[KaleunMarco]

Originally Posted by propbeanie

Thus far, I have not found anything close to running aground while looking in the ME, so I'm doing test starts to try to find the culprit. My guess is that two ships are on a collision course, and the one avoids collision by running aground. "Collision avoidance" in the game is sadly lacking, and begins to happen when the AI "anticipates" that two assets will pass within a given distance from each other (500m??). Instead of slowing one of the assets down, and doing it smoothly, each asset (in this case two ships) with their "independent" AI, will sometimes both slow down just before impact, or both assets steer to the same course, or both techniques are used, and the ships (or planes) still collide. Sometimes, they do avoid collision by one or both of the ships "backing" out of the way, in an attempt to find a new route. However, any "backing" movements usually involves improper rudder control and they then steer to inappropriate headings (the opposite of what they should do) and back themselves onto shore, into docks, or into other ships. I just saw another at Pearl Harbor the other day, and had to tweak a tug boat's start so-as to avoid having it pull out in front of a departing freighter. Very frustrating to make a harbor look like a harbor, yet not have the ships & planes crash into each other, or the "ground". This is probably why the Stock game had minimal movements in harbors...

do you remember Sub Battle (SB) from decades ago? i think it was an Epyx game. there is a story that relates to collisions.

i remember running into a problem/question while playing SB and calling the C/S line, after hours.
a guy picks up the call and he turns out to be a systems developer who was working late and happened to walk by the ringing phone.
for you young guys, this was back in the days when a telephone was attached to something, a desk or a wall, and not your thumbs.

anyway, we ended up chatting for hours, on not only Sub Battle, but also systems development.
one of things i remember him telling me was that there are an unbelievable number of collisions in a game such as this. it was one of the top issues that they had to deal with.

one of the features that SB had that SH3-4-5 do not have is the auto-drive feature. auto-drive allowed the player to set a destination and press the auto-drive key and the game would calculate the most direct course, using the best speed, and calculate the proper elapsed time, and deliver you to your destination. saved a lot of time traveling the pacific to/from Pearl. the only problem that would arise would be if you encountered an enemy during your auto-drive such that the game took you out of auto-drive while you were passing through an island on your most-direct-course. don't laugh. () when it happened, it would always screw up a perfectly good mission. the point is: that's a collision.

anyway, PB's description of designing a harbour layer of ships and their movement took me to a memory palace and i thought i would share the story. Collisions are a historical issue for games such as this.