Dawson

Forum Replies Created

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • in reply to: FS doesn't spot "Walking Pilots" ? #2743
    Dawson
    Participant

    I’ve just finished scoring the Corryong Cup 2013. The last time I scored this competition, I followed the previous scorers and used SeeYou. Now, with my experience with FS, I used FS to score the comp. For the most part, FS was up to the task, however we found a couple of glitches. Both seem to be related to this issue.

    1) Spot the Walking ( or driving ) pilot. – “Task 3 (2)” pilot Adam Jones – id 189
    I found at least one tracklog where the track which was downloaded with GPS Dump was had the correct furthest point along the track and the correct landing place marked in “FS Flight” however, the distance flown which was given to the pilot in FS was much more. Upon further analysing the track in Google Earth, I could see that after landing, the pilot had not turned off their GPS, and were then retrieved by their driver and driven further along the task to retrieve a team mate who flew further. It appears that the distance that FS awarded them was to the furthest point along their track AFTER their landing. It seems that FS Flight is correctly calculating the distance, but that FS is not.

    I have since discovered that the current version of FS – 1.3.4 – exhibits the behaviour I described above, but that when I load the .fsdb up in my development environment with the current version of the source code, it correctly identifies the landing.

    As I couldn’t get FS to score the track to his actual furthers point along the track, I estimated his distance and manually scored him. The measure distance between two lat/lon tools in FS Flight is useful for this, but only to a limited extent. I can see no way in FS to accurately work out how far along the task route any particular point is. The track point for Adam happens to be very close to the course line, so it was good enough to use, but other similar issues occurred where the track was not close to the course line. At the top of the left panel in FS Flight is a row containing data related to where the mouse currently sits over the visual representation of the tracklog. This contains the track point data. It would be nice to also show the Lat/Lon for the point ALONG the course line perpendicular to the track selected point. It would be handy to visually show this as well by extending a dotted line from the trackpoint to the course line which would intersect the course line at right angles. If we also include the distance along the course to that point, the user would be able to very easily identify the correct distance to manually score the pilot when FS for one reason or another does not do so. – Even better would be the ability to right click on a track point and be given the option to “Score the pilot to THIS point along the course.”

    2) I’ve also noticed that on some tracklogs, FS incorrectly assumes a landing when no such landing has occurred. As FS Flight only shows the track up to the point in which FS Flight calculates the landing place, and does not show points AFTER that landing place, the scorer needs to open the tracklog in another application ( Google Earth or SeeYou for example ) to be able to calculate the distance and times to manually score the pilot. To help the scorer manually score a pilots track, it would be nice to have an option in FS Flight to show the entire track, even including points before a detected launch, and after a detected landing, and even outside the task time window. With these track points shown, and with the measurement tools suggested above, I don’t think that a scorer will need to use anything other than FS to manually score a track which for some reason was not correctly scored by FS.

    in reply to: Scoring short tasks #518
    Dawson
    Participant

    Hi Oyvind,

    You can’t say that this test proves that the calculation of the shortest possible distance works, because it simply didn’t work, it presented an error message, and failed to calculate anything.

    It may be that such short tasks are unable to be scored by GAP, however, the scoring software should not report an error to the end user.

    “ScoreTask: failed scoring task. ScoreTask: set_departure_points == double.NaN!!”

    Does nothing in any way to assist the scorer who may be scoring their first competition ( as indeed I was at Corryong 2011 ) We used See You to score the competition which was able to score the day, it simply sored it with incredibly low validity. Had the decision been made before hand to use FS, then no scoring of the day at all would have been possible.

    If FS is not to be able to score such tasks, then the documentation of the software needs to specify what the minimum requirements are for a scorable task, and when such an unscorable task is entered, instead of presenting a cryptic error message, it needs to inform the scorer of the reason why the task is not able to be scored, and which rules of the software have been broken causing the failure.

    Alternatively, FS should score the task in the same way that See You does, and simply results in a ridiculously low validity for the day.

    Regards,

    Dawson

    in reply to: Scoring short tasks #508
    Dawson
    Participant

    It’s hard to debug with only Reflector to disassemble the code, but it appears as though the “set_departure_points == double.NaN!” error occurs when CalcTimeValidity() or CalcDistanceValidity() returns a negative number, causing CalcDayQuality to return a negative number.

    I see that Davis’ Launch Validity calculation for SeeYou sets LaunchValidity to 0 where the script calculates it to < 0
    It does the same for DistanceValidity and TimeValidity.
    In FS, CalcDistanceValidity() does the same, but CalcTimeValidity and CalcLaunchValidity don’t do this, so could allow negative validity to be returned.

    Dawson

    in reply to: Scoring short tasks #507
    Dawson
    Participant

    oops, please ignore the last, broken sentence, I had reworded what I was writing and left that bit in accidentally.

    in reply to: Open Source? #496
    Dawson
    Participant

    I am also, and would also be happy to help out where I can.

    Oyvind, you suggested making it multi-language capable. With .net, this can be a very simple task, which once the groundwork is done to create the first .resource file, and the application is modified to use that resource file by default, it’s a very simple task to pass the file on to anyone who offers to create the foreign language .resource files, which can then be added back into the project.

    When you guys do decide you would like to have some assistance on the code, add me to the list of programmers you can call on.

    Regards,

    Dawson

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)