The old code should have worked with a new map, as long as we could find the size of the "island radius". Many times in the last 7 years I've thought about ways to improve that.
There are obviously some random numbers being generated somewhere. If you look at your map immediately after a "land ho" transition, your ship is usually not where it should be. Most of the time it's been moved forward a considerable distance in the direction you were going, occasionally it's some random spot nearby. That's on my list of things to look for when I get tired of sailing.
There's something I don't understand. There's an option to increase the distance between islands, probably by increasing the size of the map while keeping the size of the islands the same? How long were you intending to sit at the computer to sail between any two islands without going to time compression? So people must be using time compression, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of increasing the distance, and introduces problems from the time compression. We'd already taken care of game time to distance scales by adding a day each game hour.
I sail on deck with no time compression. It takes maybe an hour of real time for a typical island hop, usually less, sometimes quite a bit more. I enjoy the sailing, and I'm used to doing one to two hour trips in flight simulators anyway. It also gives plenty of time to contemplate code changes.
I'm impressed at how well you've modeled the scale of the game. The real clock time / speed / distance is correct. The game clock runs faster, of course, and usually a day passes each hour. Your apparent speed on the sea seems correct. Everything seems well balanced.
Increasing the distance between islands, then using time compression, destroys that balance. You might as well be playing TEHO. I haven't tried the increased distance myself, so I'm guessing a bit here.
One important concept is that you can't have a single fixed distance where the transition occurs. You have to be able to sail beyond the fixed distance before transition, then if you turn around, you have to sail that same distance beyond the border the other way before you get the land-ho. Otherwise you can be sailing along the border and jumping back and forth constantly.
The code fragment you posted a couple of times in the other tread was to prevent a random encounter if you were too close to an island. I had that happen recently when a floating object was obviously inside land. I haven't looked at that code yet.
About the only thing I miss from TEHO is their map. I doubt if we could make our islands work on their map, and we don't want to use their islands because ours are more interesting. For example, look at Guadeloupe (called Martinique in our game... check a real world map to see which one is correct). You can actually sail between the two halves of the island in our map, going north/south, and the bridge is visible from the deck of your ship. In TEHO it's one land mass with no break between islands. And I do love that port at Cayman.
I'm not sure why the simple distance system to determine land-ho transitions didn't work. Any insight into what wasn't working and why it was changed would help a lot.
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