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Garmin Colorado and Wherigo


Motorsagemann

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I purchased a Garmin Colorado because it was Wherigo compatible.

 

I have found that, with many Wherigo caches, the Colorado doesn't "zero in" at a given stage. It will clock down to as low as 1 or 2 feet, but, never zero in and open the stage. It has done this at a variety of Wherigo caches.

 

Has anyone else ever experienced this and can offer any suggestions to correct?

 

Thank you,

 

Motorsagemann

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I purchased a Garmin Colorado because it was Wherigo compatible.

 

I have found that, with many Wherigo caches, the Colorado doesn't "zero in" at a given stage. It will clock down to as low as 1 or 2 feet, but, never zero in and open the stage. It has done this at a variety of Wherigo caches.

 

Has anyone else ever experienced this and can offer any suggestions to correct?

 

I've never seen that on my old Colorado 300 (now out of service because of broken rock 'n roller)

Some Wherigo's have tiny "hot zones' making it more difficult to zero in but it always worked fine on mine.

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I still have a Colorado, though I don't use it anymore.

 

In Wherigo, authors define their zone's area, or bounding box, by specifying several coordinates. This will create a shape on the map. There's also a coordinate pair that defines the zone's original point, or center. Cartridge authors primarily make use of two zone events, OnProximity and OnEnter. Proximity will fire when the player gets within a certain distance from the zone's bounding box. Enter will fire when the player crosses into the bounding box. This is how Wherigo is supposed to work.

 

It has been my experience with the Colorado that it does not follow the way Wherigo is supposed to work. Instead, in an attempt to save on processing time, the Colorado only seems to consider the zone's center. (I forgot if it was the original point or an average position of the coordinates that make up the zone's bounding box, but I believe it to be the center.) Because of this, OnProximity fires in proximity to the center while OnEnter will only fire when the GPSr zeros out. This is the issue you are experiencing. Yes, it is an absolute pain to have to zero out with any GPSr.

 

For the first several years of Wherigo, I strongly advocated using OnProximity as the Colorado and Oregon were the primary ways people played Wherigo. Now that smartphone apps, hopefully doing things the right way, are the primary ways people play Wherigo, I haven't pushed this position as much. It's largely up to the cartridge author which event to use. I think I still have Wherigo\\kit using OnProximity, so any cartridge made with Kit will be okay for you to play (though there's no easy way to tell which builder was used to create a cartridge).

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Hey Ranger Fox, you are such a great Wherigo knowledge base. Even after all these years of Wherigo programming experience I keep on learning (and wondering) from your posts :-) Even though I am also a Colorado user and testing my own cartridges with the Garmin and the smartphones, I wasn't aware of this behavior...

 

If you then use the OnProximity instead of the OnEnter, do you make your zones smaller to compensate for the earlier triggering? I would think that if your zone has a 10m radius in the OnEnter setup, you would make it a 5m radius zone with an OnProximity triggering within 5m?

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This does make things a little more challenging. Let me phrase the situation in a way others can easily see what you asked (you can skip to the next paragraph if you'd like). We're assuming a square zone, say 20m on each side (and thus a 10m radius circle would fit inside the square). This means the phone apps, that implement the zone's size correctly, would only require the player to get within 10m of the zone's actual center (for sake of simplicity, we're ignoring the square's corners) before OnEnter fires. The Garmin Player would require the player to get within 0m of the zone's center to fire OnEnter. The question asks about OnProximity. Let's say we compensate for the Garmin Player by setting the proximity event to trigger 10m from the zone. The Garmin Player would require the player to be 10m or less from the zone. That's great. But the player apps, again implementing Wherigo correctly, would then allow the player to be within 20m of the center before OnProximity is triggered (10m zone radius + 10m proximity). The question is a good one: what should we do with the zone's size? Additionally, you don't want an event to trigger too far away if you're referring to an object in the real world or the player might not know what you're talking about because they're too far away. You need the event to fire at just the right time.

 

That's a tough question to answer specifically because I get caught by one other question: do we implement things the right way or do we compromise due to the bugs? I'd love to suggest doing things the right way, but I know Garmin won't ever fix their player application, especially as most of those units are discontinued. I'd love to say to make the cartridge the right way, but I just can't. When I created Kit, I made it use proximity with small zones. I don't think the majority of people care about zone shapes and sizes; they just want to say something should happen when people get x distance close to their coordinates. So, for compatibility across all platforms, I'd just suggest a 5m across zone with a proximity distance equal to 3m plus the device's EPE (estimated position error), which can be assumed to be 5m or so unless you're in a city, so around 7m total. The apps would then fire when the player was 12m away, which is really generous, but then their accuracy isn't supposed to be as good as a dedicated GPSr, so I hope things even out.

 

Thank you for the compliment. A lot of my knowledge comes from being in this forum since epoch, when Wherigo was first released. If development ever resumes, I'm going to run into a problem keeping the past and present separate and you'll hear me saying stuff like, "it either worked this way or that's the way it works now." But, really, I wish there weren't so many little nuances and gotchas. Those surprises aren't good for a cartridge author to have to deal with.

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I suppose that in that setup you don't use characters and objects that "you see" inside a zone? Or did you go as far as to dynamically changing the zone around the player's current position? Alternatively, go could also put them in your inventory when you are near... Or was this setup only for simple "navigating zones only" cartridges?

 

One has to wonder whether we still need to pursue this setup. Was the Colorado the only device with that problem? I am using one myself but I do not hear a lot of other players. I still get a lot of remarks from players with an Oregon though.

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I believe characters and items will act as anticipated. Just make sure to have the option set to show zone contents on proximity instead of enter.

 

I can only verify the Colorado had this issue. Over the years, I've gotten mixed reports about the Oregon. I never did own one of those (and it was funny to see Oregon owners expect my Colorado to be a touchscreen), so I can't say for certain. I do have several people in my area with an Oregon, but I haven't asked them if that's because they don't want to use a cell phone to play Wherigo, they're too used to using the Oregon, or if they've just had a bad experience with an early version of a Wherigo app.

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