Index

Xelagot building tools

The Project: transforming

The steps covered until now are: surveying an area, making a project from the survey, cleaning up the project from unwanted objects, consolidating the project and saving it, as well as loading and merging a project from file. These steps are sufficient if you wish to back up some property, to delete it or to restore lost property. They do not modify the objects in any way, and they leave the object number (identification number) of the objects intact.

You may wish to go a step further: copy the project somewhere else in the same world or to another world that has exactly the same objects, i.e. the objects of the project have to be moved elsewhere. Or you may wish to rotate it by a certain angle. This can be done with the tools on the tab Transforms. How to use Transforms will be explained on this page. Next page explaind how to actually copy objects from one location to another.

Before you start, make sure your project has been consolidated and saved to file, and that the Filters checkbox is unchecked. If you loaded a project from file, you do not need to consolidate it.

A project that has applied transforms is made unsuitable for deleting objects, because the position of objects and their object number has been altered.

It is highly recommended NOT to use filters and transforms together. Filter off what you don't want, consolidate and save to file (this file may be used for deleting objects). Then use transforms, consolidate again and save again (usually, with a different filename: this file is useless for deleting objects).

ROTATING

Rotations should only be applied once. You may test rotations many times, because the bot remembers the original coordinates of the objects until you consolidate the project, but once a rotated project has been consolidated, it should not be rotated a second time. The reason is that to rotate an object, the bot uses trigonometrical functions and approximates the resulting coordinates to the nearest centimetre. By rotating a second time, you start off with aproximated values and approximate again. Possible exceptions to this rule: rotations of exactly 90 or 180 degrees.

To rotate, you need to know two things:

1. the angle of rotation: positive angles are couterclockwise, negative angles are clockwise rotations.
2. the centre of rotation: this is the coordinate of the point around which the project will be rotated (like when you stick a pin through a map to rotate it)

Input the values in the appropriate boxes, then checkmark the box Rotation and, on the Project tab, checkmark the box Transforms and hit upgrade.

If both Rotation and Translation are applied simultaneously, the project is first rotated and the translated.

See Tips and Tools at the bottom of this page.

TRANSLATING (MOVING)

Translations, i.e. moving NSWE or up/down, do not introduce approximation errors. They may be freely applied at any time.

Input the values in the appropriate boxes, check the check-box or boxes for the translation(s) you wish to apply: NS, WE, Altitude. Then check Transforms and hit Upgrade.

If both Rotation and Translation are applied simultaneously, the project is first rotated and the translated.

See Tips and Tools at the bottom of this page.

TIPS AND TOOLS

• Avoid mixing steps (making a project, cleaning up, moving, etc): keep them separate, especially applying Filters and Transforms.
• Do not mix translations and rotations, consolidate in between to avoid confusion (unless you are sure of what you are doing).
• Use the button Calculate Centre to estimate the centre of rotation
• Use the button Bring to Map Area to bring your project to an area on your map. You can survey the target area and then use this facility to roughly move your project to that area.
• Use the Round Off function to remove decimals: this keeps objects in translated projects grouped together within the same cell. Also applicable to rotations of 90 or 180 degrees. Crucial when fighting BI.
• Use the Adjust buttons and input boxes to move coordinates by a fixed amount. Remember: 1 AW unit = 1 decametre = 10 metres = 20 clicks. This is also the width and length of one cell. The bot uses AW coordinates for N, S, W, E, just as the AW browser does. It uses metres for altitude (the AW browser uses AW units and shows metres!).
• Use the Coordinate Buffers to copy coordinates from the map or the lists to the Filter and Transform tools, as explained in the Tips and Tools of the Filter page..
  • On the map: right-click on a cell and select a buffer from item Cell Position to Buffer to store the coordinate of the SE corner of the cell.
  • On a list: select part of the text of an object, right-click and proceed as for the map.
  • On a Transform input box and on the area surrounding it (2 different functions): right-click and select the appropriate action. The Result buffer of the Translation Calculater and the Origin buffer can also be accessed here.
• Use the Origin buffer to set a fixed coordinate per project. This coordinate, if set, will be stored in the project file. You can modify or enable/disable the origin by selecting the menu Projects item Project Origin. The Canopus blueprint format may also keep a signature, similar to the xelagot origin. The difference is that the Canopus signature must be attached to an object. If, when saving a project which contains an origin as a Canopus blueprint file, the xelagot finds an appropriate object (same coordinates as the origin) it will attach a signature to this object.
• No more paper and pencil-work! Use the Translation Caculator to caculate translations from one coordinate to another and store them in the Result buffer. Combine this with the Coordinate Buffers and the Origin buffer. You can access this tool at the Tools menu.

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