🗺️ Surveying the RisingWorld [map]

The next update will be available on Wednesday, December 18, in the early evening (GMT+1).

This update will not yet replace the Java version, instead it is the actual content update. We'll provide more information about the transition together with the update.

    With RisingWorld (Unity) improving a lot lately we’re feature wise almost on par with the old Java version again. Due to my hobbies I’m playing on the medieval server https://medievalrealms.co.uk/ where I usually construct buildings based on specific periods according to my understanding of timber-framed constructions. Which may not be the best to rely on but hey, it’s a game after all.


    One of the features still missing is an ingame map. We do have the compass already though and with debug enabled we even get an exact position on the current map. And the new maps are huge! And since we’re building here in multiplayer it’s no wonder that this is a dire missed feature to get an idea where the others are and what they are building, because it’s not fun navigating with X,Y,Z alone to visit other players (and keep note of where the own spot is located).


    rising_world_unity-version-1536x864.jpg


    So I was intrigued to see that the player Bamse did what gamers tend to do when a feature is missing. They start some sort of helper app (or wiki or whatever). This resulted in a QGIS Cloud map project at https://qgiscloud.com/Bamse/MapMedievalRealms/ where players from the same server may add POIs and do the leg work of surveying the “new” world.


    qgis-map-of-rising-world-server-medieval-realms-1536x1152.png


    The only drawback (haha. sorry.) is: It’s a PITA to do the surveying because stopping every few meters to note down a bunch of coordinates takes hours! Someone had to do this though, because “my” isle – a piece of rock I randomly stumbled over after the latest server reset – was still missing! And while I clocked roughly ~700h on this game already I was not going to do that. I’m a programmer – which equals to lazy in my opinion. So I started scripting and after a few minutes came up with the following still crude solution:

    Code
    echo "" > move.log

    while true; do

     gnome-screenshot -w -f /tmp/snapshot.png && convert /tmp/snapshot.png -crop 165x30+905+975 /tmp/snapshot-cropped.tiff && tesseract /tmp/snapshot-cropped.tiff - -l eng --psm 13 quiet | awk 'match($0, /([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]])+.([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+).([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+)/) { print substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)}' | awk '{ printf "%0.0f,%0.0f,%0.0f\n", $1, $2, $3}' >> move.log sleep 2

    done

    This surely can be improved a lot but… minimum viable product. We’re still talking about a game. Here is what it does:

    • Take a screenshot of the active window (Rising World while playing)
    • Save it to /tmp (that’s in my RAM disk)
    • Crop out the coordinates and convert it to tiff using `imagemagick`
    • Run `tesseract` for OCR detection
    • Pipe the result to awk and use a RegEx to identify three numbers
    • Reformat the 3 numbers (remove the precision) and dump it in as csv-like log
    • Sleep for 2 seconds and repeat until terminated

    And in case you wonder why I used gnome-screenshot: I’m on Wayland and the usual suspects written for X do simply not work. I did recompile gnome-screenshots tho to disable the annoying flashing though so it’s silent now.

    Why the awk program? Well, tesseract is good but the raw data looked something like this in the end and the RegEx cleans that up somewhat:

    So I put this to a test and jogged around “my” isle and here are the results:

    beko_island-indexed.png


    One(!) data point was misread during the ~15 minutes run. Not too shabby! That could easily be fixed manually and who knows… mebbe I’ll improve on the script to check for implausible spikes like that at some point.


    I demoed the script to other players on the same server and some already started investigating into solutions to adapt this script to Windows. Just don’t ask me how to do that – I really wouldn’t know 😛


    Updated 10th Dec 2022: A solution to do the same on Windows PC appeared on https://wiki.calarasi.net/en/p…valrealms/ocr-coordinates


    This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.


    Originally posted at: https://beko.famkos.net/2022/1…urveying-the-risingworld/

    Edited once, last by beko: Added link to script alternative on Windows ().

    Like 3 I love it 2
    Quote from red51

    Wow, this is amazing and a very creative solution! :wow: Well done! 8):thumbup:

    Hi!


    In meantime i found a solution for windows too. Same OCR software and awk for cleaning, but another setup for capture.

    I just dreams :wow:, as red51, put a configurabile key bind who just throw a line with x,y,z into a file when player press it!


    Bamse

    Quote from Bamse

    I just dreams :wow: , as red51, put a configurabile key bind who just throw a line with x,y,z into a file when player press it!

    We could introduce a "coordinates" console command with the next update which prints the current coordinates and optionally saves them in a target file (e.g. something like "coordinates testfile.txt" to print the coordinates to a file called "testfile.txt" in the game directory) :)


    You can then set it as custom command in the config.properties file (e.g. set "Game_CustomCommand1=coordinates testfile.txt") and assign a key for "Custom Command 1" in the controls setting (at the very bottom) - then your coordinates will be written to the file every time you press that key :D

    Quote from Bamse

    This will be wonderfully. Just append a line to file, not replace all file and all will be fine. :thumbup:

    Yes, by default the game will just append a line ;) Alternatively one could put a '+' in front of the path (e.g. coordinates +relativefolder/subfolder/testfile.txt) to tell the game to append the line, or a '-' so the game overwrites the file content^^

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