Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.
The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Here's a tool that will help you plan and manage surveys, the imaginatively named: Project Gorgon Survey Helper!
This is a tool that lets you use the record of survey locations in your chat logs to paint the survey locations as numbered dots on a map of the zone. I've been using a desktop tool like this for a while, but it wasn't too hard to make a web version so everyone can use it! The idea has already been run by the dev staff and it sounds like they're okay with it as long as it just uses the chat logs.
It supports Motherlode maps now!
If you find any problems with it or have any questions or suggestions, please post them here!
Alternately, pull requests will (very slowly) be reviewed at https://github.com/gchristopher/pg_survey_helper. For PR's other than simple bug fixes, like adding features or making UI decisions, please discuss them here first.
Here's a quick preview of what the map looks like with a bunch of surveys on it:
Current Known Issues:
Survey circles seem to be a bit offset from the coordinates. A game bug?
Knowing zone sizes in meters is important for accurately placing pins. They probably need fine-tuning.
Current Planned/Unfinished Features:
Auto-place the character position to a pre-defined list of common locations so it's easier to place precisely.
Add a "Open Chat Log" button that lets you browse your HD for the log.
It's a nice tool. You could improve it with pre-defined locations for the character position. For example, portal exit and respawn spots. A survey made from one of these locations would be automatically more accurate.
Haha, I never thought about that, since surveys are what you do by the hundreds. That's a good idea! If it doesn't already work for Treasure Cartography, I'll fix it.
EDIT: I checked, and treasure cart results are logged in the chat log and work with the current survey tool. Should work fine!
Originally Posted by Niph
It's a nice tool. You could improve it with pre-defined locations for the character position. For example, portal exit and respawn spots. A survey made from one of these locations would be automatically more accurate.
Thanks! That's a really good idea. I'll do that. Plus, it'll give me a chance to pick all my favorite silly locations (like balancing atop the statue in Serb) and add them.
It's fine as is. Being able to choose base 5 numerals would be nice, but yeah.
I'm interested in how you would do motherlodes. Would you check all the surveys from two different spots, then triangulate?
Yep, I've been doing that for the desktop version. As BetaNotus pointed out on discord, that gets you the intersection of two circles, so two possible points, so it only works great if you do both checks from near the same map edge. Otherwise you might get two possible locations on the map for a survey. If you do three checks, then you can narrow each survey down to only one location.
There's a few minor caveats to making it work with three survey checks, but nothing too difficult. Most of the work will be adding motherlodes to the user interface to make it nice enough to use, I suspect. (You'll have to place two or three player position markers and it would be much cleaner to break the chat log window into three separate panes, with the third being optional.
The one thing that turned out to be absolutely critical in order to place surveys on the map is knowing the distance in meters between your two survey points, and (closely related), the exact size in meters of the zone.
For the example image below, I was buying people's castoff Kur motherlode surveys and using the tool to find them. Not surprisingly, they were all in the ocean. It turns out that Kur is very close to 3000m x 3000m, but until I'd nailed that size down, the triangulated points just weren't exact enough that I could drop to the ocean floor and get them on the first try. There was lots of hilarious drowning while I used that process to dial in the zone size measurements.
There was lots of hilarious drowning while I used that process to dial in the zone size measurements.
Potions are the only way to get the ones in the water. Even if you have duck form, you don't want to have to go back to the inn after every single one.
The other problem is that some motherlodes 100% require flight. So if you aren't a baby eating druid, you need to burn a flying WOP.