approaching an idea i had in mind for a while. Except pictures ;>

And your image is not a compass ;P well you didn't call it so, but those who did don't know the topic. Unless in english people don't see a difference beetwen a rotating plate, (like on the image) and a rotating needle.

[Pizzasgood]

Speaking for U.S. "English" only (dunno 'bout them Brits), we don't see a difference between one device that has an arrow pointing north and another, at least in my experience.  Needle, plate, orb, LCD, whatever.  It points direction.

I also had thoughts on using a light shield and a hollow "needle" for C-needle, so that a spot of light would land on your angle or, in the map-toting version, your location.  That would help take care of the issue of projecting from the needle to the point, since it would be up in the air a bit when you're a good ways away from the crystal.

One way to make triangulation easier if you went the binocular-compass route instead of crystal-needle attraction would be to have a pre-marked rod between the two needle mounts.  Then just use that to "measure" the distance between the two rear ends of the needles, but you'd actually be measuring the distance to the crystal.  At least, if you're pointed at it well enough.  The rod could help with that too though, because if you're pointed correctly, each needle will be at the same notch in opposite directions.  They'd have to be spaced widely enough to make a visible difference though.  I'll have to run the numbers on that one to see if it would work.  If you replaced the needles with telescopes, you could also use it as a general purpose range-finder.  But again, that would probably need big distances to be measurable, unless you stuck some long levers on the ends and gave them fulcrums near the scopes, to amplify the distances (and function as fine-adjustment).  You have to aim pretty precisely though.

I downloaded the latest Blender last night and it feels faster than 2.44.  So I think I will make some compass models this weekend just for the heck of it.  I need an excuse to practice anyways.

[Nikodemus]

Maybe i reply without images yet ;P

And something i forgot before:
Thanks for Erisnas for pointing out there are 6 bronze doors, this would explain why it would be good to cartographicaly divide Yliakum into 6 parts, one every 60^o !

Pizzasgood
The idea with weights is interesting, but i have doubts it would work at all. I don't think the force, which would make the arrow point the crystal is strong enough to attach weights to it and see when they are too heavy. Additionally, I'm not that much into science, but i thik the arrow would change angle no matter what weights you add. lighter weihts would change the weights very slightly, heavier - stronger. And even if not that, it would be pain in the ass to add these weights. I'm too lazy to count possibilities, But lets say you have 15 weights of 3 kinds to use and you should be able to measure hypotenuse of 80km... with exactness to 10m this means 8 000 of possibilities :s Even if we had enough weights for that many possibilities, there is no frakking force, which would make me to ad these weights, while my hand start to shake with the compas on it ;P
(50m, 60km is exactness not good enoug for me ;>)
If you was thinkng about professional cartographers, who attach their compass to the ground for stability, i think they would use istead a normal compass. To determine height of hills on each level, they would measure the two angles and distances been wen each of their measurnment. With enough measurnments, they could form an equation wth one unknown, calculate it and then calculate all the other unknowns.
Triangulation it is called i gues.

Going further with your post. You can dig the Yliakum dimensions ;P I gues you would look into "Yliakum geography" for reference? ;P
The book author messed it up A prove for it you have there , because 25^o or 30^o for a level slope is too much.

then the back end of the needle will point at your location.

I fail to see it ;P


As for the differences beetwen compasses, the needle one is for personal use, the disk one was mounted on ship and still are i think. There we call it "busola" It is more complicated, more precise and honestly i know not enough to elaborate what is the exact difference beetwen it and a casual compass :]

[Pizzasgood]

You can dig the Yliakum dimensions

Yeah, I've seen a them in a couple different places, including that image you made.  Just hadn't gotten around to digging them out.

As for compasses with disks, I have a handheld one.  It's the kind where it's in a clamshell case, and the top part of the case, when opened, has a slit with a wire down the center that you can use to line up with landmarks.  I never bother with it though.  Usually I don't even bother with that particular compass, because it's so much more bulky than the standard kind and you can't see through it to use it with a map.  It's more for surveying than camping.

I definitely didn't convey the "weights" idea well.  You wouldn't be adding weights at all.  The C-needle would be housed within a tube with a spring/rubber-band holding it back.  Then the crystal would pull on it, and you could calculate the distance based on displacement.  But it wouldn't work anyways.  Aside from the issue of being pulled away from you all the time, the displacements that would be practical for such a device wouldn't give much accuracy.

Triangulating the distance of the crystal with the method I described also won't work on any kind of realistic setup.  It would take modern equipment to get enough precision out of the angles.  After I look at the actual dimensions I'll see if I can think of another way.

(50m, 60km is exactness not good enoug for me ;>)

Those were just random numbers, since I didn't know whether we were dealing with things 5 km across or 250 km across.  Looking at your picture, that would be horrible precision

As for the back end of the needle pointing at your location, I can't really explain much better than I did.  Basically, the C-needle will be pointing from you to the sun, so if you pretended it's fulcrum was the sun and Yliakum were below it, the end of the needle pointing away from the real sun would be pointing at you in the imaginary Yliakum.  So then you just have to project a map of Yliakum that would match that, which it turns out is just the bird's eye view from the tip of the crystal.  Since the map is on a magnetized disk that always stays oriented it would work wherever you are.

Looking at your picture, I wonder if the angles would work out for some of the lower levels.  Eyeballing it looks like things will be fine for the first two, but past that the edges might be blocked by the above level.  Unless they stop being so.. over-lapping.  But that only messes up maps that show features.  You could replace them with simple color-coded lines, showing the edges of each level.  So if you know which level you're on, you could still get an idea for how far from the wall and edge you are.

I'm going to model it tomorrow or Saturday, so I'm not going to bother drawing it again (I already have sketches, but no scanner to digitize them).  Then this stuff should make more sense.

[Nikodemus]

mmm, Time for the product of mine:

Yliakean compass 6MB [you been waened]

Technical issues:
resize your browser to height 600px or lower
the outer ring is having some pattern and light flashes, which i don't know why are there. This unfortunately makes the angle-scale even harder visible.

Legend:
There are basically 5 elements
1. The grey part is the one you put on your hand and which keeps all the parts in one piece. It should have a plocking mechanism to block the rotating parts, when you want to check the angles.
2. The horizontal ring is the casual "compass" element, which show the north direction. It can rotate only horizontaly.
3. The outer ring with the globe inside. The globe is so that it can rotate in all 3 axis directions. It is pointing towards the Azure Sun. It is a complete full ring for proper weight disribution.
4. The goldish marker, which show the two angles.
5. Two bubble level elements for finding out the horizontal surface.

I gues thats it.
What bothers me, is that i'm not sure the friction isn't too high and i'm not sure if there is much you can do to decrease it.

You can triangulate with the above compass. The best way to do so is measure two point of the same height and the distance beetwen them.

The levels do overlap, that was known since the start, if Talad and laanx was math and efficiency freaks, then i'm sure that the light radiating from the Crystal is parallel to the wall surface, so that the walls arent really lighted up ;> So, the lower the level, the less it is overlaped.

[Donari Tyndale]

Great thing, Nikodemus! Don't worry about the friction, there's magic

[Pizzasgood]

I haven't forgotten this.  Just been busier than I expected.  I have a basic version (not the kind that points to your location) modeled and rigged (armature's on layer 2), but not textured.  Oh, and I just realized I forgot to connect the needle-housing to the rest of the compass, so that's floating...  There's a .blend file at http://www.browserloadofcoolness.com/art/3d/planeshift/simple_compass.blend
That's just a work in progress.  I need to connect it and make sure the normals are correct.  Then I'll probably skip texturing and start on the fancier version that points out your location.  Then I'll go through and texture and render both.

By the way, I don't remember much about centers of gravity and rigid body dynamics, so I'm not sure if the way I counterbalanced the needle in the simple version above would actually work.  In case you haven't looked at it, I basically chopped off half the needle to save space, then added a bulge where it used to be that should be filled with something heavy enough to perfectly counterbalance the long end of the needle.  I know that you can do that to balance it horizontally, but I don't remember if it would remain stable at any arbitrary angle.  If not, that particular design wouldn't work unless the attraction to the crystal was enough to make the error due to gravity negligible.


Oh, and I see you thought to use a ring too   I didn't think about sliders though.  Those are nifty.  I used more of a forked needle type thing.  Slightly less precise to read, but it also has less potential to get filled with gunk and no need for lubrication.  Plus, it kinda looks like the windowless tower   (hey, there's another method for naviagation:  big lighthouse-style towers spaced at known distances.  They could serve triple purpose as "lighthouses", communication, and lookouts.  Probably only within certain fiefdoms or districts though, unless an entire level was organized and cooperated, which doesn't seem likely.  I never paid much attention to the government aspect of the settings though...)

[Unnamed_Source]

How hard is it to get lost on a freak'n donut?

You have a cliff on one side and a sheer face on the other so if you don't head in either of those directions you will eventually get back to where you came from.

[Nikodemus]

if you pay attention annamed you would know this discussion is only in part about getting lost. So if you are comenting on that, it would be nice to comment on the rest, what is in fact in majority of this thread.
Besides if you didn't notice, people complain all the time they get lost And think, what we have now is only tiny part of what is to come one day. We have zones, which cover are of from the edge to the wall long. It should be 10km if  remember right. But it is like 5km right now.

I know that you can do that to balance it horizontally, but I don't remember if it would remain stable at any arbitrary angle.

Yeah, i think it wouldn't work. but I know a little on the topic too, maybe even less than you. Because of that, just in case, i formed the outer ring to be full.

heh, my sliders are nifty, although i believe they could sometimes block the device unintentionally. Because: the ball will want to move both horizontally and vertically, if at a time at some angle the vertical force will be strong enough to pus the slider into the horizontal ring so that the horizontal force moving the bal won't overcome it, then the device won't move, untill you move it so that, the friction will decrease enough. If you see what i mean.
And yea, like Donari wes laugting that we have magic ;P But i gues he knows well how i feel about it ;> Magic is good, but it isn't always that easy ;> As easy as people often introduce in games, a force with no logic and conseqeences.

Your device for a change has very small potential for a friction. If  saw it right. The ring for magnetic field is like mine, but the part showing the crystal is a ring and a needle. The ring is mounted to the rest and rotating only hotizontlly but the needle is mounted on that ring, with ability to move only vertically. In effect that part works like my ball.
I have been thinking about that too, but instead i realised that i can decrease fricton and problem with blocking sliders in my device, in a different way.
I can reduce the device to smaller ring rotating around the grey part and only a ball inside the grey part. Additionally trap the ball in a glass bubble, filled with oil.
Draw angle scale on the ball, another on the glass bubble for comparison and thus finding horizontal angle of he ball. But then, without the sliders one has to sum the horizontal angle of the ball and the angle of magnetic ring. This isn't very practical, but in such a form can work 360^o vertically.
I gues it is hard to see it by words. I can provide another flash animation on request.

[Unnamed_Source]

No actually my comment was dead on. You are getting all excited about adding an element to the game that is quite absurd. PS is not set on a vast empty space, like an ocean or desert or flying in the open sky. No! PS is set in a cave with walls and cliffs. Very good and obvious land marks ones that at beta should be seen quite clearly in the back grounds. The whole notion of a compass and the wasted effort to bringing one about is what I questioned.

But really, people get lost in PS?? REALY?!? WOW, that just blows my mind, how the heck can anyone get lost in a bordered zone, it's not like you can walk unbound in any direction with out end. And then for later on just think about it, you have a sheer face on one side and a drop on the other. we are talking about a face as tall as a mountain and the drop can be like talking about a ocean, cause that empty space is just as flat and featureless as if it was water filled. As an example, lets use LA. To the north you got the San Bernardino mountains to the south you got the Pacific Ocean and in between you got a bit under 50 miles of city and burbs. Even in the LA smog haze you can make out the mountains to the north and the empty space to the south. So I don't know how with the miniscule distance of just 10K you can't see the two obvious and most distinct land marks of the PS landscape. Now if the wall is on your right, you are traveling counter clockwise and if its on your left you are travleing clock wise and 10 K is not that far to see whats around, it's not like there's a horizon either.
 
So, what's next in the works? Let me guess, a sextant so you can plot longitude and latitude by the glow worms in the ceiling...

It's quite apparent that you all have talent, why can't you apply it to more constructive means.. I don't know, like mounts..  Anyway I apologize for deflating your balloon.

[Marqsaynt]

*Starts a movie style slow clap* Good for you Magellan, you're innate sense of direction is amazing.

However, prepare to have your mind blown again. I've been playing this game for nearly two years, as I recall the first update I ever was around for they added that awesomely bizarre spawning grass stuff... so I guess you could say I'm older than the grass. And you know what? I still get lost. I couldn't tell you which is the north-south-west-eastarn Hydlaa gate and I still find myself occasionally getting seriously turned around on a trip to Oja and back.

By the way, I'm from SoCal, I've lived in LA and I would get lost there too. Short of "if you see the ocean, that's west" and freeway signs I almost never had any idea which compass direction I was going. And I figure I can't be all that alone either... unless those GPS systems in cars are just for show.

Just because you feel this isn't a useful allocation of resources doesn't mean it's true. I for one wouldn't mind a compass and if i was, oh say, a newcomer to the game, or someone RPing a mapmaker, I could also see how it could come in very handy.

*re-inflates the "balloon"* 

P.S. When the heck can you ever see anything all the way around you in LA?

[DaldarWraith]

I may well be as far from whats going on as i can be here, but i feel the need to give my view.

To start with as far as i can see the idea behind this thread is to evolve an idea, someone saw a base problem and the thread ( ideas) have evolved from there. where as the last post by Unnamed Source seems to want to de-evolve it.
We all have to remember that evolution is a good thing, after all without it PS would still be a dream inside someone ( /me bows my head in homage).

I can understand the point of landmarks being enough to start with and yes in the current PS world it may well be hard to get lost although i for one have done. And thats for a very simple reason, we can't always be in a place to see vast distance for example in a valley and i have found myself in a few.

The idea of having some math basic directional system is a good idea no matter what path it takes, After all there is a cartography skill and the more accurate the map the better in my opion. I'll leave you guys to discuss it and for the PS teams to sort out the refinements since all the Gods know i'm no great mind for such matters. I'm far happier with the light on my back and my flute playing softly.

[Starg]

As a person with a great deal of cartographic experience, I thought I could add something to this conversation.

The person above suggests that there is no way to get lost in Yliakum.  I know it's not possible to ever get lost anywhere (you always know where you are, you are right where you are standing!)  Many people perceive that they can get lost, so it doesn't matter what he thinks.

I recommend that you try to stick to a conventional 2 axis horizontal projection for each level.  The reason is that while it would be fun to use polar coords or some other system, many people would not be able to use or understand those systems.  Even though a horizontal projection doesn't work at all well on the Earth, we use that very projection for simpliciity, and it is likely that Yliakumites would do so too.

The next question is how do we measure the directions?  On Earth, we are lucky enough to have a fairly consistent whole planet magnetic field, but it is by no means certain the same would be true for Yliakum.  My personal opinion is that a system which points toward the Azure Sun would be hopelessly complicated for most people, because aligning the map would be extremely difficult.  So I recommend trying to find some means for keeping a northing and easting sort of system.  If there is no magnetic field, perhaps the magic flux could orient the compass.  Or perhaps a magnetic tip on the Azure Sun would have a measurable polarity with Yliakum instruments.

The ideas of using the directions of the bronze doors is interesting, however how would such a system be used when the doors aren't visible?  Again magic could come to the rescue, but we run into issues of which direction are we going again.  If we are going wallward for example, it doesnt tell us where we are unless we know where we are going wallward toward.  And try to decipher this: bearing 5 degrees right of door 4, with 30 degree axial tilt making us 3000 meters wallward of the center.  While that kind of measurement is mappable, it is very difficult for the layman to understand.  Compare that with 3000 meters south 4000 meters east from the center, which is much easier for most people to visualize.

[Erisnas]

Perhaps we could develop two objects to be sold in Yliakum.  One for the common man that has simple functions.  The other of course being for the more skilled in cartography and navigation.  That way anyone could find their way around Yliakum, but a few people could be popular due to their skill in finding exact locations.

[Nikodemus]

There is one thing in Unnamed post, which is true. We should see the 5km high wall, looking in the wallward direction. So you know where you are... somewhat. But if you want to reach a place, which isn't near the wall, you may have a hard time. Additionally you may be in the forest and see nothing around you. Really you can get lost. Not to mention you may be in stone labirynths or some tunels inside Yliakum.
Ok i won't care about explaining more, because you kind of ignored way too much, so you understand

Starg,
The polar coors are not only fun to do, but are also practical, because you can find them out with just one tool . How are you going to find your position in cartesian coordinate system? (I believe you you know bunch of things about cartography, tell us (: ) You can tell people, go to a point 3000 meters south 4000 meters east from the center, but how are they supposed to know where exactly is it? And they need to know in what direction go too, what is another thing they don't know if you won't tell how they finds it out where they are.
I don't know why you complicated so much giving direction in polar coords system. I try to desipher what you made sound complicated. "Right of" i take as looking in the doords direction, so wallward. There are 6 doors, one every 60^o, so 4th doors will be 180^o, if 1st gate is at 0^o. (0^o should be north, so if the gates aren't put that perfectly, you take the zones they are in as the marker of your position, or rather its centers) So, your "bearing 5 degrees right of door 4" would mean a point 185^o 3km from the Azure Sun, which you reach if you go at 30^o from north direction, or you meant 30^o from the edgeward direction.
So you gave not only the position of place, but also the exact direction you have to walk. Thats beter than giving only the place position, without telling where to go to reach it.
But that is only for educated people who know math - both methods. Lets keep in mind there was only a few of these in the distant past. A commoner who maybe can't afford a compass anyway, will be told to go 1 hour in the edgeward-rightwards direction and he will. He will look at the Azure sun or in the wallward direction from time to time and he will reach the destination, even if not perfectly, without any tools. He will walk along an arc if he can't figure out that he does so everytime he walk right or leftward direction, but it still isn't that bad.
Tell someone in the middle of nothing, with no compass to go south-west. I wonder what direction he pick .

Making a map with the introduced tools would be extremaly simple, as you just go around, make measurements and mark them on the map. When i think how deformed was medieval maps, i can't think how this could happen in Yliakum.
Of course everything this if there is magnetic field, which hopefully can show north. magic flux, if only it show the same direction no matter where you are in Yliakum, then fine. The Azure Sun is extremaly magical by itself, so i suppose someone would figure out a way to find out where it is located, although if there comes about magic, it is mostly speculating


Erisnas, thats the point!