Boat Suggestions, Redux

[Sho]

The IRC (BlackCanyon, Surly, me, whoever else was talking at the time) produced a few common-sense suggestions for boats. Here they are, with the problems they solve.

Problems:
1. It's very annoying and potentially disastrous if you try to dock to something without realizing that it'll take, say, two days.

2. It's not realistic that you can see the names of ships that you can dock to, and see how far away ships in your area are, but not be able to link one to the other.

3. It's not realistic that while you can see the locations of all ships in your area, you can only see the names of ships larger than yours.

4. The docking percentage doesn't seem to have any explainable meaning. It doesn't decrease linearly with time and doesn't start at 0.


Suggestions:

1. Docking should be cancelable.

2. The distance between your ship and another should be displayed beside the other ship's name. Ideally the direction would also be there. (Added effect when implemented with suggestion 3)

3. Ships in view but not dockable to should be displayed as well.

4. The "docking percentage" should be fixed somehow. Ideally it would express either time till docking or distance to target. Alternatively it could be a true percentage. (Addedd effect when implemented with suggestion 1)

[AngelSpice]

The docking percentages seem to be almost logrithmic in their progression. If you have enough seagoing characters, you learn to guess how long it's going to take. *shrugs* I guess I don't care if it's changed.

[Black Canyon]

I think that its problematic that you can't tell whether you are right next to a boat or a day's docking away from another boat when there is more than one on your docking list. You should be able to see which is closer.

[Sho]

The docking percentages seem to be almost logrithmic in their progression. If you have enough seagoing characters, you learn to guess how long it's going to take. *shrugs* I guess I don't care if it's changed.

Right, I more or less know how long docking takes based on the "percentage," but it shouldn't require loads of Cantr experience (or, for that matter, a table on the wiki) to figure that out.

[Fleegle]

From everything I've heard about boats, I've been discouraged from using boats in the game. I think if we want to encourage people to travel to new lands we should make it as intuitive as possible to navigate the seas... I don't want to have to use trigonometry!

[Racetyme]

It's not hard, and it actually makes navigation a skill.

[Black Canyon]

I fail to see how this makes docking a skill when you don't even see the percentage until after you've started docking...and at that point you have no control over it one way or the other.

[Sho]

I think it's unwritten policy that skills should apply to characters, not players. One of our goals is to make it possible for anyone to pick up Cantr and have their playing skills indistinguishable from those of us oldbies in a few days (okay, maybe not a few days, but that's the idea).

[Racetyme]

I meant trigonometry was still a skill, and it will still have to be done if you want to calculate direction from place to place if you turn.

[Nick]

Also, any boat should be able to dock to any boat.
What exactly is the reason for only some boats being able to dock?
Surely a large boat can pull up next to smaller one and have someone hop aboard.

[The Industriallist]

There is no symmetric docking Nick, that's why. I'd guess that the game doesn't even have symmetric relationships between 'rooms' as an option yet... Sure, the locks work both ways now, but it's still the host ship carrying around the 'docked' parasite.

It'd be amusing to see whether a sloop carrying a galleon was faster than a galleon carrying a sloop, but I don't really think it ought to happen...

It might be a good thing for some mechanic like that to exist, though I'm not sure that realistically a Raker-sized ship could 'dock' with a raft in any meaningful way. The raft would most likely get plowed under unless the Raker was firmly anchored.

I agree with Sho's suggestions. Probably the first even more than the others, but they're all good.

[Agar]

Ok, everyone who is freaking over any trig, calm yourselves.

Angles and even distance can be figured out using some pretty simple algerbra. Ancient greek stuff. Pythagoran Theory. I have taught this stuff to my 9 year old, and he's not honor roll or anything.

C^2 = A^2 + B^2

(A squared equals B squared plus C squared)

Here are better explinations than I can provide:

http://www.usna.edu/MathDept/mdm/pyth.html

This second link has enough math available at the "my Mathmatics" page for you to be able to start at grade school education and read your way up to ... about anything you want. Several proofs of the theory, all available to boats as far as I know.

http://www.jimloy.com/geometry/pythag.htm

[Sarah]

The Pythagorean Theorm works for right triangles (triangles with a 90-degree angle). C must be the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle). Don't forget to find the square root of C^2 to get your actual answer.

You can solve triangles that don't have a right angle too, by using the law of sines or the law of cosines. They aren't that difficult either. I could explain them, but I think Google would do a better job.

[AngelSpice]

If docking's made cancelable, I think there should be a point of no return after which you can't stop it. Maybe just make it cancelable until the boat's actually made some progress towards docking?

[Agar]

Actually, that's when you would want to cancel it.

Three days in and you still haven't fully docked, you could just be plain too frustrated to continue, moreso if it was started by an inexperienced crewmember, or worse, a newspawn thief