MapView Real-Time How-To

Here's an overview of what the real-time part of MapView does, and how to get it running.

What is it?

The purpose of the real-time code is to allow for updating of MapView info with values directly from ATS. It's purely to speed up cut-and-pasting coordinates from ATS to the MapView window, and to give a little graphical representation of your ATS position.

How does it work?

In order to get the values coming to your client from ATS, MapView has to be set up as a sort of intermediate server between you and ATS. To do that, MapView must be configured to connect to ATS, and to allow you to connect to MapView.

What are the steps to get it running?

  1. Open mapview.cfg with a text editor
  2. Check that MUSH_hostname is pointing to ATS. The setting for this should be "MUSH_Hostname,ats.trekmush.org"
  3. Set the MUSH port to 1701. The full setting is "MUSH_Port,1701". There's a line marked "#MUSH_Port,1701", remove the # from the start, and erase the line with "MUSH_Port,0".
  4. Set up which port you will connect to locally. I will assume you are using port 10000. This is the default, which should show up as "RT_Port,10000" in the config file. You can use a different port if necessary.
  5. Start MapView
  6. Set MapView to the mode that you want. This is done by the "RT Updates" pulldown in the top right of the NavUtils window. You can either have MapView showing your ship as an icon, or showing your ship as an icon while also updating your source coord (selection 1).
  7. Connect your telnet client to MapView. To do this, you should connect to "localhost 10000". If that does not work, you can also try connecting to "127.0.0.1 10000". Errors at this point may be due to whatever firewall setup you have for your machine, so make sure MapView is allowed to access the network.
  8. Get into a ship and do 'nav stat'. If everything's working, you should see a little ship icon at your current position.
After everything is set up, the process should now be:
  1. Start MapView
  2. Set the RT Update mode you want
  3. Connect to "localhost 10000" or "127.0.0.1 10000" with your client

I want to put in my own ship icon!

Go right ahead. Replace ownship.BMP with a different .BMP logo if you like. You'll have to make sure it's a power-of-2 size (16x16,32x32,64x64 etc). Black pixels will be transparent in MapView so draw accordingly.

Hope that helps, and enjoy! xr