January 23, 2025.
Josh deleted all files on the forums. Many amazing guides became unusable because of this. One of these guides was my own. It had months of dedication put into it, and I was heartbroken when I learned that others couldn’t use it anymore. But many people loved my guide, and I still get notifications for it fairly often. I’ve finally decided to fix it. It is now way simpler to build, and uses a lot less memory! With that, I give you,
How to Track Every Player and Find Their Distance… Version 2.0!
What we'll be making
Sorry, the GIF quality is bad. If you look at the top right, you will see an overlay that contains every player’s positions, as well as another string of text, which you might know to be the new player’s unique ID! In the bottom right, you can barely make out that it shows the position of the closest player, and your distance from them.
For those that are curious, here is a link to the original version:
How to Track Every Player and Find Their Distance [ 🟥 8/10]
Materials
This list is sorted first by the greatest number of devices to the least, then by how much memory they use.
“Property” ×7 (70 memory)
“Item Granter” ×2 (1,570 memory)
“Game Overlay” ×2 (1,350 memory)
“Player Coordinates” ×1 (3,500 memory)
“Trigger” ×1 (40 memory)
“Relay” ×1 (20 memory)
Friends: 2 - 3 recommended, but you can just open the game in separate tabs.
Total memory: 6,550
That is a difference of a whopping 2,315 memory from the first version!
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get started!
Part 1: Coordinates
Part 1: Coordinates
This is the simplest part of the build, but it is crucial for the system to work. You’ll be needing the “Player Coordinates” and two “Property” devices.
Give one “Property” device these settings:
Property Name: My x
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
And make another “Property” device like this:
Property Name: My y
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
And set up the “Player Coordinates” device like so:
When player position changes, transmit on: Update all player data
Update Properties: Yes
X Position Property: My x
Y Position Property: My y
Easy peasy! With that out of the way, we can get into more technical stuff!
Part 2: Setting Player Data
Part 2: Setting Player Data
Now we’ll set up how the player’s coordinates will be sent.
First, make a “Property” with these settings:
Property Name: All player data
Property Type Text
Default Value:
Property Scope: global
When property value changes, transmit on: New all player data relay
Broadcast value change on game start: No
Now get an “Item Granter”. Don’t worry about the settings, we’re just adding a block to it.
Create a new block: When receiving on channel: Update all player data
Set variable (My data) to: create text with (Triggering Player's ID) (,) (Get Property (My x) + 100) (,) (Get Property (My y) + 100) (,)
Set variable (All player data) to: Get Property (All player data)
Set variable (Substring index) to: in text (variable (All player data)) find (first) occurrence of text (Triggering Player's ID)
if variable (Substring index) = 0
do:
> Set Property (All player data) Value: create text with (variable (All player data)) (variable (My data))
> Broadcast Message On Channel: Check players
else:
> Set Property (All player data) Value: create text with (in text (variable (All player data)) get substring from (first letter) to (letter #) (variable (Substring index) - 1)) (My data) (in text (variable (All player data)) get substring from (letter #) (variable (Substring index) + 33) to (last letter))
Explanation
So this is a lot of code, but what exactly is the point of it? Since we’re dealing with several different players, we don’t want several properties for each player; that would take way too much memory. What if we stored every player in the game’s data in a single property? To do that, we need to make sure that all the player data is the same length as everyone else’s. Since player names can vary in length, we won’t use them. Instead, we can use the player’s unique ID, which always has a length of 24 characters. We’ll also add our position in there, as well as commas to separate everything. We’ll add 100 to our position to ensure that the length of the position remains 3, no matter where we are on the map. (This saves memory and makes the system faster as opposed to the older version.)
Now, we’ll find where our data should go in the string. If it can’t find our player ID, it assumes that we either just joined or the game just started, and adds our data onto the current data. If it does find our data, then it separates all of the data before and after ours, and inserts our new data.
If you’d like to learn more about how text strings work, check out this guide:
The Power of Text Strings [ 🟨 5/10]
These next steps are optional, but are good for playtesting.
Now get a “Relay” and set it up like this:
Relay Audience: All Players
Relay channel: New all player data
Relay when receiving on: New all player data relay
Next, place a “Game Overlay” with these settings:
Overlay Type: Text
Overlay Position: Top Right
Overlay Text:
Visible On Game Start: Yes
Overlay Color: R = 255 G = 255 B = 255
Content Scope: player
Visibility Scope global
Show overlay when receiving on:
Hide overlay when receiving on:
Now give it a block like this:
Create a new block: When receiving on channel: New all player data
Set text: Get Property (All player data)
Congratulations, you’ve finished part 2! You’re almost there, keep it up!
Part 3: Getting Distances
Part 3: Getting Distances
Now let’s go through the whole list of players and get their distances from us! In this system, we will just look for the closest player to us and display their position and distance on a “Game Overlay”.
Let’s first set up the properties that will be used in this system.
Property Name: Closest X
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
Property Name: Closest Y
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
Property Name: Players
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
Property Name: Closest distance
Property Type Number
Default Value: 0
Property Scope: player
When property value changes, transmit on:
Broadcast value change on game start: No
Next, place an “Item Granter” and, once again, don’t worry about changing any of its settings, and add a new block.
Create a new block: When receiving on channel: Check players
Set Property (Players) Value: Get Property (Players) - 1
if Get Property (Players) ≤ 0
do:
> Set Property (Players) Value: (length of (Get Property (All player data)) Ă· 32 + 1)
> Broadcast Message On Channel: Show closest player
else:
> Set variable (Substring index) to: Get Property (Players) Ă— 33 + 1
> if in text (Get Property (All player data)) get substring from (letter #) (variable (Substring index) - 32) to (letter #) (variable (Substring index) - 9) ≠Triggering Player's ID
> do:
> > Broadcast Message On Channel: Calculate distance
> else:
> > Broadcast Message On Channel: Check Players
What this block does is set the player whose data we’re currently trying to get. If we’re trying to get our data, then we skip the next step so that we don’t accidentally track ourselves.
Now we’ll make one more block in the “Item Granter” that will retrieve the coordinates of the player we’re tracking.
Create a new block: When receiving on channel: Calculate distance
Set variable (Substring index) to: Get Property (Players) Ă— 33
Set variable (X) to: in text (Get Property (All player data)) get substring from (letter #) (Substring index - 7) to (letter #) (Substring index - 5)
Set variable (X) to: variable (X) - 100
Set variable (Y) to: in text (Get Property (All player data)) get substring from (letter #) (Substring index - 3) to (letter #) (Substring index - 1)
Set variable (Y) to: variable (Y) - 100
Set variable (Distance) to: square root ((Get Property (My x) - variable (X))^2 + (Get Property (My y) - variable (Y))^2)
if variable (Distance) < Get Property (Closest Distance
do:
> Set Property (Closest distance) Value: variable (Distance)
> Set Property (Closest X) Value: variable (X)
> Set Property (Closest Y) Value: variable (Y)
Broadcast Message On Channel: Check players
What this does is convert the text string of the “All player data” property to a number, by using a variable to set it, then subtracting 100, which converts it from a text string to a number, and cancels out when we added 100 to the position in the “Update all player data” block.
We’re so close to finishing! Keep it up! Now we’re going to add the display. You can replace this with whatever function you’re trying to create!
Overlay Type: Text
Overlay Position: Top Right
Overlay Text:
Visible On Game Start: Yes
Overlay Color: R = 255 G = 255 B = 255
Content Scope: player
Visibility Scope global
Show overlay when receiving on:
Hide overlay when receiving on:
Now give it a block:
Create a new block: When receiving on channel: Show closest player
Set text: create text with (The closest player to you is at ) (Get Property (Closest X)) (, ) (Get Property (Closest Y)) ( which is ) (Get Property (Closest distance)) ( meters away.)
Set Property (Closest distance) Value: 9999
Broadcast Message On Channel: Check players prep
Add a “Trigger” with these settings:
When triggered, transmit on: Check players
Trigger when receiving on: Check players prep
Trigger Delay: 0.2
Visible In-Game: No
Allowed Team: Any Team
Max Triggers:
Active On Game Start: Yes
Activate when receiving on:
Deactivate when receiving on:
Active Scope: global
Trigger By Player Collision: No
The reason we have this “Trigger” is so that we don’t accidentally try to track players again too soon. Without this, the whole system freezes up. I haven’t tested this with too many people in game, but I do know that the more players in game, the longer the delay has to be. If you want to be safe, I would put the delay at 0.5, but I find 0.2 to work fine.
Congratulations, you have finished your player tracker! I hope you enjoyed this guide and learned something!
Make it your own
Welcome to the “Make it your own” section of the guide, the latest addition to my guides, where I give small challenges to add on to the system and improve your Gimkit Creative knowledge.
-
Make a pseudo-tagging system that sets a property when the tagger gets close enough to another player!
-
Replace player ID with the player name so you can know who you’re tracking (Hint: the maximum length a player’s name can be is 20 characters)
- AMAZING!!!
- Great!
- Okay.
- Needs improvement.
- Bad.
- WORST GUIDE EVER ON THE FORUMS
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