Can't seem to stay in the zone

[+Zorkan_Heneron]

Hopefully someone can help me out. I was testing one of my cartridges I built in the park near my home and everything was working fine. On occasion I "moved" out of the zone and had to go back into it. I realize the GPS can move me out of the zone when it rechecks it's location. My zones were 40 ft by 40 ft. The number of times I got knocked out of the zones was acceptable. I completed all the testing of the cartridge and moved all the zones to the actual place in the forest where the cartridge was ment to run. Because of the occasional zone knock out in the test area, I increased the zone size to 80 x 80 ft. thinking that would solve my problems, however it has actually gotten worse. I have a few people helping me beta test and they are getting knocked out of the zones several times before completing the actions in the zone.

 

The forest is not too heavy with foliage and the weather was clear. When inside any of the zones I only have 3 zones active, the one I'm in and the two other closest. Should I be making the zones even bigger? Any help would be appreciated.

 

Zorkan Heneron

[Ranger Fox]

I see you had a Garmin Oregon in 2011. If you're still using that to test cartridges, you might want to be advised Garmin's Wherigo Player seems to recognize zero meters and similar to be within a zone. Everything else is within proximity. (Unless Garmin has done something to update their player since I last tested with my Colorado a couple years ago.) If you're just displaying messages and/or inputs to the user, you could do this on proximity and set the zone to inactive while the user interacts with them so the event isn't triggered a second time (thereby crashing Garmin's player if the user was on an input).

[+Zorkan_Heneron]

Thanks Ranger Fox for your answer. I have a couple of more questions for verification. I have the trigger set for the zones for "on Entry". The reason for that was to get the player as close to a particular area. I have tacks on trees in the form of numbers for the player to find. These numbers are for the cacher to figure out the true location of the cache. I do this as a type of anti hacking so the armchair hackers actually have to go to the location. I know that good practice is to use "on Proximity" with zones but I figured the cacher may then be too far from the numbers on the trees.

So if I was to drop the concept of anti hacking and numbers on trees and went to "on Proximity" triggers for the zone what would be a good size for the zones?

 

There are messages upon entry to a zone and usually 2 or 3 items to interact with in the zone with messages coming up with each interaction.

 

If I set the zone inactive upon "Proximity" can I still interact with the items in the room?

 

I currently have actions triggered "on exit". What would be the best way to get them triggered when the zone is inactive? In other words how can I get the "exit" triggers to work without reactivating the "proximity" triggers when the cacher starts moving to the next zone?

 

Thanks in advance

[+Zorkan_Heneron]

In addition to my last post the other problem was all the items in the zone were disappearing until the cacher wandered around to get back into the zone. I thought once you were in the zone, if it was big enough the items would remain visible. my zones were 80 X 80 ft. I thought that would be large enough to remain inside the zone.

 

Thanks

[Geo-Magician]

In addition to my last post the other problem was all the items in the zone were disappearing until the cacher wandered around to get back into the zone. I thought once you were in the zone, if it was big enough the items would remain visible. my zones were 80 X 80 ft. I thought that would be large enough to remain inside the zone.

 

Thanks

 

You are struggling with a conceptual design error of the zones. I wrote about a solution/workaround some time ago. It will do exactly what you want (get people close to a location and continue without zone jitter, items remain usable). Try his presentation to get your answers. http://www.earwigo.net/WWB/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=comfortzone.pdf

 

The document lists code for the Earwigo builder but it has a large concept part that should help you to find your way.