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.