Hobbes' Dream, the Floating City of Many Lights.

[Cogliostro]

Whenever a Cantr session is a little boring because nothing is happening with my character, I turn to read a bit from the Thomas Hobbes log, conveniently included under his maps. In case someone actually never heard of that guy, Hobbes was a remarkable character, evidently invented by a great roleplayer in the early-ish days of Cantr, who explored most of the world by ship and made maps.

Today, one of his log entries (which I'm not allowed to quote here, I presume) struck me, since it has the gem of a brilliant idea in it: What if sailing kept on evolving, and eventually there could be floating cities made out of conglomerates of many ships in the middle of the ocean? That was Hobbes' idea, but it never comes true in Cantr. Why? Because if you want to have a floating city, then people have to be able to enter and leave as they like (the city-ship needs to be unlocked). And the problem is that anyone getting onto an unlocked ship can start moving it without the owner.

Many times previously, a feature to be able to add a lock to the steering wheel of a ship has been suggested, and as far as I know it's still in the accepted list somewhere because it's a major pain in the ass to code that. Here's an alternative idea to consider.


THE SUGGESTION:


a tweak to the "sailing" page (where you adjust direction, speed, etc.) where we:
- add a little button "Lock Rudder" (or "Drop Anchor")
- if the button hasn't been pressed, then everything works just as it does now.
- If it has been pressed, then: we add some simple logic on the same page to check if the person attempting to change direction or speed on the ship has the ship's deck key in their inventory. If yes, the "Rudder Lock" is turned off and the ship changes direction. If no, the person gets a message: "This ship cannot move because the rudder is locked and you don't have the key."
- Pressing the "Lock Rudder" button only works if you have the key. Otherwise a message: "You don't have the key to do that."
- Ships without locks either display no "lock rudder" button or if that'd be clumsy to code, display the button which just does nothing, giving a message like: "You can't lock the rudder because there is no lock."

Very important bit to understand: This isn't a suggestion about lockable ship control. In this suggestion, hitting the "rudder lock" causes the ship to stop dead and stay like that. No one can move it, unless they have the ship key or destroy the lock first. The character who DOES have the ship's key, however, must first unlock the rudder to make the ship move anywhere. If the ship is already moving (the rudder's unlocked), then anyone aboard the ship can change it's sailing just as it is now.

Effects: We will be able to collaboratively build clusters of galleons or other large vessels at certain known locations, the dream of Hobbes coming true because visitor ships docking to those static galleons will be able to freely board, going to and fro, without however being able to move the vessel anywhere while the lock is still in place. The owners of the static galleon and their friends can live permanently inside its locked cabins.

Ideas and exploitation scenarios?

[theguy]

hmmm, I like the idea of having the floating "islands" of boats but I see a problem: You cant get an unlimited supply of food from boats so at some point people have to go home to restocks.

Saying that, I think i've missed the point of this suggestion. Boat can stop in the sea anyway can't they? I don't see how adding steering locks changes the way that boats can dock in the middle of the sea? I'm not sure how many boats can be docked together at once (think it's just the 2)

In conclusion, I dont understand what the suggestion is

[Cogliostro]

theguy, lots and lots of boats can dock to the bigger ones. So that part works just fine! The problem right now is that if you're running a floating city like that you can't let anyone aboard, since any fool could move your galleon while you're not looking. With this in place, they'd have to sneak on, bust out their screwdrivers and dismantle the lock which takes some days. You have to watch the visitors, still, but at least it's reasonable you don't have to watch them 24/7.

Supplies of food and other needed things would come from the land, sure. I don't see anything wrong with that. If they carried dedicated fishing longboats with nets, the cityships might manage to be almost self-sufficient, for pretty long spans of time.

There are problems in that those cityships would be vulnerable to cheaters attacking them. Since you can't get rid of weight at sea, cheaters might dock to such a cityship and pull random junk into it, until even the biggest galleon is overfull. That will in turn make it impossible for the people inside its cabins to come out. Thankfully, we already have an accepted suggestion against that kind of cheating, so it's a problem which shouldn't be around any more in the near future. Problem is, it might still not help much in this scenario, because the space inside cabins is very limited too. I was thinking that if people like cityships and we run into a lot of cases of this kind of cheating, then Programming might change how ship decks work: make it the exception to general rules in that they're limited by weight, but still any number of people could come aboard, even above the weight limit. (of course if such an overloaded ship tries moving it should fail horribly)

[theguy]

so just to clarify, you want rudder locks?

[Cogliostro]

No, not separate rudder locks. Sure it'd be nice but we had a suggestion like that before and it was ( I think ) accepted, but is still not implemented. There's some serious programming or database problem with it.

I'm wondering if we can get away with what I described (not a separate lock, but a button like that and some logic to it) without touching whatever the original problem was.

[SekoETC]

I'm too tired to read all you're writing... If you want a floating city, you need to bind the docked boats to the mother boat so that they cannot undock. Anchors or rudder locks only make a difference on the mother ship, unless a rudder lock also prevents undocking.

These things have been discussed before. I think at least with small boats it would make more sense that there was no magical barrier protecting the boat from being boarded, just a chain that can be used to dock it to the shore or other targets. If people wanted resources to be safe on board, they would have to build lockable containers. But for some reason we can't have lockable containers because they're too difficult to implement. Also if people could climb onto your dinghy and you couldn't get them out of there, that would suck. So it would also require the ability to drag people from the outside of a vehicle. A bit unrelated to floating cities, I admit.

You also mentioned lights in the title and it would be nice if ships had lights just like lighthouses. They could require honorable ships to use a light and then only pirates and poor people would go without, or turn it on only when within view range.

[Cogliostro]

If the rudders on those ships were locked, then sure, they wouldn't be able to undock of course. The big thing to see with this is how it allows the ship's deck to be open to people wanting to come aboard at all times, and yet prevents them from moving the ship anywhere.

(Btw I hadn't thought of that, but docking other ships to each of the cityship galleons and leaving them open would allow it to have "rooms" or "subdistricts", each maybe with its own purpose, and all open to visitors to walk around in. It would also allow colonists to come to new lands with ships equipped with machinery, and the leader could let his minions enter/exit any time they need to use machinery, while keeping the deck key and preventing anyone from immediately undocking and stealing it. Many new possibilities.)

[theguy]

Well stopping visitors from moving around the ships would just be social control You could do what yours suggesting now just your character would have to try to control anybody's attempts to undock ships or move them about.

[Piscator]

hmmm, I like the idea of having the floating "islands" of boats but I see a problem: You cant get an unlimited supply of food from boats so at some point people have to go home to restocks.

We are considering to give boats an access to salt so you might soon be able to survive on sea without ever coming to land.

About the rudder lock, could we perhaps create a "wheel house" or "bridge" to which the controls of the ship would be transfered upon completion? It would be a separate building and could be either locked or not.
It would require some programming, but should be rather intuitive and wouldn't require any innovations of the interface.

[theguy]

hmmm, I like the idea of having the floating "islands" of boats but I see a problem: You cant get an unlimited supply of food from boats so at some point people have to go home to restocks.

We are considering to give boats an access to salt so you might soon be able to survive on sea without ever coming to land.

About the rudder lock, could we perhaps create a "wheel house" or "bridge" to which the controls of the ship would be transfered upon completion? It would be a separate building and could be either locked or not.
It would require some programming, but should be rather intuitive and wouldn't require any innovations of the interface.

I would like to register my entire support for both of these ideas

[Cogliostro]

Need to hear from Seko again in case there's some weird "catch" preventing ProgD from implementing that. A Bridge would be much better than my suggested hack. And at least the cityships if they start to appear after this, can rest fairly secure knowing that people with mere screwdrivers can't bust their locks, needing crowbars instead like normal.

If I remember correctly, it had to do with ProgD for some reason not being able to restrict who gets to access the ship navigation screen (everyone on the ship gets to). But that's really weird if there's really no way to check "is character in the special bridge building? if yes, display screen. If no, and special bridge building exists on location, display a "can't do that" message."

Some ships also don't allow cabins to be built. Could there be a problem with allowing a bridge while disallowing all other types of cabins?

But darn. The possibility for the captains to finally have our own, functioning bridge. That'd be way nice.

[Cogliostro]

Anyone from ProgD care to chime in? We need you. Seko?

[Ryaga]

If coded properly, the buildings would be 'parented' in some way to the ships, so it could be. I assume there's some type of that already since, there are limits on the numbers of building on one boat. It all depends on how ProgD coded the buildings and such on boats.

[Dudel]

Problem...

When inside a building you don't see things like say... lighthouses and docking platforms and... towns and other ships and... well... so a building on a ship that isn't actually a building? O.o

A glass and almost pointless building that only "protects" the controls of the boat?

Or an "extra icon" on the screen to "make anchor" or whatever?

I'm not sure... and I'm not a programmer but um... yeah.

[SekoETC]

Yeah, if there was a bridge building, you couldn't see outside from there. And people are supposed to be able to touch the controls, if you don't want them to do that, you either intimidate them or lock them in a cabin or a hold. It would be possible to add a bridge that was like a cabin and was buildable on all boat types, but first of all small boats don't have a bridge and secondly if it was a building, you couldn't see outside. It would be better to come up with a subtype of a location that's like a vehicle but located in the buildings category and it's unable to travel. Then there could be stuff like guard towers and pavilions. But my knowledge of how Cantr works is rather limited, there are hundreds of files and I haven't read all of them. The locations file was especially confusing.