Comment by alnwlsn
17 hours ago
I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun.
If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.
To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.
> I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS
Can you name the game? Meshtastic has got me thinking about that kind of stuff.
It was just something a friend of mine came up with - we called it "Area Capture" or something (and was ironically, mostly vibe-coded).
There were 4 or 5 "color" teams. Each one carries a meshtastic node, and they all report to a central server back at base. The play field was roughly a square mile divided up into a grid of smaller squares. If you walk into one and it's past the cooldown time, it claims it for your team. Most squares at the end of two hours wins. The server would send out updates over meshtastic also: "Blue captures H12" "Red has 18", etc. If you were at the base station, you got to see it all play out live on a big map.
There was another one played at night which was a hide and seek game / capture the flag sort of game. It would tell the seekers some limited information about the seekers, and each side had special functions they could use. Hiders could "go invisible" or fake their location for a certain time. Seekers could call a limited number of "drone strikes" on different squares. The game ends when either the hiders are caught, or they make it to a specific target location.
Lots of possibility for that sort of thing with Meshtastic. I guess either could have run on a phone since now even rural camping areas have decent cell coverage these days, but that's not quite as impressive.