Ships in transit can unexpectedly travel large distances off-course Thread - Machinations

(also known as "To Infinity and beyond... and back again!)

Observed in version 0.0.2 .

deller79 saw this one happen on my device and got all excited because he'd only seen it before on one other device
It does seem to be a rare occurrence - I've only seen it that one time and have no idea how it happened.

During gameplay, there were ships travelling from one station to another.
For some reason, all movement on the screen froze temporarily for a few seconds (I don't think there was any external OS operation taking place that could have delayed processing) .
After the screen unfroze, all of the ships in transit had travelled *way* off-screen (I could tell because you could still see their trails!) ... but if you waited long enough, the ships eventually still completed their objectiev and made it to their destination... they'd just taken a big detour

deller79 suggested that whilst the cause of this bug (the freeze mid-game) is unknown, the reason for the resultant behaviour probably is.
If you think of the time between normal screen updates as "one unit of time" , every time the screen updates, the ships update their position by travelling a very small distance in their current direction, then update their heading ready for next time.
If, for some reason, there were a huge delay between screen updates, in that time "many units of time" will have passed, and the ships will travel in their current direction a very large distance (because so much time has passed) ... and as a result could be way off course!

I was impressed that the ships still made it to their station in the end though

I actually had this happen while developing yesterday, so I had logging running. I think that it may be related to the very quick and dirty implementation of sounds I have done. I got a warning saying that the sound pool threads/channels/whatever they are called had been destroyed or weren't available or something. I need to find some time to look into it.

I think that we need to look at it as a potential generals power