Nauticus
Tracks the precise arrival & departure schedules of boats and Zeppelins around Azeroth and displays them on the Mini-Map and World Map in real-time.
For better accuracy, get your friends and guild mates to install Nauticus as well.
Official Homepage: drool.me.uk/naut
Click here to report an issue or request a new feature
(Please do not post in the comments section to report bugs)
Before posting a comment...
Please read the entire addon description below - especially the Frequently Asked Questions section! You can also comment on the WowAce.com page.
What is Nauticus?
Nauticus tracks the precise arrival & departure schedules of boats and Zeppelins around Azeroth and displays them on the Mini-Map and World Map in real-time.
Look up arrival & departure schedules for any transport and know exactly when you need to be there. Less time waiting on platforms, more time at the AH or mailbox, less duelling rogues or shamies who want you to take a seat while they crit you... 'for fun'...
To track a transport requires that you, or someone else running the addon, has taken the route sometime earlier. Nauticus uses hidden addon-to-addon communications to synchronise and share up-to-date schedules between players automatically.
Important: This addon works best the more players on your realm also using the addon. So get your friends and guild mates to install Nauticus - the more the merrier! Even if you don't use transports because you're only ever in Outland, you can help store and transmit up-to-date data to everyone that needs it. Nauticus performs well in the background and you can disable the map icons for zero interference.
Main Features
- Plots all (16) Horde, Alliance and neutral transports on the World Map in real time
- Displays the most relevant transports on the Mini-Map, based on your current zone
- Map icons rotate to show their actual direction at any point in time
- Shows arrival or departure schedule for each platform when you mouse-over any map icon
- Discovers schedule by travelling a route in either direction
- Calculates future schedules, based on precisely measured round-trip cycles
- Automatically share schedules with other users of the addon on your realm
- Differential delayed updates keep communication bandwidth low even with many users (O(1))
- Ranks quality of data based on number of reboots and swaps, always picking the best
- Remember schedule data even after computer reboot (see FAQ for caveat)
- Select any transport for viewing in any LibDataBroker (LDB) display addon.†
- Shows the next arrival or departure event in the button text.
- Button icon changes colour to indicate status (yellow = docked, red = about to depart, green = in transit)
- Auto-selects nearest transport when standing at a platform (optional)
- Alt-click button to manually set audio alarm to warn you before next departure
- Less spam: Filter ship crew talk and Zeppelin Master yells from your chat window (optional)
† If you're new to Broker plugins, they're a bit like FuBar plugins but displayed how you want. Try StatBlockCore, Button Bin or Fortress for display addons and see here for more plugins. Titan has LDB support built-in. FuBar requires the lightweight bridge addon Broker2FuBar (not to be confused with FuBar2Broker, which does the opposite).
Usage
Find out the status of a transport via World Map/Mini-Map or via an LDB button display.
For options, type /nauticus or /naut in the command line.
To Do
- Auto pop-up tooltip and/or sound arrival/departure alarm (i.e. Zeppelin horn or boats bell) when at platform
Note: Nauticus is always in continual development. You should try to keep your version up-to-date, not least because the addon interacts with other users and they rely on good quality data from you. You'll be notified upon login when there's a new version available, after other users are seen using a later version. For this reason, please DON'T redistribute or include in a compilation pack!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. I just installed Nauticus, why don't I see any schedules?
A player with the addon needs to travel on the boat/Zeppelin/turtle before the schedules come up. This could be you or someone else who may have taken the transport earlier. The most recent schedules are synchronised between other players running the addon, so after a short while the data will most likely be available to you before you take any transport. Get as many of your friends and guild mates to install Nauticus - the more the merrier.
Q. How does Nauticus get the schedules?
There are no Blizzard-provided API methods to directly determine the transport schedule. Thus we do it indirectly by getting player coords and comparing them to a known set of coords along the route. When the player 'triggers' these coords, we know the cycle and can subsequently work out future schedules at any point in time.
Q. How accurate is it?
Round-trip cycles have been calculated to one microsecond (six decimal places) over a 1-2 week period. This is significantly better resolution than provided by the API, which only measures in milliseconds (three decimal places). Baring slight adjustments in Blizzard's clocks etc., 99.9% of the time there should be no observable drift of more than a second or two.
Q. Why are some of my schedules wrong?
Rarely, schedules can become corrupted due to changes in your computer's system clock that may occur between WoW sessions/reboots. This can also be caused by dodgy CMOS batteries and some over-clocked systems. Otherwise, Nauticus can normally keep track of schedules between reboots. Additionally, while realm servers appear to keep very precise clocks for running the transports and to generate their positions, from time to time they may re-synchronise these clocks, sending the data slightly out of wack. Nauticus should quickly fix the schedules, as it will gather more recent and better quality data from other users or from your own travels.
Q. Doesn't weekly maintenance ruin the schedules?
It doesn't! We can only assume how Blizzard calculates transport schedules and their positions but it's probably based on the realm server's system clock, which is likely synchronised with a centralised ntp time server at each data centre. You can verify this by visiting another realm (at least, in the same geographical location - e.g. EU, US Eastern) to observe exactly the same schedules. This is another way to obtain accurate schedule data - from other realms. If there is one, an epoch is presently unknown - if any maths wiz can manage to reverse engineer it (simultaneous equations?), do let me know!
Q. Why does Nauticus have to use a chat channel?
Blizzard's SendAddonMessage() API is effectively limited to guild and raid addon communication, which is insufficient to get data spread furtherest across your realm. For maximum availability and accuracy of schedules, we need to use a chat channel. You shouldn't be concerned if you have the channel slot spare - we're extra careful not to mess up channel numbers.
Q. Where did the GUI disappear to?
The red window was removed in favour of map icons with tooltips. It became difficulty to maintain the rather clunky code necessary to provide this functionality and consumed more resources than desirable. Plus it didn't cater for other languages very well due to its fixed size. Native FuBar support was removed in favour of LibDataBroker (Broker/LDB) displays. Broker allows ''you'' to choose your method of displaying plugins. The lightweight bridge addon Broker2FuBar returns the old FuBar functionality, as well as allowing you to put it as a Mini-Map button (even if you don't use FuBar).
Q. Can you add the Deeprun Tram?
Unfortunately no, since it's treated as an instance and we can't properly track player coords within instances.
Nauticus is a complete rewrite of ZeppelinMaster which was originally conceived by Sammysnake. He runs a DKP hosting service online @ dkphost.net.
Well I would like to add a comment here.
After the last Titan Panel , or blizzard update. Nauticus does not work correctly with Titan panel for me. The arrow on the MiniMap shows the correct color and times, green yellow and red. When I mouse over the addon in Titan Panel it will show the correct times. The problem is it not longer shows the times counting down in Titan Panel. It will freeze and show the two ports. Once in a while it will show the time and freeze on that second and stop counting (like it will show 45 second until depart, and be yellow and get stuck on it, even though the mini map color has changed and the time in second should have definitely change). I like to have it on only show the ones in the zone I am in, and I not like having the GUI on screen, just right click on titan and change it, but now...due to it freezing..I can not just glance at it to see the time....so I disabled it in the addon list for now...so I hope that there is a way to fix that...
Have you removed Titan Panel support? It wasn't clear from the notes. I now see a minimap icon and the icon on my Titan panel no longer shows up.
Nope it's not removed, it's integrated. You may have to re-add it back onto the bar. Right-click the bar, under the Plugins Information sub-menu, select Nauticus.
(Do make sure you don't have a separate TitanNauticus addon folder - these are no longer needed - read the section on 'UPGRADING' in the description above.)
Mainly cosmetic improvements in this v2.3.3 release. Enjoy.
Is there any way to increase the size of the icons on the Minimap and/or Worldmap?
I myself find them rather dificult to see since they are smaller then the player arrow... :-/
And.. ^-^ I love the addon!
Okey dokey, I'll add an option to resize them.
An update will be due soon anyway (may try to coincide it with the next WoW patch release)...
The version I just uploaded contains several minor fixes and tweaks. Accuracy of all round-trip-times is basically finalised and pretty damn good. It should drift no more than 0.1 seconds over a 2 week period.
Importantly, we now default back to a world chat channel for data sync (you *can* manually change it to the guild comms API via slash command but it is NOT recommended!). This is necessary to get the data spread furthest. Don't mess unless you absolutely have to.
Patch 2.3-compatible release uploaded, finally. :) IMPORTANT: Due to significant route changes, sync comms backward compatibility is not supported. So get your friends and guildies to update too! (Remember, Nauticus is on WAU also.)
What is WAU? Lol sorry, not familiar with that acronym.
WAU is WowAceUpdater.
It's a good way to keep Ace addons up-to-date. Note: even though it says they're beta versions, I would say most authors including myself tend not to leave them in an unstable state for too long, bugs are fixed pretty speedily and avoided as much as possible in the main trunk.
Brief update:
Calibrated the routes and got some rough round-trip-times. To get the rtt's down to a better precision, and to avoid too much drift, I need to literally wait for time to pass - ideally as much as a week, but I'll do a day or so and put out a version for use soon. It'll do till I'm able to tweak it to the accuracy we're used to...
Fun and games though. Had to rewrite the 'trigger' algorithm because some of the (Zep) routes don't go over water now - which was crucial to avoid players accidentally triggering the coords from below, since we could exclude such events by detecting if the player was swimming. Now some of those triggers are over land, I've had to make it detect certain player speeds (anything over 300%). This is actually a performance enhancement, since it won't bother to iterate through each trigger in the zone until enough speed is met.
Another pita thing was the trigger range - it was reaching a bit too far and on some routes where choice of trigger coords was tight due to overlapping routes on the return journey, it was hitting the wrong ones, heh. So now it uses a smaller fixed measurement in game yards rather than some arbitrary number.
Also, some of my code assumed a docking time of exactly 60 seconds but it seems Blizzard reduced that to 30 for the Feathermoon boat. Had to workaround that hard-coded bit.
Another day or so for the next release then.
awesome! sounds great ^_^
Dang! Nice mod, it is very helpful! I really appreciate the work you put into it.
Yes I'm gonna have to recalibrate every single transport due to the patch 2.3 release. And I'll be adding some more strings to the chat filter it seems. Don'tcha just love Blizzard? Please bare with me folks...
Edit:
Well Blizzard have rocked the boat on this one... quite literally! The Ratchet to Booty Bay boat is now animated to rock from side to side, which means it moves at dock and all the bloody time, which means I can't easily calibrate the precise docking times, or even the round-trip-time. I need to rewrite my calibration algorithm from scratch before I can do anything. Sorry folks but this might take awhile.
I turned off the MiniMap button/icon, and now I can't seem to find a way to turn it back on... I tried everything, no luck. Help, please?
The minimap button is the FuBar plugin (although it's up to you if you want to use it without FuBar itself) and such plugins are usually re-enabled via right-click on the FuBar, so I don't know of a direct way.
Indirectly, you can try this on the command line and then relog/reload UI (/console reloadui):
/script NauticusFu.db.profile.hidden = false
Excellent, that (the script bit) did it! Thanks so much!
Hmm yea. Please read the description above on UPGRADING - you still have the TitanNauticus directory installed, which you should delete, as it's built-in now.
By the way, the ticket system does work y'know. ;)
Those of you who use WAU will now find it there. Best thing to do to select it and 'Reinstall Marked Addons' so it uses your choice of externals or without.
*ahem* Let me be the first to say: "w00t!!!!!!!! Heck yeah!!!!" I was excited for this release when you hinted the zeps would appear on my maps, but with the passage of time, was unsure that it would ever be realized. Can't wait to get in and start testing it out!