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Board » Technical Support » Ideas for SOL development

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Posted by
Karri


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2012-11-12 13:17:29
2014-01-30 13:57:41 - Ideas for SOL development
Here a few ideas, more like food for thought as I know we are operating on limited voluntary resources:

1. Create a search engine for sailonline.org, and especially the forum. This could possibly be done with tools provided by Google

2. Add a possibility to see all races one has participated in SOL. Now you can see 30 last races in ranking, but it would be nice to see all, possibly sortable by date, race, position. This could be a part of Profile page

3. Chat development: Currently we have numerous instances of chat ongoing, one possible development direction would be to integrate them all so that regardless in which race you are, you see all chatting. This chat could also be accessible even if you are not in a race.

4. Make key information and tools available at SOL site. For noobs it is difficult to find all of the tools and info (e.g. polars, wind GRIBs etc. available on brainaid’s site) This would partially also serve marketing to lower the threshold of starting and learning. Maybe even start a wiki where everybody can contribute e.g. based on forum discussion

5. Improvements to gameplay: Extend weather slider in client to past, also show boat location at points in history

6. Improvements to gameplay: Include boat course and speed indication when pointer hovered over boat (now only displays name and rank)

If there is a thread for ideas for SOL development, I did not manage to find it despite some considerable effort. Thus I started a new one, if one already exists, this can be merged to that.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right.
Posted by
WIN


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2009-07-09 23:32:07
2014-01-30 19:56:30 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
Ciao Karri

congrats for your success in Leg two of Timed Races Championship .

As SOL Coordinator I think you should be thanked first of all for supporting SOL with ideas , and in that role I wish to give you here the very short and very very preliminary answers ...( mainly because your idea span through various skills needed and I do ot have half of them ! ;) )

1- I think SOL is already well up in search engine Google ...I do not know if forum threads are , but think so ...will suggest that some experimenting is done ...

2- Your input carries the need for a much more powerful and flexible DB ..The profile thing seems to me much easier and closer in time than the interaction and sorting capabilities you mention , but both could be looked at .

3- The idea of chat being independent from acual race window is good ; it is today linked to race registration though , and some software development would be needed there too I guess.

4- What you refer to is property of third party ...linking is easy ...embedding is not ...but it could happen one day ..It needs to be discussed with Brainaid as an example ....

5- It is a nice idea ..I have no clue as to feasibility . In actual facts you suggest to make the beginning of a grib file at zero plus 12 hours ( as an example ) and basically keep in client the 12 to 18 hours previous to now ....other thing is to ask client to record boat position in the past and be able to show it on demand ...we would need Aaron for that ;((

6- This is simple answer : NO ! ...one of the fundamental rules of SOL ( see manual ) is that no one player knows navigation data of competitors ) ..This rule is already broken by some tools available to solers , that I have more than once declared I am opposing to....now you suggest instant full information on competitors by pointing of mouse ...well it may happen , but not with my vote ! LOL

Once again ...THANK YOU

I am sure that those who serve SOL as volunteers have already started to think !!!

ciao

Piero
;))
Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2014-01-30 21:52:14 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
Adding some points, some of which have been previously discussed.

7. CLIENT: Improve "boathandling": increase the accuracy of the shown boat position. See here and here

8. CLIENT: Show "new course"-line when manually entering a heading (possibly only for COG, or TWA when delay is not checked).

9. CLIENT: store dashboard display mode in local memory, so that I don't have to alt-click every time I reload the client.

10. new performance loss system (see this thread)

11. include performance loss in predictor line calculation

-----

Clarification on point 1: I think karriv meant a search bar on the sol website, to search the forum, or the whole site.

To all points mentioned, except 4 and 6, I vote a clear yes :) It's just that someone has to eventually realise it.. and that might take a while. But still nice to have a list.

About point 4 (including external tools in the sol website): It's not that simple... I think I would agree with some part of this, and disagree with other parts. And I know I have a different opinion than many others. There are many different opinions.

About point 6 (showing heading of competitors): I think I understand both sides. At this point the data about other boats (heading+position) is public, but for most only viewable via hmm's sollog and via the client. I don't think it's right to try to hide this data. But I agree that it could make the game a lot more interesting to limit the amount of information about the competitors. THOUGH: competitors in sight (within 10nm or so) should always be visible. This should be thought about well. There probably some technicalities here too. Meanwhile, I think we shouldn't change anything on what data is available about the competitors.

--- Last Edited by kroppyer at 2014-01-30 21:57:24 ---
Posted by
hmm


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2011-11-03 13:35:22
2014-01-31 09:22:49 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
Thanks for starting a good thread, most of the ideas are of course not new but it's good to have a list in public for discussion.

From Karri's list, I'll here comment on things which I think should be pretty easy to do:


1. Google search engine for sailonline.org
- I'm not expert in web technologies but I believe this is easy and also I think that someone could pretty easily do it without access to the code. When it's done it can be added to the web page.

2. List all users races in one page
- This is pretty easy to do, let's see what I can do about it.

3. Without changing the clients and with pretty small changes to backend we could have "global" and "race" chats. That would be that the global chats would be shared for all races and race chats would be for that race only like they are now.

So basically we could add global chatrooms for each language to the client.

4. Bringing the 3rd party tools to SOL site is of course doable, easy way to do this would just create x.sailonline.org domain name for them. I.e. brainaid.sailonline.org, agage.sailonline.org.

The gameplay things are harder to do as they need changes to the client and for history also the server api has to return that data.
Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2014-01-31 12:00:06 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
This userscript adds a searchbar to the sol website.
- search engine is registered on my name
- I only did placement, layout isn't very pretty right now.

preview

[userscript works local, nothing has changed on the website itself, it's you browser that (if you install the script) changes the appearance]

--- Last Edited by kroppyer at 2014-01-31 12:06:18 ---
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Posted by
Tyger / Robert Neilson


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2012-05-28 15:07:00
2014-01-31 12:17:06 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
hmm said @ 2014-01-31 09:22:49:
1. Google search engine for sailonline.org
- I'm not expert in web technologies but I believe this is easy and also I think that someone could pretty easily do it without access to the code. When it's done it can be added to the web page.
---
There is a facility here to generate the code to embed Google search into a website: Google Custom Search

You can insert into the whole website or just a particular part ie. SOL Forum.
Probably best that someone with the authority to do so (Markku) ticks the boxes and agrees to terms.

“We may have arrived on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now!” Martin Luther King Jr.
Posted by
Rod


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2010-06-24 22:30:48
2014-02-03 02:44:17 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
They say that Half of sailboat racing is Starting.
The Second Half is the strategy of sailing the course in relation to the wind.
The Third Half is knowledge of and obedience to the Racing Rules of Sailing.
While SOL deals with the Second Half exceedingly well, it completely neglects the First Half (Starting) and the Third Half (which covers Right of Way and the Rounding of Marks).
Please, in any planned development of the SOL program, give serious consideration to the First and Third Halves.
If it breaks, it's not strong enough--if it doesn't, it's too heavy.
Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2014-02-03 10:06:01 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
Rod, I would classify that is very close to impossible. With over 200 boats starting, hopefully increasing to 500 or even more, it's not really desirable to start with collisions/RRS enabled. Besides, it makes it impossible to sail on DCs. There's also that it invites unfair play: others could ram someone to slow him down and let their friend win. IRL there are all sorts of collision detectors, but on SOL, that's a bit hard, because we're not on our boat 24/7.

My opinion: SOL is a NavSim, the game is choosing the best route to the finish.

--- Last Edited by kroppyer at 2014-02-03 10:06:51 ---
Posted by
Karri


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2012-11-12 13:17:29
2014-03-02 20:10:40 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
kroppyer, how do you install that search thing you made? Would it be possible to get that running on server side?
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right.
Posted by
kroppyer


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2010-02-05 15:25:55
2014-03-03 00:21:49 - Re: Ideas for SOL development
installing a userscript

Firefox:
1. install greasemonkey (plugin for firefox)
2. click the link to the userscript, and a window should pop up that let's you install the script

Chrome/chromium:
1. download and save the file
2. go to menu->tools->extensions (or go to chrome://extensions/ directly)
3. drag the file in the browser

Internet Explorer:
1. get another browser
2. get instructions for that browser

Other:
Use a search engine of your preference to look for instructions

--- Last Edited by kroppyer at 2014-03-03 10:48:02 ---

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