Topic: How to create a water source?

Tagged: water springs

This topic has 5 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 3 months ago by Sean Robinson.

Viewing 6 posts - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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August 1, 2023 at 4:11 am #2595

Leonardo16
Participant

Hey guys, I saw some videos about the sandbox, and I’m wondering If It is possível to make a water source, like, some point where I set and the water keeps going out of that point. I Will use It to make some rivers or whatever to teach about watersheds.

August 1, 2023 at 3:01 pm #2596

Sean Robinson
Participant

One possible way to do this is to cut out a hand silohuette. Just as a trial, I once cut out a trace of my hand on cardboard and stood it over the sand with a short PVC pipe. It worked to make an artesian well on the sand.

We do not use the hand silohuette because part of the fun is the interactivity and group effort. Assign a student to make the rain hand shape. Rotate student helpers as arms become tired.

Another way is to use the “Manage Water Locally” tool. Place the mouse cursor where you want the rain/spring and press the assigned key to add water at that spot. I believe this could be automated with xdotool (for Xorg or the similar ydotool for Wayland) to place the mouse pointer and virtually press the “Manage Water Locally” hot key. I think it would be possible to assign a command key in SARndbox to run a script for a local water source. I have not tried this.

August 4, 2023 at 4:32 am #2597

Leonardo16
Participant

Hey Sean, I was meaning to do something different, like a water spring, because I need 3 or 4 point of water to make watersheds, with the manage water locally se can’t make It in more points. I saw a Brazilian project that made a program based on the original sandbox software, they made water springs but I can’t talk with the creators, I Will drop a link If you wanna see It.

Thanks for the help 🙂

August 10, 2023 at 6:57 am #2602

Sean Robinson
Participant

Thank you for sharing the video. I had not seen the Universidade Regional de Blumenau (FURB) project before.

…I can’t talk with the creators…

Is it a language issue or are they not responding?

I see two possible ways to accomplish multiple springs. I’ll split the ideas across posts in case I have to fight the spam filters.

August 10, 2023 at 7:02 am #2603
Sean Robinson
Participant
The first idea, and immediately workable, is to use xdotool. With xdotool:

1- move the mouse to a spring source
2- press the local water key
3- wait some time
4- release the key

Repeat this in a loop (in a script) with several spring sources.

As an example, here are xdotool commands to add water at three locations, each for a tenth of a second. (This assumes the ‘r’ key has been assigned to “Manage Local Water” in SARndbox.)
```
search --name "^SARndbox$"
windowactivate %1
mousemove --window %1 --polar 0 200
keydown 'r'
sleep 0.1
keyup 'r'
mousemove --window %1 --polar 90 200
keydown 'r'
sleep 0.1
keyup 'r'
mousemove --window %1 --polar 270 200
keydown 'r'
sleep 0.1
keyup 'r'
```
If there is not enough water from each spring, increase the rain strength with the -rs argument or patch your SARndbox to add the rainStrength pipe command.
August 10, 2023 at 7:09 am #2604

Sean Robinson
Participant

I have not tried the FURB software (Caixa and custom SARndbox), but it looks like it could be made to work with the newer sandbox software. The second idea is to add the Caixa water spring changes to the latest SARndbox.

I’ll add my notes in case someone wants to try porting the spring sources to SARndbox 2.x. Below here are my speculations from watching the video, reading the source code for the various components in Caixa, and their source changes to SARndbox v1.6.

There are two parts: 1) measurement of the target (black-top-surface hemispheres) coordinates with Caixa; and 2) modifications to SARndbox to read the measured points from a file and add local water at those points.

The modified SARndbox reads the spring coordinates and uses a modified Sandbox::LocalWaterTool::addWater to add water to several “S” points. Sandbox::LocalWaterTool gains a ::registerPoint helper function to add “S” points.

If someone wants to work on this feature, I’d be happy to advise.
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