Goonhub
08-27-2018, 06:23 PM
I have terrible color vision and didn't read the book all that closely past the basic techniques, so my first attempt at engineering on Oshan was a dismal failure. I'm pretty sure that it's relatively easy to make a much more intuitive system for this, but I'm not sure how much work this would need under the hood so that bit might be harder than it initially seems.
First of all, move the section in the book about the Doppler effect much closer to the top, and explain what this means for the accuracy of dowsing in simple, blunt terms. The code part of this would be to change the dowsing rods so that they display two numbers instead of a number and a color - a temperature reading on the left in bright red, and a vibration reading on the right in bright blue. This would make it MUCH easier to tell what the readings actually mean, especially if you have terrible vision or a red/orange color filter on your monitor like I do. The numerical temperature reading would be based on what a heatmap of the tile it's on would look like, with it being the sum of the temperature readings from each hotspot it's in the radius of, and the temperature reading from a single hotspot being 10 if it's at the center and 1 less for each tile away it is. So a dowsing rod on the exact center of a hotspot would read 10 temperature if no other hotspot is in range, 1 if it's one tile away from the center, and so on. The numerical vibration reading should be based on how the Doppler effect actually works: one extra if the hotspot is moving away from the rod, and one less if it's moving towards from the rod, based on the difference between the tile it last was and the tile it currently was. This would let you tell the direction it's moving and the tile it's actually on from relatively few readings, and should hopefully make more intuitive sense than the previous system.
First of all, move the section in the book about the Doppler effect much closer to the top, and explain what this means for the accuracy of dowsing in simple, blunt terms. The code part of this would be to change the dowsing rods so that they display two numbers instead of a number and a color - a temperature reading on the left in bright red, and a vibration reading on the right in bright blue. This would make it MUCH easier to tell what the readings actually mean, especially if you have terrible vision or a red/orange color filter on your monitor like I do. The numerical temperature reading would be based on what a heatmap of the tile it's on would look like, with it being the sum of the temperature readings from each hotspot it's in the radius of, and the temperature reading from a single hotspot being 10 if it's at the center and 1 less for each tile away it is. So a dowsing rod on the exact center of a hotspot would read 10 temperature if no other hotspot is in range, 1 if it's one tile away from the center, and so on. The numerical vibration reading should be based on how the Doppler effect actually works: one extra if the hotspot is moving away from the rod, and one less if it's moving towards from the rod, based on the difference between the tile it last was and the tile it currently was. This would let you tell the direction it's moving and the tile it's actually on from relatively few readings, and should hopefully make more intuitive sense than the previous system.
![[Image: Goonstation_Dave_Robot_Cache_70_2018-08-27_221222.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/383743035894267905/483821784420843530/Goonstation_Dave_Robot_Cache_70_2018-08-27_221222.png)
