NauticusClassic tracks the precise arrival & departure schedules of boats and Zeppelins around Azeroth and displays them on the Mini-Map and World Map in real-time.
Look up arrival & departure schedules for any transport and know exactly when you need to be there. Less time waiting on platforms, more time at the AH or mailbox, less duelling rogues or shamies who want you to take a seat while they crit you... 'for fun'...
To track a transport requires that you, or someone else running the addon, has taken the route sometime earlier. Nauticus uses hidden addon-to-addon communications to synchronise and share up-to-date schedules between players automatically.
Important: This addon works best the more players on your realm also using the addon. So get your friends and guild mates to install Nauticus - the more the merrier! Nauticus performs well in the background and you can disable the map icons for zero interference.
† If you're new to Broker plugins, they're a bit like FuBar plugins but displayed how you want. Try StatBlockCore, Button Bin or Fortress for display addons. Titan has LDB support built-in. FuBar requires the lightweight bridge addon Broker2FuBar (not to be confused with FuBar2Broker, which does the opposite).
Find out the status of a transport via World Map/Mini-Map or via an LDB button display.
For options, type /nauticus or /naut in the command line.
Nauticus is always in continual development. You should try to keep your version up-to-date, not least because the addon interacts with other users and they rely on good quality data from you. You'll be notified upon login when there's a new version available, after other users are seen using a later version. For this reason, please DON'T redistribute or include in a compilation pack!
A player with the addon needs to travel on the Boat/Zeppelin before the schedules come up. This could be you or someone else who may have taken the transport earlier. The most recent schedules are synchronised between other players running the addon, so after a short while the data will most likely be available to you before you take any transport. Get as many of your friends and guild mates to install Nauticus - the more the merrier.
There are no Blizzard-provided API methods to directly determine the transport schedule. Thus we do it indirectly by getting player coords and comparing them to a known set of coords along the route. When the player 'triggers' these coords, we know the cycle and can subsequently work out future schedules at any point in time.
Round-trip cycles have been calculated to one microsecond (six decimal places) over a 1-2 week period. This is significantly better resolution than provided by the API, which only measures in milliseconds (three decimal places). Baring slight adjustments in Blizzard's clocks etc., 99.9% of the time there should be no observable drift of more than a second or two.
Rarely, schedules can become corrupted due to changes in your computer's system clock that may occur between WoW sessions/reboots. This can also be caused by dodgy CMOS batteries and some over-clocked systems. Otherwise, Nauticus can normally keep track of schedules between reboots. Additionally, while realm servers appear to keep very precise clocks for running the transports and to generate their positions, from time to time they may re-synchronise these clocks, sending the data slightly out of wack. Nauticus should quickly fix the schedules, as it will gather more recent and better quality data from other users or from your own travels.
It doesn't! We can only assume how Blizzard calculates transport schedules and their positions but it's probably based on the realm server's system clock, which is likely synchronised with a centralised ntp time server at each data centre. You can verify this by visiting another realm (at least, in the same geographical location - e.g. EU, US Eastern) to observe exactly the same schedules. This is another way to obtain accurate schedule data - from other realms. If there is one, an epoch is presently unknown - if any maths wiz can manage to reverse engineer it (simultaneous equations?), do let me know!
Nauticus Classic is a rewrite of Nauticus by Drooliog which was a complete rewrite of ZeppelinMaster which was originally conceived by Sammysnake. He runs a DKP hosting service @ dkphosting.net.