Cantr II Discussion Forum

The boat should have been in range to instant dock to shore. If not, it should show 75% until the next sailing tick. Has something changed recently to instant docking? Help! My char is a sitting duck.

Here is the announcement for the most recent change to the sailing system. It was also announced in-game:

viewtopic.php?p=531264&f=1#p531264

This is the first time anyone has ever reported this. It sounds like a bug, but it's weird that it would manifest itself for the first time months after the system was changed. It's a fact that if it says 75%, it will dock at next turn, so it should never say 100% in any case.

Thanks. I saw the announcement. However, these changes ought not to have rendered instant docking impossible, no matter the location. I’ve managed it to ships and to harbours.

The boat should have been close enough to shore. And it was, hence 100%. But it didn’t dock until the next sailing tick. This is potentially life or death for a char, so should be fixed.

If it’s not a bug, then there are a couple of possibilities coming from the recent changes. I did notice that the boat changed direction when I initiated docking. To start, that’s a clearly exploitable error, if the boat’s direction is automatically reset to the optimal docking position. One only has to initate the docking far enough out to cancel, then continue that course and be sure of success. So it’s both too easy and too hard to instant dock to land now, oddly. It should never be impossible to tell if your boat has a good chance to instant dock, nor should it be guaranteed by exploiting this direction change. Cancelling docking should return your boat to its original course and speed.

What I suspect might be this case, is that it was a fairly unusual location. A sandy peninsula with undocking points in many directions. If the closest point to the boat when docking was initiated was e.g. North-West, instead of West, and these points are defined at greater distance from the shore, that distance got added once the boat was redirected from its course, so incremental docking was initiatiated even though the boat was as its target before then. I hope this is not what happened, as it would render such a town, with too many docking points, almost a fortress. Such locations should not exist, and certainly not for this reason.

The other possibility is that the map graphic is off, which is common. But it still oughtn’t have reported 100%. It’s a problem that needs to be solved.

I've finally tracked down this bug. It's caused by round-off error when comparing ships' speed and its distance from docking target.
It will be fixed soon.

sanchez wrote:What I suspect might be this case, is that it was a fairly unusual location. A sandy peninsula with undocking points in many directions. If the closest point to the boat when docking was initiated was e.g. North-West, instead of West, and these points are defined at greater distance from the shore, that distance got added once the boat was redirected from its course, so incremental docking was initiatiated even though the boat was as its target before then. I hope this is not what happened, as it would render such a town, with too many docking points, almost a fortress. Such locations should not exist, and certainly not for this reason.

Well, I don't understand. What is the closest point to the boat? There are two points: the boat and the docking location.

sanchez wrote:The other possibility is that the map graphic is off, which is common. But it still oughtn’t have reported 100%. It’s a problem that needs to be solved.

Every sailing ship in the game has two positions: one is defined as integer - like every location in the game; another - floating point value - used to avoid (reduce) rounding errors. Map pixels can't precisely project such position, so visual representation will always have to be just an approximation.

Thanks, Greek!

Greek wrote:Well, I don't understand. What is the closest point to the boat? There are two points: the boat and the docking location.

What I wondered about here, was what is used to determine the optimal docking course where it's now adjusted? Is the speed also adjusted?

And, was there anything specific about this location that made finding a course for instant docking more difficult?