Thanks
@Grey Roger and
@Pieter Boelen.
Well, no smoke came out, Fulton notwithstanding.
I have to wonder if I had the wrong difficulty set, as the next game I had 100 gold to sell, and at Eleuthera too, where the gold prices are high.. This is the reason I wanted to play at a slightly higher difficulty setting.
![Smile :) :)](http://piratesahoy.bowengames.com/PA_Forum/Emoticons/smile.gif)
I wanted to be able to repair my ship and have *some* starting capital, but not be swimming in doubloons.
I'm going to mess with the code I have for a while before trying newer versions, but thanks. I needed to know what to load to get the proper version. I want to make sure my directsail changes still work.
The first thing I noticed was violent wind shifts while sailing. I think we can do a much better job using randnorm() to shift the wind. If we know the location of storms, we can make it even better. Something I learned from flight simming was "Drift right into danger." If you're drifting right, the wind is blowing from your left, and you're moving into a low pressure area. If the wind is blowing from your right, you're moving out of a low pressure area. If storms have definite locations, we can use this to determine general wind direction, then vary it by randnorm(), and if no weather cells are close, vary it around the trade winds, which in the Caribbean are generally from the northeast at 15-25 knots. Heck, I thought wind direction and speed were *already* being adjusted with randnorm(). You'll still need winds shifting more near islands, or you can get stuck in a port, or unable to enter one.
If you're not familiar with it, randnorm() takes a mean and a standard deviation and generates a random number that uses the bell curve. About 65% of all numbers will fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% will fall within two standard deviations, and 99% will fall within three. Random numbers generated this way will seem to be quite natural.
Hook