TLDR

Fog Machine: https://fogmachine.8bits.io/
Source code: https://github.com/CaviarChen/fog-machine

Nonsense background story

Late last year, a friend and I published the Fog machine project: A 3rd party Fog of World data visualizer/editor. It got more popular than I expected and I became more addicted to Fog of World since then. So I want to build more things. I’ve talked to multiple people about what they want and it seems that the most common things are:

  1. Time machine: Recording the history of Fog of World.
  2. Multi-layer: Mostly for separating flight tracks from other tracks.

Both features require having the ability to visualize the Fog of World data, which we already have, and 2 is somewhat depending on 1 because we need to solve the problem of extending the way we save the data. Thus, Time machine seems to be a reasonable next step. In fact, I already have a python script that running on my NAS that achives similar things, now I just need to productionalize it.

So I came up with the plan at the end of last year and was aiming for a public beta around April 2022. However, the acutal work started around March 2022 and I have been working very slowly (Thanks for other contributors: @PwzXxm, @ suozixie, @kuailezhiyuan. It would take longer without them). If I’m allowed to have some excuses, I would say mainly because I was traveling around so don’t have enough time and feeling uncertain about whether Fog of World 3 will change the whole format. The other thing is: never trust the timeline estimated by an engineer, we are full of crap and always being way too optimistic about our skills.

But anyway, now we have a version that basically works.

Time Machine!

You can start using it by visiting the Fog Machine website.

Fog Machine home page

In short, with a simple set up, the time machine service will take snapshot of your Fog of World data periodically. The way it works is that you need to turn on auto-sync in Fog of World app so the app will backup your data to a cloud storage automatically. Then you need to link the cloud storage with the time machine so it can snapshot that data. Currently, we only supports OneDrive as the cloud storage and you’ll need a Github account to use this service. We’ll add support of other cloud storages and login methods in the future. Also, if you have old data laying around, you could manually create snapshots by uploading these.

Time Machine

We also provide an easy way to view your tracks of each snapshot:

Time Machine Viewer

Future plan

We will keep working on this project and please let me know if there is any specific feature that you want. Also feel free to contact me if you want to contribute to this project.

Here are a non-exhaustive list of future plans:

  • Drawing tracks #70.
  • Better rendering.
  • Supporting other cloud storages.
  • Supporting other login methods.
  • Visualizing diff between snapshots.
  • Multi-layer.