Basic Roamer Internet Table-Top Rally Championship 2012
Round 1 - The Nearest FarAway Place Rally
Information: Introduction | Entry List | Regulations | Bulletins | Standings | MS

Rallies: The Nearest FarAway Place | Panglossian | Schoolfrenz | Thalamorph


Having resolved a few queries the results became final at midnight on April 5th.

When I set the Route Cards I had no idea that the final results would be so close. Admittedly I kept the navigation relatively straightforward and the routes fairly short to cut down on the amount of "clicking". I wanted the competition to be a balance between solving and plotting, but it seems that many breezed through the solving and then focused on increasingly refined marking before submitting. Most of the penalties were plotting based rather than solving based - it wasn't meant to be that way. Being over generous and allowing you to drop your worst two Route Cards made the results even tighter.

With such a sea change from the route check days I suppose it was inevitable that the balance on this event wasn't to everyone's liking. There were a few software issues too caused by incompatibilities between different browsers which only show themselves when you start to do more complicated things other than view web pages. As far as I am aware all these have now been addressed.
Despite these shortcomings I hope that the hours I kept you at your PC were worth the £5 you spent to do the event.

There will obviously be changes for Round 2. The major difference will be the advent of AutoP(i)lot (see below) an automatic way to map the route between two clicked (major) points. Transparently in-between additional (minor) points are generated to follow the roads between your clicks. The interface to click your route has also been considerably simplified.

I spent some time producing new master routes for the "timed-to-the-second" Route Cards using AutoP(i)lot since these sections were critical to the overall results. For example, my original master route for RC3 comprised 315 major points. Using AutoP(i)lot required just 28 major points with 1272 minor points automatically inserted to fully define the route. The differences in overall distances were minor so I have not used AutoP(i)lot routes in the marking.

Expect each Route Card in round 2 to have longer (but not more complicated) plotting, longer routes (but oh so much quicker to mark) and as many traps as possible to fool you into taking an incorrect route.
I also hope to introduce a new type of "timed-to-the-second" (TTTS) section, which will be modelled on the regularity sections on real world rallies. The existing style of TTTS sections won't be appropriate since a correct route will exactly match the master route as the defining points will be sourced from the same database.
There won't be any Re-Do sections - you'll have one chance to get the route right.

Now to the results. The links below will take you to the Route Card master solutions (click on the blue circles for PC numbers) and my commentaries.

ROUTE CARD SOLUTIONS:     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9     10     11     12 

If you have a queries please post (only) to the Provisional Results Feedback topic on the TTR forum. You have until midnight Thursday April 5th to raise your queries before the results become Final.

"Crow"
March 29, 2012 @ ~midnight
April 5, 2012 @ midnight


AutoP(i)lot

You can practise AutoP(i)loting here. This is an early version of the software to shake down before the next event. You'll be taken to a blank map with a start marker. Get clicking!

See the new version of Practice Marking a Route instead and practise with Panglossian Route Card 0.

Mouse Left-Click.

As before, left-click to extend your route. Be lazy, click roughly on the road, even slightly off it, and magically (with a short delay while the database of road points is examined) the tramlined route will be drawn for you. Nor do you have to be at Street Level to get accurate placement; clicking at the 1:50000 level works fine too. Note that your clicked point will be moved to be on the road at nearest database point.

Now click some distance from your last point. Again a route will be drawn for you. Therein lies an important concept: the route between any two clicked points will always be treated as a separate journey, and most of the time the shortest route will be drawn. If between two points you need to go round a (longer journey) loop, then you must tell the software by deliberately marking a point on the loop. (The software is good but doesn't read minds - yet!)

If you've shot passed a loop you want to go round, left-click on the route already defined (near the loop and within 25 scale metres of the route) and one of invisible, minor points will be converted to a major point. You can then drag this major point and drop it on the loop. During the dragging operation straight lines will run from the previous and subsequent major points until you "drop" and then the new route will follow the roads round the loop.

Mouse Right-Click

Right-clicks are now used for deleting points. Any major point can be deleted by right-clicking within 200 metres of it. A new route will be drawn between the previous and next point; this will only be noticeable if the deleted point was defining a loop.

OS VectorMap® District

As you zoom up and down you will see there are two extra map types which are available called OS VectorMap District. They may be used on future Route Cards so best you know about them now.

Anomalies

Not many. Some white roads are not (or partially) encoded in the database. Clicking on the track that's not fully encoded may see your point placed on the nearest road/track that is encoded. Where possible the use of such tracks will be avoided on the Route Cards, but if you need to go back to the old way of clicking, you can temporarily switch off AutoP(i)lot by unticking the checkbox (top right).

Some tramlines may not follow the exact centre of an OS road. This is due to the slight mapping disparities between the OS raster maps and the background vector maps which drive the road following. This is not an issue and will be the same for everyone.

Be careful near the edge of the map, a "shortest" route may take you outside the plotting area, so you may need to add points to keep with the map boundaries.

There may be others I don't know about yet. If you come across any odd behaviour, please let me know in as much detail as possible. Either post a comment to the AutoP(i)lot Feedback topic on the TTR forum, or send an email to autoplotATtable-top-rallying.org.uk (change AT to @).

That's really all you need to know for now. The Practice Marking a Route webpage will be updated before the Panglossian Rally, and a new Route Card 0 will be available for you to play with AutoP(i)lot.