Concept : Autonavigation
NAME
Autonav - Giving ships automatic sailing orders
Level: Expert
In a very short while after acquiring ships the effort of moving ships after
every update gets very boring. And the more ships you have, the more work it
is. Hence the concept of autonavigation. Like any self-respecting dictator,
you don't personally drive your ships around (except when you want to),
instead you command you ship captains to take their vessels to a specified
destination. This is done via the "order" command.
Each ship can be ordered to proceed to a destination. During each update, the
ship will try and use ALL the mobility it has and use the shortest possible
path. It will also avoid any known mines (sectors marked with an 'X' or 'x'
on your bmap). Note that this movement is all done before mobility is accumu-
lated, so that after the update is complete the ship will have a full updates
worth of mobility in case you need to move it by hand. Should a ship be fired
upon by forts or strike a mine they will stop moving! This will prevent your
ship from foolishly getting sunk in enemy waters. The "order" command covers
many special cases.
The autonavigation capability is dependent upon the per country map database
accessed via the "bmap" command. If you order a vessel to a destination that
causes it to cross a previously unexplored area, the ship will attempt to
cross that area as if it were water. One of the features of the bmap func-
tionality is that when a ship is navigated, it automatically uses its radar to
see the local sectors (much like real life). This sector information is added
to the per country map database. Thus upon running into a previously unknown
obstruction, that information is added to the map database and on the next
update, a new path to the destination will be calculated which avoids the
obstruction. This process applied iteratively means that a ships will eventu-
ally find its way around any obstruction, provided that a path exists. In
reality, this is a limit to this process. In order to limit the processing
that is done to find a path to the destination, the internal path string is
limited to 28 characters.
The other capability of the autonav function is autotrading. By specifying
two destinations and two commodities, the ship will move back and forth
between the two destination loading and unloading the appropriate commodities.
Specific examples can be found in the "order" info file.
The same rules for navigating, loading, and unloading apply for Autonavigation
as they do when you do these things by hand, namely that you may only use har-
bours owned by nations which consider you to be a friendly trading partner
(see info relations).
SEE ALSO
navigate, order, Ships, Updates