Pathfinding and Map Wrapping rants 2

I forgot that Planet Earth is a sphere...so the map wrap for Y coords is wrong, the intersection of equator and prime meridian divides meridian projection(tile map) into 4 "areas" like this:

Y Max
[NW][NE]
[SW][SE]
Y Min

So when your whatever moving object hits Y Max in [NW] area, your ship should reappear at [NE] area with Y Max minus 1..Hitting is Y Min in [SW] is similar except it's Y Min plus 1, also X coords is mirrored when your hit Y Max or Y Min:

X Min[NW][NE]X Max
X Min[SW][SE]X Max

Lets say we have a ship at X(100), Y(MAX-1) on 1000x1000 map(starting index 0):
[NW]'s X coords range would be 0-499
[NE]'s X coords range would be 500-999

When ship moves towards Y axis positively(north) by one, the ship reappears at X(999 - 100), Y(MAX-1)...It's very confusing, even on papers, in game the renderer needs to flip all tiles that have been "Y wrapped"(the "wrapped" tiles are on the other side of the sphere, so they are upside down and mirrored.It needs to draw from right to left and swap point 1,2 with 3,4 on quads...)

Though i will ignore this issue for now, since it's tolerable and in 1500's no ship could reach max Y(northpole) or min Y(southpole) intact... =o

Site updated

Updated the site hosted by sourceforge.net site to a few table-layout html pages with contents ripped from forums, it's definitely better than the old good blank page with 2 links. =)

Pathfinding and Map Wrapping rants

Okay, here is the rants about Pathfinding and Map Wrapping in Ocean Horizons,they are royal pains really, why? Let me explain:

Pathfinding on HUGE tiles map:
Initially I naively thought a decent pathfinding algorithm will solve the problem, so I ripped borrowed A* Array implementation codes from an excellent pathfinding example program called PathFinder2D, but soon I realized pathfinding on a HUGE tile map will be a CPU hog, not to mention the enormous overhead of memory used by PathPlanner to store tile information like block status, open/closed flag, terrain type and stuff.

I have to make a simple and stupid pathplanner that only plans next node to move towards, basically it loops through 8 directions and find the one that is closest to the destination, it sucks but works.Probably a last-node needs to be passed to that function to avoid lock between 2 tiles.

Additionally a navigation graph needs to be incorporated into pathfinding system, once the graph is contructed, the routes between nodes are trusted, which means there is no obstruction between 2 linked nodes in graph, so pathfinding is not needed when doing long distance traverse.

Map Wrapping:
What is Map Wrapping?You may wonder, Map Wrapping is wrapping the coords when reaching map edges, it's a must because planet Earth is not flat, at least in our game. So whenever the map reaches edges(MAX_WIDTH or MAX_HEIGHT), the map needs to be wrapped to X-0 Y-0 again, this sounds easy enough, but there is tons of stuff that need to take Map Wrapping into consideration:

When units move to a coordination that is larger than max x, max y, you will need to cap it.
When screen draws tiles x, y bigger than max x, max y, you will need to draw the wrapped ones.
Distance between tiles calculation must checkwhether the distance is greater than 1/2 of map height or width, because distance between X-1023 and X-1 is actually 2 on a 1024 width map, but you might get broken result 1023-1 if you don't..

Hopefully I will be able to resolve these headaches gracefully. =D