Shorah Tyra (and hi dadguy ),

[[Sorry for the double post--hit the wrong button before I was done!! See next post for the real message!]]

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Last edited by Ainia on Thu Feb 16, 2012 1:21 am; edited 1 time in total

Shorah Tyra (and hi dadguy ),

There's also Pod Clock/Zik Clock (Zik is short for Reziksehv, the name for the planet/Age with all the pods), which I happen to really like too. It's available for Windows, Mac and iPhone and has a very nice graphical interface. You can use it to scroll way ahead if you want to see portal times well into the future (which makes it easier to plan your weekends in the Cavern).


It took me a little while to figure out the images (I guess I'm a bit slow sometimes), but the top bar is for Negilahn, the next is Dereno, the third is Payiferen and the last is Tetsonot, the same order they are shown on the Pod Age map in the Museum. The colors of each bar correspond to the overall age colors and show their night cycles too (pretty helpful if you want to see what Negilahn and Payiferen look like after dark).

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Wow, thanks! This is super helpful. I've gotten all the portals except Payiferen. Which is really weird because I was standing there the whole time the lights passed the stones on the floor and no portal opened. I even followed one of the pod clocks and there was no portal that opened when the clock said it was supposed to open.

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Dragon Lover <3

Tyra, I noticed this too. I watched the Payiferen portal time come and go with no Portal, as I watched the lights hit the symbols on the floor. I wrote it off as either I missed it by coming a bit late, or my Special FX and Ambient Sounds levels were turned down (they were) and I didn't hear it (perhaps because the portal appears in the lower level).

I'll try it again next chance and report back here.

ALSO, I have that POD clock that my friend Ainia provided. I found that it was off by about 5 minutes - the portal came 5 minutes AFTER what it predicted - (the other one I sent you was spot-on), and Ainia's Pod clock has a calibrate feature that allowed me to correct it. It's not entirely intuitive how you use the calibrate feature though.

Have fun,

Dadguy

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Member of the Guild of Greeters

I've tested some of the portal clocks that are available and my conclusion:

the one that we can found on the Guild of Greeters is by far the most accurate. The link is already provided by Dadguy on February 14th. (see 7 posts before mine) You can be sure of one thing, I have a whole community of avatars so you can be sure that I tested thoroughly the pod portals.

Many won't realise it but for example the portals (yes it's plurial) for Negilahn won't appears all at the same time. I've tested it with multiple users accounts on my PCs. I brought 4 avatars in their Negilahn between 10 and 5 minutes before the estimate portal time. I putted the sound ON on each open client.

I should have heard 1 big opening portal sound. I heard 4 distinct sounds. Some were really close (5 to 10 seconds apart), some were really far (up to 1 minute).

I made this kind of test on several occasions and in different pods. 2 avatars with their portals already and 2 without so the 2 with theirs, I didn't bother much to miss the open portal. I only came with the standard set of 2 arms at birth

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On MOULa shard:

Annabelle 03632553 & Sophie (aka STA1) 15112736 - main public avatars
Annabot 209XXXXX - the bot

Based on the experiences with Payiferen mentioned here I linked to
that Pod about 4.5 hrs. ago to see if it wouldn't appear, but it did as
it should ...

In general you should always give at least a couple minutes up and
down of the given time by the portal calculators ... I love to be ahead
of time patiently awaiting the appearence of those most beautiful
star portals and then joyfully passing through ...

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janaba MOULa KI #154268, Minkata KI #4525 , Gehn KI # 16392, TOC KI # 86963
MO:ULa is

Ok, thanks for all your advice! I really appreciate it.

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Dragon Lover <3

Ainia wrote:

(Zik is short for Reziksehv, the name for the planet/Age with all the pods)

Reziksehv just means "The Pod Age", a player-based (i.e. not confirmed by RAWA) translation based on the assumption that "Zik" means "Pod". That assumption comes from the map, which has "Zik" written in apparent association with a diagram of a pod.

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In Cavern: Dryhad (KI: 01316560)

It bears repeating that Pod Clock/Zik Clock are intentionally inaccurate out-of-the-box, in order to encourage you to do your own calibration to make them more accurate (and also to save me the effort of releasing an updated version every time the predictions have deviated by one second ). They are meant primarily as research tools to help you solve the puzzle, not as cheating tools to help you get your wedges with the least amount of effort possible. (I don’t mind if people use them for that, it’s just not what I made them for.)

dadguy wrote:

It's not entirely intuitive how you use the calibrate feature though.

Fair enough. That was a compromise between getting a halfways usable user interface in the lowest-common-denominator cross-platform environment of wxWidgets, and not spending too much work and code on it (the calibration window already accounts for more code than the main view and the internal number-crunching). I hope, if you use it, you find the iOS version (Zik Clock) more intuitive. Finally, as a reminder, both are open source, so anyone is welcome to improve them.

Thanks CW. Even though it takes a try or two to calibrate, the tool works great. Thanks for putting it together!

Cheers,

Dadguy

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Member of the Guild of Greeters