Game development

This Programming Challenge requires you to read in a text file, process the contents of the file and output the results.
The file consists of 50 lines of text. Each line consists of 3 sections: First is 3 characters made up of spaces and digits that you can ignore, then 80 characters which are either a space or a + then another 2 characters. The first 3 and last 2 characters are just 1 or 2 digits line numbers padded with spaces. The important part is the 80 characters.
The file would look something like this...

File starts here:
1 1
27 ++++++++ ++++ +++++++ ++++++++++++ +++ 27
28 ++++++++ ++++ +++++++ ++++++++++++ + ++++ ++++++ 28

This is a map of a game world where each location is either land or sea.Land points are +, sea are spaces. What you have to do is process the 80 x 50 map, determine how many continents there are and output how many continents there are plus a list of those continents, together with the size of each continent. The definition of a continent is one or more connected locations where each location is a +. Connected means that in a 3 x 3 grid around a +, if any of the 8 surrounding locations contains a + then the two are connected.

the map file can be downloaded from this location.

I present the code for this problem as below.

/* C++ */

/*
author  : pranav prakash
country : india
email   : pranavprakash@programmer.net
*/

#include < fstream.h >

char map[50][85];

int getMap(char*);
int scanContinent(int, int , int);
int findNext();

int getMap(char* mapfile){
 fstream fl;
 char v;
 fl.open(mapfile, ios::in);
 if(fl.bad() || fl.eof()){
  return -1;
 }
 for(int i=0; i<50; i++){
  for(int j=0; j<85; j++){
   fl.read((char*)&v, sizeof(v));
   map[i][j] = v;
  }
 }
 return 1;
}

int findNext(){
 int Xpos=0, Ypos=0, unit=0, i, j;
 static int continent=1;

 for(i=0; i<50; i++)
  for(j=3; j<83; j++)
   if(map[i][j] == '+'){
    Xpos = i;
    Ypos = j;
    cout<<"\n\n--- Continent Number: "<< continent<<" ---";
    //cout<<"\nXpos: "<< Xpos<<" Ypos: "<< Ypos<<"\n";
    unit = scanContinent(Xpos, Ypos, continent++);
    cout<<"\nNo. of units: "<< unit;

   }

 return 0; // No more continents left in the map;

}

int scanContinent(int seedX, int seedY, int continent){
 static int count=0;
 if(map[seedX][seedY] == '+'){
  count++;
  map[seedX][seedY] = continent;

  scanContinent(seedX,seedY+1,continent);
  scanContinent(seedX,seedY-1,continent);

  scanContinent(seedX+1,seedY+1,continent);
  scanContinent(seedX+1,seedY,continent);
  scanContinent(seedX+1,seedY-1,continent);

  scanContinent(seedX-1,seedY+1,continent);
  scanContinent(seedX-1,seedY,continent);
  scanContinent(seedX-1,seedY-1,continent);
 }
 return count;
}

void main(void){
 if(getMap("map.txt")){
  findNext();
 }
}

The original problem statement can be viewed at this location.

This solution was actually selected as a correct solution and was in the top 20 codes. The actual content can be seen at this location.