maturin

So how do we enter an instance? How close do we have to get before the loading screen starts? It would be pretty damn awesome if the relative positions and firing sounds of vessels in an instance could synched to the view from the open world, as seen in your telescope. A simplified facsimile of what's going on in the instance. So you watch the combatants maneuvering as you approach, listening to the distant gunfire until you are close enough to enter the loading screen and appear close by in the battle instance. The combatants would get warning of incoming sails as well. That would be damnedly hard to code, though. I also hope that instances are open to all comers, but only within a certain 'bubble' that's defined by time and distance. For example, a battle might last 30 real minutes. In 30 real minutes a fleet of players could probably cross the entire Atlantic and intervene. Battles are real-time, but the open world is time compression. So the you have to convert from real time to compressed time, and you figure that 30 minutes of time compression is a month of real-time travel. Basically what I'm saying is this: If a battle starts somewhere on the map, it should only be joinable by people who were within two hours striking distance when it started. And by two hours, I mean two hours of real sailing time, determined by actual speed and real-world distance in nautical miles. Maybe battles that begin beyond your range should even be invisible to people who sail to that location using time compression. Although this raises all sort of questions of what happens with the victor when he exits the instance. He could just be ganked as soon as the one battle is done. Or if the victor is invisible, he won't be able to attack new vessels. It's only a fake feature if every player prints off a copy of every map or uses another monitor to stare at them constantly. And even then, they won't know the exact location of their vessel, because it won't be displayed on any precise map. Consider how rarely players in games are deprived of perfect GPS. I don't think it would be a fake feature. People will be able to research beforehand (not exactly unrealistic) and know what to expect, but you are still asking them to navigate.

See, if we going to sail all the way to Dublin like that, we will need the ability to fiddle with our sail plan on the way, responding to changing wind conditions. For some gameplay to kill the time.

Seamanship in the age of sail has some excellent facts about shipboard fires that are very easily implemented in-game. Basically, the ship was maneuvered so that the fire was on the leeward side, because the fire will spread with the wind. So if the foremast is on fire, you sail downwind. If the mizzen is aflame, you heave to with the bow pointing upwind. The same goes for fires below decks. If your starboard side is on fire, you should sail on a larboard tack (water from the pumps will flow downhill and pool where the fire is). Closing the gunports will also prevent fanning of below-decks flames.

Так в картине, как в игре, верхние реи остаются в неправильной позиции.

I have found the relevant passage, and I think someone read it backwards. The passage was about taking in sail, not setting it. And of course, it's the same order, just reversed. The first sails you take in are the royals and topgallants. That means they are the last sails you set. The last sails you take in are the topsails. That means that you set them first. Edit: Also see page 82, where the author discusses topsails individually. They are the first sail set and the last taken in.

I nag, I nag. The topsails thing is a big drag for the game's overall prettiness and screenshot potential. And then there's those ugly stiff spritsails that mask all your bow chaser (newly added!) shots in an amusing fashion. Really, I won't rest until we get the ability to set everything individually, whether or not it affects performance.

Tacking manually is at least ten seconds faster than tacking on auto-skipper (Constitution, from 8.7 knots, battle sails). And that's without any fancy yard turning when coming up, and conservative timing for 'let go and haul.'

I hope the devs fix the sail setting order soon. Then we can reproduce all sorts of famous battle paintings in screenshots.

Damn, that was fast. Congrats. Anyone know what the total votes came to?

Doesn't that leave out the gaff foresail? I keep trying to think of different configurations for smaller vessels, and they always come out feeling rather unergonomic.

At the moment, so far as I can tell, everything works. You can de-power the fore stack or not (note that the yards swivel so fast that you are only sacrificing a few short seconds of foreward thrust by doing this). A correct manual tack now works just as well (probably a bit better) as the autoskipper, which still has the incorrect 'throw everything over at once' routine. I'm not sure what you would have to do to mess up a tack. Besides the huge mistake that I made a day or so ago, that is. I tried to brace the fore yards around too soon after passing through the eye of the wind. That halted my turn and locked me in place for a good three minutes. So my vulnerable target sailed away and beat the snot out of my ally. Edit: Yeah, I just found something silly by testing a hunch. You can tack just fine without ever bracing your yards onto the new tack. The Surprise is fast and agile enough to ram the bow through the wind, sending all your sails aback. And the ships answer the helm very happily when making sternway, that you can simply put your stern into the wind and fall off onto a new course. And then you just press F, hauling all your yards just about instantaneously. Probably the biggest problem with yard control realism right now is how fast it happens. Yards should swivel quickly when there is no wind force acting on them, and slowly when the sails are full and drawing, either ahead or astern.

Do gaff-rigged vessels have any running rigging that control the gaff (upper spar) except halyard and topping lifts?

Great writeup. I doubt we'll see any vessels that are small enough to knock the crew over the head with the boom. But gybing is still somehow significant, isn't it? How could it be represented in-game? I'll return to that point about gaff-rig yard control. I don't think that the Q/E and Z/C control scheme is appropriate for it. You don't move the boom freely in either direction, you just let it in and out. That means that the wind direction decides what the maximum boom angle is. So you could do something like this: Hold C: Haul in the mainsheet to bring the boom (yard) parallel to the keel. Shift-C: Ease up on the mainsheet to let the wind drag the boom. If you are going downwind, this means that the boom swings out as far as it can possibly go. If you are close-hauled, then the wind carries the boom only forty degrees or so. Basically, the wind wants the boom to be parallel to the wind direction. Essentially, manual skipper on a schooner requires the same sort of code as auto skipper, because the wind has the power to move the boom. If you have the let the boom all the way out when going downwind, and then turn upwind, the boom will change position in an out-of-control fashion. If anything here sounds confusing, it's not. Because we are talking about sailing 101, with zero experience in traditional sail necessary. All this works just the same in any tiny recreational sailboat. In this example, Z and Shift-Z would control the foresail. Then you still have Q/E to control a possibly square-rigged topsail. Or you could use Q/E for the headsails, which behave the same as a gaff rig. So theoretically, we could control every single sail on a schooner without a significant increase in complexity. The problem with the above suggestion is that a square topsail schooner would have to sacrifice control of its headsails, unless we found more key bindings.

Sails 1 and 2? So we're talking gaff rig. AFAIK the gaff rig is just a larger and more flexible ancestor of the bermuda/marconi sail that you see on just about every single modern yacht. Like all fore-and-aft rigs (gaff, bermuda, lug, sprit, lanteen), the gaff is more efficient upwind than a square sail. Schooners can lie closer to the wind. Still, none of the traditional sails are as efficient as the modern bermuda rig. At the end of the day, the gaff is optimized for beam reach. Tacking a schooner is very easy. Not surprisingly, it's harder to go downwind in a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel. It's not just slower, but difficult to make the sails keep their shape. In light winds they can just collapse or wave around uselessly. One way to optimize downwind performance is to move the yards out to opposite sides so that they don't blanket each other. Going 'wing and wing.' However, this only works when going nearly dead downwind. Otherwise, one of the yards will simply swing back into it's old position. http://www.photoseed.com/blog/2012/02/05/reverie/ The biggest single difference for yard control is that there are no braces (correct me if I'm wrong): only sheets. So you can't swing the boom around at will; you can only choose to let the wind take it out, or pull it in tight. This also means that backing is not very effective. The most you can do is manually drag the boom over a few feet, as far as the rail. So this isn't something you can do for a long period, without a lot of effort, or in a strong wind. So far as I know, sailing backwards is something that only square riggers could do well. You could probably sail a schooner backwards, but only awkwardly when you are pointing upwind. Furthermore, such vessels have to worry about gybing. That's like the opposite of a tack, where the wind crosses the stern instead of the bow. That is, steering from 170 degrees to 190 degrees. The boom can swing violently across the deck and put stresses on the gear. I'm not too sure about the particulars, as the boat I've done 90% of my sailing on gybed very gently. But on some boats it's a big problem. I'm not sure what aspects of this would need to be modeled in a game. The main thing to keep in mind is that a fore-and-aft rig gives the player much less to do. So control of the headsails is likely necessary to keep him entertained. They behave the same way as a gaff rig, except they can be backed a bit more effectively in order to control rotation. In general, their main purpose in terms of game control would be for aiding turns. To go off topic for a moment, headsails are important. USS Chesapeake lost to HMS Shannon because the first broadside shredded Chesapeake's wheel and headsails. With no headsails and no wheel to counteract the new rig balance, Chesapeake spun up into the wind and presented her stern to her foe.

Yeah Johny, that's the situation. You can tack perfectly well without de-powering you fore yards for a quicker crash-turn (sort of like a backwards wear, ain't it). I'm not even sure that doing this is advantageous. Perhaps it gets you a quicker upwind turn, but costs you when coming through the wind. We should time it.

Mythbusters использовали 6-фунтовые пушки (домашняя пушка, стреляла не порохом а воздухом), стреляли по мелким сосновым балкам (несколько сентиметров ширины). Детские игрушки вообще. Посмотрите видео, где настоящая пушка и настоящий борт корабля. Можете сами видеть, как один из осколков пробил дерево.

I'm a tester and don't have access. The forum just uses a pre-made model with a lot of sections not filled out yet.

The shortest naval battle (between capable opponents of equal strength) that I am aware of was the duel between the USS Chesapeake and HMS Shannon. 15 minutes from first gun to surrender, and not at all a one-sided affair. I think that's a good benchmark for a game, where the superlative becomes routine.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. De-powering the foremast sails should be optional, really. And don't sweat the sternway right now. It's just that in the current build, closehauled sails give you the fastest sternway instead of the slowest, so we're really getting rammed backwards by that mixed up config. Mainsails should go over when you're in the teeth of the wind. And you should turn on auto skipper as soon as you begin making headway again, because that's when the main and mizzen are drawing (even if it's far too early in-game).

I feel the need to speak out on behalf of luffing. It's important, even if you only see it animated on your own vessel. Luffing sails visually (and audibly above all) tell a new player when he is doing something wrong. They tell you that you are losing power, slowing down. They tell you if your tacking sequence is done, that it's time to bring the fore yards around. If we want to drift with the current, luffing tells us that we are still stopped, without ever looking at the UI. I know that that is exactly what you want to do: make a game that is played through sensory experiences, not meters and gauges and buttons. What I mean to say is that it is worth taking resources away from something else, in order to make the player's ship behave more lifelike. Smoke ultimately does nothing, but luffing is a built-in gameplay aid. As for the recurring topic of sail movement, I agree with both sides. Properly set sails don't shake and wave all over the place, it is true. But the fact remains that the current sails look plastic and immobile. Consider the fact that Naval Action is a game, and has to overcome our sense of disbelief. Sometimes reality has to be overmodeled. If the sails gave the occasional swell or shiver (not at all GPU-intensive, I should hope), our brains could be tricked into treating the pixels as real canvas. No sail is properly set for all conditions, of course. There are always gusts and eddies that will affect the canvas. POTBS did this rather well, as I recall. Some better sail textures would help too, with straining bunt lines and reef bands.

Well, in 1720 it would have been anyone's game, because the naval presence was so anemic. The Caribbean was the real Wild West, where there was no law. The Channel would be suicidal for a pirate because a single attack would make huge headlines and then every ship in the busy waters would report you.

Control is WASD, plain and simple. You will learn quickly that some motorboat-like maneuvers don't work well, but there is no requirement to touch a brace or a sheet. Yard control is advanced mode, basically, and can be automated. I do know how to sail, so I'm not the best person to ask here. But to repeat something I once heard from an expert, "Sailing is fundamentally easy." Certainly, it's not a trivial skill in real life, but this game only has 4 pairs of buttons! As for controlling sets of yards to affect maneuvers, it sounds harder than it is. If someone has stood a piece of paper up on a table, and you want to blow it over, what angle do you blow on it from? If you want to spin the paper around, do you blow on the center of the page or one end of it? When it comes to sails and wind, 80% of it can be explained in intuitive ways like that. So far as boxhauling and clubhauling goes, I have hope but will believe it when I see it. And even then, I won't see it in battle very often. Remember that a game is a fantastic place to learn, and the forums are best of all. My knowledge of square rigger handling has shot through the roof since I registered here.

Slow down a tack? Absolutely. Let's look at what happens when bringing the ship about. Quite some time ahead of time you have to call the men to their positions. On a large ship, you quite literally have seamen lining up to be shot at, waiting at their stations by the braces and sheets. They're not really moving around at all, in this case. It's practically an infantry line battle, for a minute or two. You're in action, so you will probably be tacking at low speeds with only topsails. The men at the braces will be waiting there while the master picks his moment for mainsail haul. If anything is messed up, a huge, labor-intensive tug-of-war begins, one for every square sail on the ship. And then there's all sorts of other lines that have to be constantly tended. When you're third in a row of men clapped on to the main brace, and the enemy's tops suddenly start spitting fire, and people next to you are being hit, it's going to take a whole lot of courage and determination to keep pulling on a stupid rope with not even a strip of canvas to hide you. And yes, I was full intending this to only work at point-blank range. Just something to make those double-shotted carronade users nervous. Suppress Snipers cancels out any ability in use, as the sharpshooter game returns to the earlier equilibrium of disorganized potshots.

I think it's common sense. Sharpshooters hit people on the deck, and any serious maneuver requires the deck to be full of men. Every single time the yards move, you need to have multiple crew members stationed at each of the braces, along the whole length of the ship. The hammocks aren't going to screen them if they are on the opposite side from the enemy. The effect of sharpshooters is described as 'clearing the decks,' which I often interpret as meaning permanently cleared. In a game, we're better off dealing with momentary disruption that can be recovered from. The effect is entirely meant to be temporary. That's why the skill is caused 'suppression' and not 'kill.' You can't keep up prolonged suppressive fire with black powder muzzle loaders. I'm thinking of effects that last 10-30 seconds while the swivel guns fire simultaneously to panic the target, then the sharpshooters fire at paced intervals using the several loaded muskets they've prepared. Actually, the complexity of such a maneuver makes me think that there should not be a skill cooldown but rather a skill warmup. Everyone has to spend time preparing. So if you pay close attention to the lack of sharpshooter activity of your foe, you know that the attack is coming soon. There is a counter; it's the Suppress Sharpshooters ability. Or you can sail out of range, which is accomplished in seconds, given the accuracy of these weapons. The thought of Sailing focus increasing small arms vulnerability did come into my head. However, we still have enough crew to turn all yards simultaneously on Repair or Gunnery, so it's still a target-rich environment for snipers. Right, but as I understand it, they weren't screaming along at 10 knots under courses and royals.

I don't see what's wrong with an occasional 'break rudder' sort of skill. So long as it stems from the very real fact that stationing dozens of men at each brace and sheet for every sail presents an enormous number of vulnerable targets for the enemy. Screwing up the enemy's tack is precisely the point of Suppress Seamen. Bear in mind that if someone is tacking at point-blank range, they are probably doing it in order to sneak in a punishing raking broadside. Currently in-game we can maneuver far more effectively in battle than would be typical. That's fine for gameplay's sake, but let's add some hazards, too. Tacking is also a lot harder to screw up now that we have faster sternway aiding rotation. (And I do agree that sailing focus shouldn't be required, if your ship has a full complement.) What do you think of strict skill-use limitations as a way to prevent problems? I mean, orchestrating the fire of the whole ship like that would be very difficult in combat. Realistically, the captain would have to plan the whole concentrated fire thing well in advance and give a pre-arranged signal. So in game terms, that would mean choosing only one of the four Suppress options.