GPSLarpHelp

How do I plan a route with several stops?

Two points make a journey. A delivery round, a commute with a detour on the way home, an afternoon of errands — these are several journeys unless the route can pass through every stop. You want one continuous journey that visits each place, in the order you choose.

Walk and drive modes both take more than two points. Turn on the Multi-stop toggle, click a starting point, click each stop in the order you want to visit them, and press Plan. GPSLarp routes between each consecutive pair of stops on real streets and stitches the legs into one track, which the reported position then walks or drives exactly as it would a two-point route.

The limit to plan around before anything else

The Mac has to stay running and connected for the entire journey. This is the same limit as a two-point route and for the same reason: the track is played from the Mac, position by position, not handed to the phone. Quitting the app, letting the Mac sleep, or losing the connection ends the journey wherever it had got to — see putting the real location back for every way a journey can end.

01Where the route comes from

Each consecutive pair of stops is sent to the same routing service the two-point planner uses — the pedestrian service for a walk, the driving service for a drive — and the fastest route for that leg is kept. The legs are then joined into one geometry, with each leg's duplicated joining point removed so the track does not double back on itself, and the distances and durations are summed. One track, one journey.

The order you click is the order you travel

Nothing reorders your stops. The routing service behind this has no way to work out a shorter visiting order, and GPSLarp asks nothing of the sort. If a different order makes a shorter round, planning it in that order is how you get it — the application will not discover it for you.

Two more differences from the two-point planner follow from how the legs are joined:

  • No choice of alternatives. The two-point planner can offer the fastest route plus up to two alternatives to pick from; the multi-stop planner keeps the fastest leg of each pair and offers no choice, because the journey is the chain rather than any one leg.
  • The mode is part of the plan. A chain built on the pedestrian service cannot be started as a drive, and the reverse — the same rule the two-point planner follows, and for the same reason. Plan it in the mode you intend to travel.

From there it is the same machinery as any route: the application builds a track of the journey's points, each with a timestamp saying when the position should be there, and works through it while the journey runs, reporting each position to the phone as its moment arrives.

Screenshot pending — a planned multi-stop route with its stops marked
The stops keep their clicked order; the streets between each pair were computed by the routing service, not drawn between the pins.

02Setting one up

01Connect the iPhone and select it

Same starting point as everything else. If the phone is not in the device list, start at GPSLarp can't find my iPhone.

02Choose walk or drive before planning

The mode is part of the plan request, not something chosen afterwards. A walk chain and a drive chain between the same stops are different journeys on different services — see the walking and driving page for what each one does with the pace.

03Turn Multi-stop on

A toggle beside the route controls, and it reads Multi-stop: on when it is engaged. With it off, a second click on the map plans a plain two-point route instead.

04Click the start, then every stop

The first click sets the starting point; every click after that adds a stop, and the status line counts them as they land. Order is the whole decision here — the journey visits the stops in exactly this sequence. Each stop is chosen the same way any place is chosen: click the map, search, or take a saved one.

05Press Plan, then start it

Planning costs nothing — a run is spent when a journey starts, not when it is planned, so a plan that comes back wrong can be thrown away and redone for free. When the route card appears the status line reads Multi-stop route ready — pick Walk or Drive to start: be in the mode you planned in, and start it from the card as you would any route. From that moment the Mac is driving the journey for as long as it lasts.

03What it needs and what it costs

It needs the internet, and asks more of it than a two-point route. The map needs a connection, and so does the routing — one request per consecutive pair of stops. A five-stop journey is four routing requests. What still works offline is on using GPSLarp without an internet connection.

Every consecutive pair of stops is sent to a public routing service run by a third party. That is the same privacy consequence as a two-point route, taken once per leg: the service sees each pair of points in turn. The mode decides which organisation that is — walk and drive ask different services — so the same chain planned both ways is disclosed to two of them. The privacy policy lists the services the app contacts, and What does GPSLarp send from my Mac? names them.

Planning is free; starting is what a run pays for. Every account gets one free walk and one free drive, counted separately — a multi-stop walk spends the walk run, not the drive. The whole arrangement is on What you get without paying.

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