Travel System strange behavior

[kreelor]

Travel System behavior - (link to my video of a couple of issues).

I created a very simple video to illustrate a couple of issues I've been having with the Travel System. It's not a great video, and it's quite short. I didn't even add narration or sound. Note: It "loops" (repeats), so just exit it when you've had a chance to see it.

It's a Windows Movie file (.wmv).

I don't understand why the Travel System displays even after I turn it off completely. Maybe this video might offer some insight as to what I might be overlooking?

My quickie website: (no cookies, viruses, etc.!).
http://www.kreelor.com/

[Cartman]

I looked into this and I think there's a misunderstanding of the options.
Turning the travel system off means the guide does not calculate a route, it just shows the destination.
But as long as you have the ants shown (50 yards in your case) you will still see the straight ant line.
You need to turn the ants off in the box with the 50 yards setting.

Maybe it would be better if the travel system settings would be put into a separate box like the ants options. That way you would directly see that they are for separate things.

About the ants moving backwards, I don't know why this is happening, maybe because of Carbonite.
I think while playing around with the settings the ants moved backwards one time for less than a second. But I could not reproduce this.
Turning off the ants however would solve your problems.

[cabby]

As Cartman has said, turning the Travel System off only stops it from calculating the different routes like using the flight master to get to where you want to go, and it just shows a direct arrow to your desitnation (kinda like using the Tom Tom arrow).

The ants moving still when the animation is turned off might just be a bug since it's a new option. I'll get with the programmers about this one.

[kreelor]

Thanks for checking it out.

To me, the destination is only the big round green bullet, not the ant trail. And, I'd still like to know why turning off the animation doesn't turn off the animation (of the ant trail). What else does "animation" refer to, except for that movement? Isn't that a bug?

Please, do not separate the options! That would be even more confusing and time-consuming to hunt for the options when wanting to use them.

Also, why does the Zygor ant trail and its destination bullet have to be so large? Did you notice in the video the relative sizes between Zygor's and Carbonite's trails and destination markers? Had I zoomed in even more, Zygor's ants and destination marker would have filled the screen. To me, it seems to scale in reverse when I zoom inward; it gets larger instead of smaller. I have never had any difficulty seeing Carbonite's thin lines, no matter what zoom ratio I was in. I'm just asking questions.

Edited:
Cabby, I must have been typing while you were replying. woops!

[cabby]

Our programmer says he's seen the oddity once or twice of the ants moving backwards so it's something he's still investigating. And he's aware that the animation doesn't always turn off when it's set to off so this is another bug that's being worked on.

The ant spacing option controls if it's shown or not and how much distance between the dots, the animation option is to control if you want the ants to move or be stationary.

For the waypoint dot, it was designed for the Blizzard map which has no zooming. Since special coding will be needed to have it play nice on Carbonite's map it has been a low priority fix. The reasoning for this is that everyone has Blizzard's map, not everyone has Carbonite and since it's working as intended on the map everyone has that means it's not really broken. We have a lot of other bugs that are broken items that need to get fixed first before we can start in on the cosmetic stuff like this. Don't worry, it will eventually be fixed to play nice on Carbonite, just I don't know when.

[kreelor]

Thanks! I'm sure it'll all get worked out. You said that Blizzard's waypoint is locked into its size (non-zooming/scaling). On the other hand, the ant trail is controlled by Zygor, isn't it? Why can't it be scaled more appropriately to the maps' zoom ratios irregardless of the huge green waypoint? No need for you to reply to that question. I'm offering it merely as a suggestion to be considered by your programmer.

[Cartman]

With separating the options for travel system and ants I only meant to put them into two separated parts on one options screen. Currently it may be confusing that turning off the travel system does not turn off the ants. Those are two separate things, you can use ants without turning on the travel system.
In your special case just turn off the ants and you won't have the problem with their size. As Cabby says, Carbonite support is currently limited and may be reduced to only show the target dot and nothing more (just as in the good old days before the travel system).

[cabby]

Actually those ants are a much larger size than if it were the Blizzard map. It looks like everything on the Carbonite map is being scaled up from what would normally be displayed on the Blizzard map.

[Zygor Dev 1]

That's just how Carbonite works; it puts oddly sized Blizzard maps in its window, making a Frankenstein's monster out of fully functional map widgets - so it's to be expected that our dots, used to appearing on plain Blizzard maps, behave oddly. We can safely put the blame on Carbonite here - "it's their fault, they broke the map! mooooom!"

However, as I said, we're putting some degree of Carbonite support back in. We'll just have to see how nice we can get it to play.