Geolyzer, is it useful in its current form?

[TwoThe 4]

I've been playing around with the Geolyzer a few days ago, and I do really like the concept, however I can't seem to find any practical use as of yet.

The results are very unreliable

I tried several things to clear up the noise from the data, however I either run into OutOfMemory problems or very unreliable results. The average range that still gives some reasonable valid results seems to be 16 blocks, beyond that it really gets messy. Which feels kind of strange for a device that has a 32 block standard radius and could go way beyond that.

It is not really portable

Now visualizing that with a Holprojector does make a great addition to every house, however the fact that I need to setup a power-source, a PC, Screen, Keyboard, Geolyzer and Holoprojector and that this thing really draws power while running makes it to stationary to carry around. I could probably setup some scanning array somewhere down in my mine, but by the time I have that up and the scan completed, I probably already have cleared the scanned area by hand. And sadly it cannot be put into a robot.

Is there something I am doing wrong with this thing or is this just work in progress?

[Sangar 92]

The OOM is Lua sided, I assume? Each call does return a relatively large table, so I suppose that can be an issue, not much that can be done there, though.

As for the noise, it might need some tweaking. Feel free to mess with the config settings and suggest alternative default values!

Portability: I am looking into making the thing an upgrade, too, so it can be used in robots. Further suggestions as to how it can be made more interesting are always welcome, of course!

[TwoThe 4]

Indeed Lua OOM, otherwise there would already be a bug report.

 

Normal scans run just fine memory-wise, but when I tried to make an incremental median scan code it turned out that the data size of a table is far beyond what one would assume when counting the bytes. It is possible to squeeze it all into a string of bytes, however that makes the whole code much slower as of the lack of native bit-shift operations.