Coming to end of Game 1, plus technical updates, new features, and Game 2

[Lucien Van Elsen]

Hello fellow dashers,

As we reach the very end of our first month back in action, I want to thank everyone who got out there, logged some dashes, and helped stress-test the new system. It has been incredibly exciting to watch the map light up again!

As we transition into our second month, I wanted to share a quick update on where things stand and get your thoughts on a few ideas.

Game 1 Ending & Game 2 Launch
Game 1 will officially close at midnight Eastern Time tonight, and Game 2 will automatically cut over. Since this is the first time the new engine is executing a month-to-month rollover, I am crossing my fingers that there are no technical snags, but I will be keeping a close eye on it. Once the dust settles, I will be sending out a summary of the Game 1 results in the next day or two to celebrate everyone's finds.

Technical Updates: Email Delivery
Some of you may have noticed a bit of lag with system emails or found them trapped in your spam folders. To fix this, I have rewritten the mail handling to use the Gmail API instead of the native SMTP server. This should significantly reduce latency and keep our notifications out of your junk mail going forward.

New Feature Ideas: Feedback welcome!
Before I start writing the code for the next batch of updates, I wanted to run two potential new features past the community:

• Equal Daily Scoring: Right now, I am considering a tweak to the scoring logic where all visits to a specific dashpoint on the same day would grant the same number of points. This isn't quite a full "Team Play" system yet, but it would ensure that spouses, friends, or groups who travel to a point together get equal scores for their shared effort.

• Early Game Previews: Would it be helpful to make the next month's games available to view (but not log) a month in advance? This could give everyone a bit of a head start on planning road trips or coordinating dashes for the upcoming cycle.

Please reply to the list and let me know what you think of these ideas, or if there is anything else you'd like to see added.

Thank you all again for a fantastic first month. Have a great time out there, and happy navigating in Game 2!

-Lucien

[Denise Tamura]

I think both of these features would be helpful.

Congrats to everyone that reached (or attempted to reach) a dashpoint this month. Good luck in May! 

Denise

madt67

[Ash Doge]

Lucien

Thank you for reviving geodashing. I was about to restart when the previous version of geodashing came to an end.

I was going to request early game previews, so that feature would be most welcome. 

One convenience would be to remain logged in to the website. I'll defer any other suggestions until I've played a few games.

A small bug report: the dashpoint URLs in the downloaded GPX file are invalid. Getting  SSL_ERROR_UNRECOGNIZED_NAME_ALERT. The URL works if I change .com to .org.

<gpx xmlns="http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1" version="1.1" creator="Geodashing V2 API Engine">

  <wpt lat="39.658718444907" lon="-103.47727970978">

    <name>GD001-ADYF</name>

    <desc>Dashpoint GD001-ADYF</desc>

    <link href="https://www.geodashing.com/#dashpoint?id=GD001-ADYF">

      <text>View on Geodashing</text>

    </link>

    <sym>Waypoint</sym>

    <type>Dashpoint</type>

  </wpt>

[Kelly Markwell]

I have to say that I'm really getting into the new dashpoint challenges.  I did notice a few items that were refined in the first iteration that added to a little of the enjoyment and challenge, surrounding the "randomness" of the placement of points.  One item was the minimum distance between points in each game.  I believe that Scout's trained llamas had accurate measurements that didn't place the dashpoints within 20 KM of another point in the same game.  If I remember the description, the system was based on a grid of the globe (not mercator projection). In that grid, the llama would propose a point and make sure it wasn't within 20 KM of a point already generated in the game.  Likewise, while the llamas could swim, they avoided being more than 1 KM from a shore (based on polygons of large bodies of water).

For the bodies of water, I was looking in my old state of Illinois and saw GD001-AAVH, but in looking at the Google Earth map, I see that it's almost exactly 1 KM from the shore. I haven't looked close enough to see if any other points are farther into water, but I figured it was worth asking.

With the May dashpoints within 200 miles of my home coordinates, I found two pairs of coordinates in the same game that were less than 20 KM

GD002-AXNH and GD002-AYGN 4.999 KM (even though there's a mountain ridge between the two)
GD002-BTNL and GD002-BJRD 13.84 KM (even though Buzzard's Bay lies between the two)

Last game GD001-BMUL and GD001-AYTW were 3.706 KM apart

I'm not trying to change the game, but just making a suggestion on something that had been done for the last version.

Thanks for everything you do!

Markwell

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[Lucien Van Elsen]

Hi Ash-

  Thanks!  I fixed the URLs in the export files, if you want to re-download them now.  I also have updated the login session lifetimes, so that they should last 30 days after your last activity - so as long as you visit the website at least once in that time, you shouldn't have to login again.  Frankly, I may just make it even longer - the risks of someone stealing your session in order to log dashpoints for you aren't really that high :-)

-Lucien

[Lucien Van Elsen]

Hi Kelly-

   Yes, the dashpoints are generated more randomly now - I found the description of the algorithm from the old site on archive.org, and it's basically as you describe - a grid with one dashpoint per cell, with constraints on how far it had to be from the points in the neighboring cells.  I had some feedback early on about that process being overly complex to implement, and now instead I'm just picking random points until I find 31,000 that fall within land, as defined by the shapes in https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector (land with the 'lakes' cut out).  I did find an error in that logic that I just fixed, though - it was allowing the points to be within 500m of land, instead of 100m as they should have been.  That said - this is also free shape data at 1:10m resolution, so there definitely will be some 'unreachable' points even so, where the free map doesn't match a higher resolution map (or reality).

  If you're so inclined and curious, the data sets and the script to generate the points are at https://github.com/lucienve/geodashing-v2/blob/main/backend/scripts/generate_game.py and https://github.com/lucienve/geodashing-v2/blob/main/data/README.md .   Suggestions (and pull requests) welcome :-)

[Ash Doge]

Lucien

Thanks for making those adjustments. Yeah, the only way I am going to win a game is if someone steals my session and logs a lot of dashpoints. :)

Thank you for open sourcing the geodashing code. That's awesome! I look forward to peeking under the covers to see how the game works.