Working around "dead" panoramas
under review
Jay
There is this "new addition" to google street view, which we lovingly call "dead pano". Its pretty much a panorama image that appears normal until you try load it, when google will not respond to your request properly, not allowing you to move into that spot. This is what i had encountered a couple months ago in my bug report "Failure to load panorama while fastmoving" and what others had encountered as well, seeing theres 2 other bug reports for the same issue. It is not a rare issue by any means, as almost everyone who plays a bit of moving has encountered this at some point. These dead panos stay consistent (e.g. the panorama one step to the east of this will not be loaded, as long as you dont use the official google maps interface https://maps.app.goo.gl/8iMiefVhNkThEEk4A )
Considering this is an issue with google, there is unfortunately not a lot you can do against it, but you can significantly improve the way you treat the issue when it arises. Currently, youre just doing nothing and trying to load the same panorama again whenever the player tries to move that way. When moving using the mouse, this is not a huge deal as it just appears you cant move in that direction despite there being arrows there, however when fast-moving into this panorama, you will repeatedly try and load it until you run into some sort of rate-limit and your page gets reloaded. (see my other post on checkpoints and returning to spawn as to why this is a bad thing)
Ideas on how to improve this:
1) After receiving an improper response, try loading the next panorama up instead, allowing you to jump over the dead pano (this would imo be the perfect solution).
2) Add a button to jump ahead by a fixed distance. This distance could just be 25m, which should easily be enough to escape these dead panos, or it could be 50m or even 100m (this requires testing and feedback from the community and should probably have some sort of cooldown to prevent players from jumping across the map in search for information) to fix other issues street view has like small coverage gaps and disconnected coverage. This is also a feature you should think about including, regardless of the way you choose to deal with dead panos.
If, for some reason you do not want to or can not implement either of these solutions, at least prohibit the player from getting rate-limited while fast moving. This could be achieved in these two ways:
3) Disallow the player to load the same panorama after n failed attempts. This would at least solve the fast-moving issue of reloading the page after hitting one of these bad boys.
or
4) De-select the movement-arrow after failing to properly load a panorama, stopping your fast-movement. This would, of course, still suck, but at least the player will know about the issue and be able to react to it properly instead of just being thrown back to spawn
L
Lennin
under review
Thanks for the report and our team is now aware of this. We will look into this as soon as we can.
L
Lennin
under review
Thanks for the report and our team is now aware of this. We will look into this as soon as we can.