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Nick (CanalPlanAC)

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    Mintball
  • Boat Location
    Market Drayton

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  1. I'm less sure. Here's what just might happen: they do this, putting the towpaths in and providing some very basic planning - like they do for walking and driving - but without anything sophisticated like different speeds for different times of waterways and the like because it's Google any attempt for people who don't know to find out about canal route planning pulls their pages up which means that new users never find CanalPlanAC and so don't look at the adverts on it which means that we don't get enough revenue to pay for our huge bandwidth requirements so it's no longer possible to provide a really sophisticated free route planner to you all so you get stuck with only Google's basic planner I hope not, and I'm going to see what I can do to prevent this happening, but I certainly can't rule it out.
  2. CanalPlan doesn't work things out for tides. It could but I'm not that keen as I'd really rather people did the research and made the decisions themself rather than relied on the program (we've seen what people following satnavs can do). It therefore doesn't use anything like a reasonable speed for tidal waterways to sort of make up for the likely waiting time (and because it doesn't use different speeds for up and down stream).
  3. That's not actually the problem - that's a different bug entirely! You can never end up in the middle of a tunnel as the exact overnight stop is always a specific place. But for some places - if you are at a fairly low detail level in the output - it tells you where that is (because otherwise it's very irritating to have Brown's Bridge No 17 as a stopping place when it doesn't appear at all in distance table). If you look closely at that you can see that it's got you a sensible stopping place - the southern end of the tunnel - but it's then come up with complete tosh when trying to tell you where that is. But - as some good news - there is now full tidal water and lock flight avoidance implemented.
  4. It's already on the issues list as issue 417. Now I've got the "adjust overnight stops to force stopping at specific places" code working pretty reliably it should actually be a lot easier than it was before as it can use much the same functionality. I'm working on some JavaScript to improve the maps at the moment, but will mentally raise this fix up my priorities list for when I feel like some scripting.
  5. I realised just how useful that was and added it as an option a couple of months ago - you can get a count-down as well ("show data to destination"). The time estimates are just that, a rule of thumb. What CanalPlan does usefully is work out those distances and miles for you with very little bother indeed. Just pop a handful of key points on your route in and off you go. I don't really want people to feel it's a set of instructions they must follow - it's a quick reckoner and also gives you a "where do I need to be today to be roughly on track" by breaking it into days - just what you need to help you decide whether to do one of those dawn starts. Mind you, I've been known to do that most days just for fun on some trips - it's very dependent on who's in the crew. I like the look of that, I feel a new output format coming on... I think that's a fair point. The real thing to do is to restore some code that I had in the earlier version that adjusted stopping places to avoid flights, tidal waters etc. It never worked quite properly and so didn't get translated to the new version. And a quick message above the stops would certainly be a friendly thing to do. I'll see about sneaking it into the next release.
  6. CanalPlan timings are deliberately designed to be, by default, somewhat on the conservative side. There are a few reasons for this of which the key one is that it is most likely to be novices who use the defaults and the last thing I want to do is to encourage someone to ruin their first boating holiday by trying something too ambitious. Also, having it like this means you don't need to make allowances in your cruising day for shopping, filling up the water tank, clearing muck off the prop and the like. Regular users really ought to create an account and can then keep their preferences. It's actually a lot more optimistic than typical guide book advice. For example, Nicholson's says "add the number of miles to the number of locks and divide by three to get hours" and then suggests adding time for services and visiting pubs. That would work out at 3 miles an hour and 20 minutes a lock (so slightly faster over the water than CanalPlan on narrow canals and as slow as anything CanalPlan suggests for locks, inside or out of flights). To compare, for the Cheshire Ring, CanalPlan suggests a total of 56 hours 20 minutes. Nicholson's formula comes out at 63 hours 40 minutes. That's a day longer. I have, at times, considered allowing % adjustment factors for waterways - including up and down stream factors but have not yet (hint) been persuaded that it's worth the effort, nor that people will care enough to help create the data.
  7. Although CanalPlan doesn't have particular fields for length of stay, return period or other things (charge for example), neither would a Wiki. It does have the ability to comment on the mooring at a place. So you can use it just like a wiki - go to the place, rate the mooring and then add a comment on whether it's an official BW mooring, how long you can stay etc. If people start putting useful mooring information in, I can start adding useful features that use it (how far is the nearest good mooring to where I am now, show all moorings on this canal, that sort of thing). But until there's a reasonable amount of data in there this would not just be pointless, but actually misleading to anyone who used it. So, there is already a facility for noting where good moorings are - why not use it?
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