Michael Donning

There's a site which archives many sites. In that archive there's still a copy of the firstmateguides site: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102231509/http://firstmateguides.co.uk/

We did the trip this summer (but not from Chirk Marina). Llangollen is "right around the corner" from your start point. It'll be around 3h from the marina to Llangollen basin. For me the most "challenging" part was going "upstream" in the chirk tunnel. But you'll only do that on the end of your trip when returning to the marina. The only challenging part on that tunnel also is that you're going unexpectedly slow and that you might notice that your boat is pointing a bit sideways while going straight. You will pass the moorings on Froncysyllte (before the aqueduct) maybe

Much of that information (shops, pubs, etc.) is already available in the Openstreetmap project. I think I remember that the author of the Open Canal Map had some discussion with the OSM guys about the project name (I don't know how it turned out). Anyway it could as well be added separately to the OCM. By the way, I forgot to add the proper disclaimer about my map source. Here it is: Map Data: © OpenStreetMap-Contributors, SRTM | Map display: © OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA)

We actually fetched some Welsh Oaties from Gerrards bakery (I think) in Llangollen. Butchers weren't a topic as our family of five had only one meat eater which wan't interested in doing his own shopping. But if certain butchers and/or bakeries are recommended here for those locations then I can update the maps at a later time.

Hi all! We did a 2 weeks hireboat trip in mid July to Llangollen + Chester. One thing that I didn't expect to happen so often was shopping for food. But we had 3 constantly growing teens in the crew which ate us out of boat and home. Another reason may've been also that we arrived (from Germany) by plane. So we did only some essential food shopping before getting afloat on our Snowmane of Chas Hardern Boats. Considering that. I thought that it might be helpful to post some notes and maps on the topic food shopping for other canal visitors. Generally, I propose that

CanalPlan already allows to set inidividual speeds for different waterway types and locks/swing bridges in the preferences. But using "realistic" average times would nevertheless be interesting. Especially if the "season" and the individual "profile" would be taken into account. This might give a better impression about travel times on very popular canals. (Like the Llangollen in Summer Holidays) including wait times at locks. If inidividual travel times/gps will be collected it might be very important to let the user tell the app if it is mooring (filling up water, eating, etc.

I've seen in their forum that CanalPlan can also deliver JSON-Files. But basically, that makes no difference. I still don't see the point of the moving camera. Either you are using the map while on the canal then the camera might just follow the GPS. Or you are mooring/at home then you can manually scroll the map on which the route is displayed. Route planning is tedious to implement. So it is a good idea to query CanalPlan for that as long as you keep the last route stored. Just have an interface to add the waypoints for the route query (from/to maybe stopovers like: From "here" (=G

The journey time in my little tool is based on the CanalPlan journey time intervals included in their CSV export. Just added up. (People can customize these on the CanalPlan site AFAIR).

Sorry, i noticed that my screenshots were far to big. Editing wasn't possible, so here's another post with smaller images:

I hacked together a little route planner for our journey last year. It was basically a web site which ran locally on android (within the firefox browser). It used downloaded CSV data from CanalPlanAC (converted to JSON). The "logic" was done in Javascript using the "Leaflet" library and some previoisly downloaded map tiles. If it is of any use I can pack the thing together and provide it to the developer. (in its current form it was basically limited to the GU and some "sidearms")

Thank you, Paul. I'll try the directional stability force (might take a time). But I fear that it will just interfere in a bad way with my lift/draft force model. I am aware that the latter is just a very rough approximation to the real thing. The implementation of propwalk is planned. Bank effect, not planned, yet. By the way: I've read that the Coandă-effect is one of the factors which is responsible for bowthrusters becoming pretty much useless on speeds above 5kts (= ca. 5.8mph). But narrowboats don't travel at this speed (at least on canals).

Yes, I use a (quite limited) physics model in the game. There's a basic phyics engine which handles weight/gravity, inertia and forces. On top of that I add a simple 4-area buoyancy calculation and a multi-point approximated lift/draft calculation. Multi-point because opposed to an aircraft wing profile a narrowboat often moves in different directions on different positions of the boat. My much simplified model therefore wouldn't cover the effect of speed on the bowthruster. For now, I just degrade the applied force depending on the forward speed... and I added an overheating turn-off aft

Sure, I could simply display a black screen for some seconds. Would not be much different than simulating the effect of a bottle of wine on the helmsman (consumption, not the other).

Thank you. That helps much. I won't ask people for reasons why the use the bowthruster at a specific speed. I just want to be sure to simulate the correct effect (= nil ) when somebody tries it out.