select a group of vessels to track

[g7ruh]

Jasper,

As you know, I live in an area renowned for yacht racing.

It is interesting to watch the tactics develop.

Would it be possible to enable a group of vessels to have tracking enabled? E.G. use a mouse button to create a rectangle and set tracking on for all vessels within that rectangle.

select an area as below

and enable tracking for all vessels:

Of course the idea came when I had to select all one at a time!

The track length needs to be variable, it is too short for this use case:

and from OpenCPN which allows track length to be configured

Thanks for considering this,
regards
Roger

[g7ruh]

Of course, the arrow indicating speed and direction on the OpenCPN map adds more to the experience, as a real-time status

Roger

[g7ruh]

the highlight when hovering over the vessel icon is very good at showing the individual tactics.

Roger

[jvde-github]

Hi Roger, great idea!

[g7ruh]

Jasper,

the race in the example went on for most of the afternoon, so the tracks were very long. if a bit thick on the default OpenCPN track width, it made a 'mess' of confusion on the screen, however your feature to highlight when hovering on a vessel picks out the detail nicely.

To that end, I think that the length of track (time-wise) needs to be a configurable setting, for normal use as it is or a bit longer is OK, for tracking a race and tactics, it needs to be a lot longer, but configurable.

Maybe AIS-catcher needs to have the option to record tracks for the "selected" rectangle or all tracks for e.g. 24 hours so the tracks are recoverable, post event, at least for a short while. E.G. playing back this afternoon's Cowes Week races: there are many separate races happening in The Solent at the same time. That option may win you some users in the yacht racing world too. Replay analysis tool, the tactician's friend!!!!!!!

Roger

[kit-powell]

This is right up my alley, as I want to do something similar (not for racing per se, but for fishing)

I’m not sure how fast I can get it done but if y’all would like I’d work on a companion platform to create a sort of geo-temporal fence and replay the tracks (probably leaflet based) with varying speed and chart/map/imagery)

Though I freely admit my github experience is limited to one project I put up years ago