Starting location for play anywhere cartridges

[+Landsbanki]

What determines the starting location for play anywhere cartridges? I've just created my first play anywhere cartridges and some folks are having problems with either starting inside zones or having the zones appear many Kms away. They all start 15-150m away for me so I can't replicate the problem. It's nothing to do with location being switched off. It seems to be very consistent. The same people get the same problems whereas for others everything works fine. The person who ended up with zones 8.5kms away had it happen on multiple cartridges and on multiple devices. Any help sorting folks out would be appreciated as these are set for a mega event. 

[+Landsbanki]

Yet again I post on this forum and don't get a single reply. What I've ascertained so far is that it only happens with the WhereYouGo app. The iPhone app starts at the correct relative coordinates in the cartridge. The futher you are from the start location the greater the margin of error. The direction of error seems to sone extent match the direction the person is from the starting coordinates. I'll see if I can find a WhereYouGo forum as it's clearly an issue with that app. Any suggestions on where to look would be gratefully received. Cue more tumbleweed....

[+SOSaunders]

Possibly a bug or error with The WhereYouGo app. Don't know too much about this topic however, maybe contact their support team.

[Ranger Fox]

There are times I don't answer posts right away because I'm hoping the community will do so.  I wait a few days, then answer.

 

The starting location of a play anywhere cartridge is determined by how you set up the cartridge.  This is usually done within either an item or the cartridge's start event.  For example, when some of mine start, I tell the person about the game and give them an item called something like "Start Game".  The item has a command to start the game, where the player will confirm he or she is in a space that fits the play area size needed by the game.  I choose to use football fields because they can be found throughout the world as football (soccer in the US) is the most popular sport.

 

Other than that, you can start a play anywhere cartridge from the cartridge's start event.

 

What you're doing in these events is either creating zones or moving the zones you've already set up so they're relative to the player's starting position.  You can't just create a cartridge somewhere, say it's play anywhere, and expect the cartridge to translate zone positions magically.  It doesn't work like that.  I do think, though, there's some early code floating around that does this sort of thing, but I don't know where to find it at the moment.

 

If that's not the case, perhaps you could provide a link to the cartridge.

[+Tungstène]

There is a really old bug lying somewhere between WhereYouGo and Earwigo. Is Earwigo the Wherigo builder you used?

 

If you look carefully in the lua code generated by Earwigo, you'll see two declared but unused functions linked to the play anywhere functionality. If you modify this code in order to use these functions instead of the native ones, relocation becomes accurate.

 

I've met Nick (sTeamTraen) and he doesn't even remember why he wrote these two functions. He is aware that using them could circumvent the bug. But this seems to be really deeply buried in his TO-DO list. (And I understand why: there could be side effects).

 

For information, the play anywhere capability of Earwigo consists of zone relocations. Again, reading the generated LUA code is a good way to catch the idea.

[+Landsbanki]

Yes I used Earwigo. Apologies if this is a naive question but how do I look at the Lua code generated by Earwigo? I use Earwigo to avoid looking at Lua code. That sounds like a really simple solution to what has become a big problem as these are for a Mega and we have lots of unhappy folks some even asking that the Wherigos be archived. Many thanks for the explanation of what's going on.