Sailing the seven seas

As a side effect of the ongoing mapping and world linearization project, I had a strange idea: why can't I hop in a boat and sail from the mainland to the islands?

The short answer is that in most muds, rooms have no absolute position data. Since this is no longer true for Alter Aeon, having long-distance boats suddenly seemed possible. So, I set aside a short period of time to do it.

It was nowhere near enough.

As a first step, I created boats and allowed some lookup of position to figure out where I could place them. This worked reasonably well.

For the second step, built a quick lookup function to go from boat position back to nearest room. This allows people to disembark.

Next, I had planned to simply use that lookup function to build maps, so that sailing around would have a functional map display. We can also use the map generator to construct blind descriptions, so that blind players can still see when land is near. This is where the problems began.

While we do in fact have positional data for rooms, the reverse lookup is quite a bit less trivial. In order to build maps, the lookup has to be quick and efficient. To complicate matters, the world grid moves around dynamically the rebuild time has to be short as well. There are also difficulties with a single room appearing in multiple places, and with multiple rooms vying for the same space.

I initially tried a rather complex space partitioning scheme, but after sleeping on it I realized I should just use a hash table. I implemented the various hash table routines in about an hour, and with around 3 hours total I have most of the corner cases cleaned up in the map.

Next, I pull up the anchors and see about doing some exploring.