How does the compass work?

[Schack]

Here is a question, that might seem dumb, but I can't for the life of me remember.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=812918339&fileuploadsuccess=1

If I want to go from the red circle ('Your Location') to the red X ('Your Destination), which direction, do you go on the compass? Straight South?

If I walk straight south, will I end up at the red X (line 1) or will it go the direction of the Magnetic Southpole (line 2). I can't seem to test it properly in game, since I don't have an actual map of the islands. Can someone answer me? :)

[Chilkoot]

The compass always aligns with the north/south axis - it doesn't point to a position on the map. If it helps, you can imagine the place it's pointing to as infinitely far away.

In other words, to go from red circle to red x, you would just follow the compass direction south. To move along line #2 from the red circle, you would actually have to follow the compass S-by-SW.

[Schack]

See, that's what I thought. But it doesn't seem to function whenever I try to navigate. Is the compass broken right now? Because it worked for me on previous patch, but now it seems as if South keeps changing direction XD

[Chilkoot]

Originally posted by Schack:

See, that's what I thought. But it doesn't seem to function whenever I try to navigate. Is the compass broken right now? Because it worked for me on previous patch, but now it seems as if South keeps changing direction XD

Well, it seems *consistent* at least, as long as you always hold it in the same hand. After making a map using the compass, I'm able to use it to find stuff pretty reliably (if not easily).

The problem with the compass from day 1 has always been the orientation/rendering on the screen. Programatically it works as intended, but it's very hard to get any kind of real reading out of it. North is always kind of a 'best guess', which perhaps the way Signal wants to keep it.

[TrompeL'Oeil]

You need to insert two AAA alkalyne batteries into the back of the compass for it to work properly.


(false news are trending...)

[Corpse]

Compass needs a fine tune alignement with a bigger hammer. Obviously.......

Right now if you hold it in your left hand, and then imediately swap it to your right hand, you will see it actualy points in two seperate directions. I do not know which hand is more accurate, or if either hand is actualy 100% accurate.

I normaly hold it in the left hand as that is simply just better for me. I do align the needle so it is parralel with the left edge of the screen and that is what I have been calling north. I do not know if this is accurate or not but I have been able to navigate this way.

When they finaly decide to calibrate the compass so it reads accurately, it more than likely will throw us all off. And I say that for this one reason only, I have come to believe that the land bridge between noobie island and island two is at right angles on both islands, possibly indicating that who ever placed it loves propper angles. This suggests a North South Relationship of the bridge indicating both of these directions.

The caveat is the compass does not share this relationship at a zero degree angle for North, nor does it share a 180 degree angle for south.

Based only on this slim theory, it would seem that holding the compass in either hand would have a margin of error. And it would appear to me that the right hand has more error, presuming that bridge is dead on accurate for 0 & 180 degrees. The bridge would only be accurate this way if the smaller Island was directly south of the second Island. I do not know if this relationship exists. But I have a hunch that it does.

Would be realy nice if a Dev would happen to know whats going on and be willing to set us straight just for verification purposes.

[Chilkoot]

I posted this almost exactly 18 months ago to the day:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/307880/discussions/1/618463738386804667/

We can only guess that there is not a lot of priority behind fixing the compass ;)

[Corpse]

With a compass, we can only tell magnetic north, and apparently this plannet has one. I would imagine that some planets do not have a iron core as Earth does, and thus would not have a magnetic North.

FYI: I only use the compass in my left hand, All references to magnetic directions are from the left hand only and the technique I use is to have the needle point directly to the top of the screen with the left side of the screen perfectly parallel to the needle.

We also have something called True North. True North can be ascertained by marking Three main points, and then finding and marking the middle travel point inbetween sunset and sunrise. A Center point ( a place where you stand as a reference to where you mark all other points ), the sunrise point ( point where we first see the sun rise on the horizon ) and sunset point ( point where the sunsets on the horizon ). This will give you the azmuth of travel in degrees. It is also impossible for a planet to spin in any other direction then along the same axis it uses to orbit the sun, unless it has a axial tilt or wobble.

In a real world setting in real life with the laws of physics in operation one would expect to see the path of the sun travel in no more then 180 degrees. In fact it would be physicaly impossible for the revolution of the sun to be larger then 180 degrees from the center reference point. Also it must be noted that without a planetary axis tilt, one can conclude that the day and night durations would be equal. We know there is no planatary axis tilt because after 2 plus years we have not had any seasonal change in weather patterns. It is constantly ball breaking cold. With some wind, snow, and for some reason, fog thrown in. Mind you it is impossible to have fog at these cold temperatures without a warm front pushing it towards us. I would expect maybe a super heavy snow pattern inhibitting vision, but hey, its a game.

Axis tilt is what gives us things such as the seasons, extremely long days in summer or extremely long nights in winter. If one polarcap has long days, then the other polar cap automaticaly has long nights. Without a tilt, the complete day cycle should be fairly close to 24 hours every where on the planet.

But we know that there is roughly 54 min days, and 18 min nights. I am in no way complaining about the days being longer and nights shorter, but this fudging of the day/night cylce has some how reaked havoc on the suns travel patterns across the sky. It is now traveling in a 225 degree arc across the sky instead of the 180 degree or less arc it should have.

Now asking a game developer to understand the laws of physics as applied to the universe is realy asking a lot. So in understanding this, it would not be a far reach to say that whom ever wrote the code to have the sun run across the sky may have decided to not have the sun travel across the sky based upon any known laws of the universe but simply out of wimsy, as also is confirmed via the East to West travel path we currently use here on planet Earth. Thus we have a sun that rises in the North West, and sets in the South. And at one time it used to set in the South East. Apparently this is coded in a complex geometrical loop instead of a simple timer system.

But if you look closely at the unchanging skyline and clouds, You can see the clouds lite up in the North west at sunrise, and also the clouds lite up near the south east at night. Indicating the two points where the sun was INTENDED to rise and fall.

I am presuming the sun some how sets in a different location based on the lopsided day night cycle. Thusly throwing off the true location of True North.

I believe True North was supposed to be where you see the reflection of the moon on the water line in the North East. This reflection can be seen at any time of the day or night in the same location. It does not follow any particular light source at this time.

I have built a very simple chronometer on the land bridge from noobie island to island 2. It is very possible that one may experience some day/night & or magnetic North fluctions and True North if tested anywhere else on the northern edge of the Island 2. This is all dependent on how far away the initial point was used to calculate Magnetic North is. If its to close, we will have anomalies similar to the Burmuda Triangle, minus the missing air planes.

Now I have seen it said that "A compass needle always points to the North". While this is fundamentaly true, it can have visual flaws inserted into the game via parrallax errors coded into the software trying to make the "North" be just some where above the little dot sight in the middle of the screen instead of the traditional pointing away from the body meathod typicaly used all across our world today by any one who has ever been trained to use a compas for survival or milittary purposes.

So you can see the typical response we have seen " A compass needle always points to the North" does not cover where on the screen is north when your body is facing north too. Is it when the needle is pointing straight up to the top of the screen & when the needle is also parralel to the left edge of the screen? Or is it when it is pointing a few inches above the targeting dot in the center of the screen?

And what is the deal with the needle moving when you look up above the horizon or down below the horizon? While facing what I belive to be magnetic north, If you look down it will shift to the left. If you look up, it will shift at first to the right, and then if you look as far up as possible it will go to the left too. If you are not looking due north, it will then move differently then I just described. It is very peculiar indeed. I typicaly just aim it at the horizon as best I can and try not to point it up hill or down hill for what I can only hope is the best accuracy possible.

So my general theory is that Signal wanted us to have that lost feeling. By giving us a broken compass, I think they have nailed it.

[Corpse]

With all that said. Who knows if north is actualy north or not. They may have encountered a bug or problem that was going to take longer then desired to fix and decided to come back to this and do things to make the game actualy playable again so people could have something to play and test.

[Chilkoot]

Originally posted by Corpse:

With all that said. Who knows if north is actualy north or not.

As I recall, at least in the legacy build, true north and magnetic north were confirmed to be the same point in the world of Savage Lands, and considered at in infinite distance.

[Corpse]

Fair enough, then looks like they have deviated from that decision, OR they have some fixing to do. lol

[Chilkoot]

Originally posted by Corpse:

Fair enough, then looks like they have deviated from that decision, OR they have some fixing to do. lol

Oh, yeah, for sure. Whole different team now, new models, etc. Logan mentioned putting in a compass 'shoulder' animation similar to the shield one, where the compass would move to a flat, non-ambiguous rendering dead centre and flat, but that may have fallen by the wayside. We can hope!

[TrompeL'Oeil]

Originally posted by Corpse:

With a compass, we can only tell magnetic north, and apparently this plannet has one. I would imagine that some planets do not have a iron core as Earth does, and thus would not have a magnetic North.

FYI: I only use the compass in my left hand, All references to magnetic directions are from the left hand only and the technique I use is to have the needle point directly to the top of the screen with the left side of the screen perfectly parallel to the needle.

We also have something called True North. True North can be ascertained by marking Three main points, and then finding and marking the middle travel point inbetween sunset and sunrise. A Center point ( a place where you stand as a reference to where you mark all other points ), the sunrise point ( point where we first see the sun rise on the horizon ) and sunset point ( point where the sunsets on the horizon ). This will give you the azmuth of travel in degrees. It is also impossible for a planet to spin in any other direction then along the same axis it uses to orbit the sun, unless it has a axial tilt or wobble.

In a real world setting in real life with the laws of physics in operation one would expect to see the path of the sun travel in no more then 180 degrees. In fact it would be physicaly impossible for the revolution of the sun to be larger then 180 degrees from the center reference point. Also it must be noted that without a planetary axis tilt, one can conclude that the day and night durations would be equal. We know there is no planatary axis tilt because after 2 plus years we have not had any seasonal change in weather patterns. It is constantly ball breaking cold. With some wind, snow, and for some reason, fog thrown in. Mind you it is impossible to have fog at these cold temperatures without a warm front pushing it towards us. I would expect maybe a super heavy snow pattern inhibitting vision, but hey, its a game.

Axis tilt is what gives us things such as the seasons, extremely long days in summer or extremely long nights in winter. If one polarcap has long days, then the other polar cap automaticaly has long nights. Without a tilt, the complete day cycle should be fairly close to 24 hours every where on the planet.

But we know that there is roughly 54 min days, and 18 min nights. I am in no way complaining about the days being longer and nights shorter, but this fudging of the day/night cylce has some how reaked havoc on the suns travel patterns across the sky. It is now traveling in a 225 degree arc across the sky instead of the 180 degree or less arc it should have.

Now asking a game developer to understand the laws of physics as applied to the universe is realy asking a lot. So in understanding this, it would not be a far reach to say that whom ever wrote the code to have the sun run across the sky may have decided to not have the sun travel across the sky based upon any known laws of the universe but simply out of wimsy, as also is confirmed via the non linear East to West travel path we currently use here on planet Earth. Thus we have a sun that rises in the North West, and sets in the South. And at one time it used to set in the South East. Apparently this is coded in a complex geometrical loop instead of a simple timer system.

But if you look closely at the unchanging skyline and clouds, You can see the clouds lite up in the North west at sunrise, and also the clouds lite up near the south east at night. Indicating the two points where the sun was INTENDED to rise and fall.

I am presuming the sun some how sets in a different location based on the lopsided day night cycle. Thusly throwing off the true location of True North.

I believe True North was supposed to be where you see the reflection of the moon on the water line in the North East. This reflection can be seen at any time of the day or night in the same location. It does not follow any particular light source at this time.

I have built a very simple chronometer on the land bridge from noobie island to island 2. It is very possible that one may experience some day/night & or magnetic North fluctions from and True North if tested anywhere else on the northern edge of the Island 2. This is all dependent on how far away the initial point was used to calculate Magnetic North is. If its to close, we will have anomalies similar to the Burmuda Triangle, minus the missing air planes.

Now I have seen it said that "A compass needle always points to the North". While this is fundamentaly true, it can have visual flaws inserted into the game via parrallax errors coded into the software trying to make the "North" be just some where above the little dot sight in the middle of the screen instead of the traditional pointing away from the body meathod typicaly used all across our world today by any one who has ever been trained to use a compas for survival or milittary purposes.

So you can see the typical response we have seen " A compass needle always points to the North" does not cover where on the screen is north when your body is facing north too. Is it when the needle is pointing straight up to the top of the screen & when the needle is also parralel to the left edge of the screen? Or is it when it is pointing a few inches above the targeting dot in the center of the screen?

And what is the deal with the needle moving when you look up above the horizon or down below the horizon? While facing what I belive to be magnetic north, If you look down it will shift to the left. If you look up, it will shirt at first to the right, and then if you look as far up as possible it will go the left too. If you are not looking due north, it will then move differently then I just described. It is very peculiar indeed. I typicaly just aim it at the horizon as best I can and try not to point it up hill or down hill for what I can only hope is the best accuracy possible.

So my general theory is that Signal wanted us to have that lost feeling. By giving us a broken compass, I think they have nailed it.

All fine and dandy, but what about using batteries?

[Corpse]

Well i have not had any luck finding any lead nodes, nor have I found any Citrus fruits for the acid required to make batteries. But if you can share where I may find these items, then I think batteries would be super duper sweet !