Test Run Failure!

[+NevadaWolf]

I just finished building the zones and actions for my historical tour of Carson City. Total was 36 zones (along the sidewalks) and one character following the player around. Only 3-5 pictures so far, and no sounds. Zones built using the Edit Online tool

 

Everything worked beautifully in the Emulator - with an action firing upon entry and exit of a zone, the character moving where she was supposed to, and all the zones appearing and disappearing as the player moved through the neighborhood.

 

So, trial time and actually walk the thing.

 

Disaster!!

 

My first zone was alright, being right next to the starting coordinates (the parking lot), everything did exactly as it was meant to. Once I left that zone, a whole lot went wrong -

 

1) *probably just me* In acknowledging the OK button, I would push Ok on my PPC and whoops... closed the program. Drat, four times got me used to that.

 

2) GPS (Delorme BT-20) would maintain the green LED indicating signal, but the Player would go from full green bars to red to green again - causing it to lose my location.

 

3) Due to the above happening, I would be standing in front of one house and it would show I still had anywhere from 100-200 feet remaining. I'd walk to the supposed location and be blocks off my route.

 

4) Still with green LED and green bars - I would move, and the Player would not....

 

5) *need to check this* I would enter one zone, and a message from a zone blocks away would fire. Possibly either bad coding on my part, or it thinking I was someplace else.

 

6) Oddly, my PPC wouldn't recognize that I had an active program running and would go inactive and then my phone would turn off. **my problem** if my phone turns off while the GPS is connected - Bluetooth turns off - and, upon restart, the Player still shows green bars and full strength. ARGH!

 

7) Turn phone back on, relaunch BT, reconnect GPS, relaunch Player - and I'm now three houses behind my location.

 

The only time that things worked properly was after each reboot and reconnect. Then set the phone down to take a picture - and after a few moments it would catch up and fire the appropriate action (YEA!) and then two houses later it would lose it again.

 

Has anyone else actually gone out and walked their cartridge and had it work exactly as expected? I'm really really hoping that my gear just really hates me.

[Jeremy]

NevadaWolf,

 

I must say that I am impressed with your ambitious project! Hopefully you aren't too discouraged with your first attempt at building Wherigo cartridges. I'll try and offer some suggestions on how to get this working to your satisfaction.

 

It looks like the main issue is GPS signal and the jumping that is occurring. We do set the bar (both figuratively and literally) with the GPS signal requirements for processing location. So while you have green lights on your bluetooth device the Wherigo Player may notice that your signal is too poor to process your location accurately. If there is a temporary loss of satellites it will also show red even though the GPS device may just skip over that one instance. It is very much a real time rendition of the kind of signals coming from your GPS. Since we haven't tested that particular Bluetooth gps it can be hard to duplicate on our end as well.

 

I would suggest creating a new cartridge that only has a couple of zones to limit the amount of testing you need to do. Even just creating a few zones and navigating to them in the real world would be a good start. That way you can get a good feel with how the zones work in the real world instead of the perfect world of 5 bars in the emulator.

 

I'll also add that we use hysteresis as part of calculating zones to reduce the amount of bounce that happens when you get on the edge on the zone. The short of it is that when you enter the zone the zone size pops out slightly so you can remain in the zone even if the accuracy of the signal isn't perfect. And hysteresis isn't perfect either since you can still bounce around when the signal isn't very good.

 

I hope this helps some. I have found when testing carts created by the Wherigo team that when an additional zone is created it can double the complexity of the cartridge. If you flesh out a few zones very well you can end up creating a better experience overall.

 

I also had one more suggestion about zone building. If you have issues with lots of little zones you can always create larger ones and give the objects and characters in the locations their own coordinates. That way the person playing the cartridge can just navigate to the object in the zone instead of navigating to various locations to interact with characters. We found that having people navigate to specific coordinates within a zone helps to enhance the experience by directing the person to exactly where you want them to be.

[+NevadaWolf]

NevadaWolf,

 

I must say that I am impressed with your ambitious project! Hopefully you aren't too discouraged with your first attempt at building Wherigo cartridges.

 

Discouraged? Heck no! Its a personal challenge now. I don't like it when a piece of plastic and metal outwits me.

 

I also had one more suggestion about zone building. If you have issues with lots of little zones you can always create larger ones and give the objects and characters in the locations their own coordinates. That way the person playing the cartridge can just navigate to the object in the zone instead of navigating to various locations to interact with characters.

 

Oh, didn't think of that. Perfect! As one problem I had was houses/zones to close to each other.

 

One question / suggestion - but as it relates to Building I'll put it under the proper forum.

 

Thanks Jeremy!!