maturin

Naturally, yes. Although this may just be a function of speed. I need to keep deserting in battle to try all this.

The actual NDA agreement was in legalese and seemed to have some grey area. Are we allowed to say anything about the current game mechanics on the non-testing forums?

There's really next to no roll with a calm sea at the moment, just heel. Battle sails also include royals and all staysails.

Can you explain what factors affect repair? Do we have to slow down to repair things?

And remember that all this talk is just about naval vessels. Right down to the present day, the flag of a merchant vessel is almost always a fiction devised for diplomatic (now tax) purposes.

Oi. Those might be the best videos yet. Watch those shrouds go limp on the roll. Also, did they have the spritsail reefed asymmetrically?

I somewhat like the basic sample for the gunfire. It's just a bit too obvious that we're hearing two or three reports and not forty.

Not possible for performance reasons, or just not implemented? Will we see something on par with POTBS's pre-baked sail animations? They looked natural (except was setting or furling). The one thing is the video that caught my eye was the distant ship in one of the fleet videos. She was constantly setting and furling her topsails. It's not possible to have topgallants and royals set when the topsails are not raised. Also, when the sails are furled, there is a conspicuous line running from one yardarm to the other that really shouldn't be there. Empire: Total War had it to, like an outline of where the sail will be. It doesn't exist like that and just looks odd.

Is specific feedback on various elements useful at this point? Or is the focus solidly on gameplay for now.

I think the front page of any news site can provide a likely answer to that question. : /

The weather gauge is important because it allows you to bring the enemy to action and achieve a decisive result. That's the whole ballgame. Any tactical advantages are just nice extras, but the Royal Navy doesn't care about tactical advantages because the Royal Navy always wins. I think that sums it up. In game terms, it must be said that it is rather difficult to avoid being raked by a vessel charging down from to windward.

I read that paper too. Everything individual point he makes is very convincing, and it's excellent analysis of an institution overall, but of course his overall thesis is a case of vast overreaching. Britain is simply an island with a maritime economy. It always had a greater population of skilled seamen than did France, and the press (which worked better than the French equivalent) was more valuable as a means of abducting skilled hands than of sweeping out taverns and jails. And the doctrine of sea control meant that the British had the oceangoing population of the entire world at their fingertips. They could press pretty much anyone. A crew with a poor captain is worth a lot more than a motivated captain with no crew, so there were enormous factors there that had nothing to do with the institutional culture of the opposing navies.

That could provide some very important balance.

If the ship actually had a full complement aboard. Which was very much the best case scenario. Fighting both sides was considered a rather rare and enviable ability of a numerous but also skilled crew. Do you have any battle diagrams showing fleets tacking in line? Because in practice, the fleet would be made up of different sailers with different crews, and many would make sternway while tacking while others would not. So tacking in line could easily become chaos.

It's not really relevant here, though. Rounshot can reach its maximum effective range in a few seconds. That's long enough for a shot aimed at the bow to hit the stern... maybe.

Hmmn, maybe other vessels should change sails with simplified sprite animations? Will there be any detailed animations that we can experiment with in focus testing?

Niagara and Lynx definitely weren't motoring in those videos, with winds like that. But you can see that the very large V-shaped wake is only a momentary thing from when the bow blasts through each discrete swell. What do wake and bow waves look like in the game at the moment? And remember that 5 knots is the general 'no wake' speed in ports, meaning that much of the time nothing will be produced at all. And sailing vessels are rather long for their beam, compared to the tugs and modern workboats that are so stubby and create the big waves.

I'm pretty sure Ryan21 was talking about the immediate bow wave. As you can see in the video, that large V-shaped wake that trails out from the vessel is inappropriate. Something like that only appears when the ship shoulders through a swell.

Ha, I like how someone has written 'foretopmast' in chalk.

On the other hand, an impressive bow wave animation will be worth having for high speeds and heavy seas, especially when close-hauled.

When people are asking for SP, I think a lot are really asking for 'offline mode.' They're not expected Skyrim at sea, just a dynamic world with lots of bots and econ and randomized encounters, but running off their computer instead of a server. So I envision it as something that could be patched in the far future, rather than a whole new game mode.

I think that a badly damaged hull will not make crew more vulnerable to roundshot. There could be a difference either way, but not an important one. Grapeshot, however, would start having a horrible effect. So yes, dedicated anti-personnel weapons could get a bonus when firing on a badly damaged bulwark. I don't think all the planking ever got destroyed either. Even a 32lb ball is only six inches across, and there's a lot of area to cover. Patrick O'brian books often mentions things like "three ports beaten into one." So that describes a large gash, or a three meter-long hole. I think he took that description from eyewitness accounts: Here too: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZJstAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA401&lpg=PA401&dq=%22two+gunports+beaten+into+one%22&source=bl&ots=RRYV1x4a4U&sig=OlPH9-SQHhpGaA9bL47on8Drq34&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UwkNU9yJMsKsyAHb64DwCw&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22two%20gunports%20beaten%20into%20one%22&f=false "...several ports beaten into one." The most important effect of a hull full of holes is that the guns are going to start getting dismounted, with their breeches shot loose from the hull. They become unusable and downright dangerous, charging around the decks with the roll of the ship or even plunging down hatches to smash into the hold.

Hold on, could you be more specific as to what animations are too stressful? Obviously no-one is expecting a different sail animation for every level of the Beaufort scale. But things like reefing or blown-out sails couldn't be too demanding, could they? Because they are relatively rare events, or short animations that are over with quickly. I really think that setting individual sails and reefing them should be an option. It doesn't need to have a big impact on gameplay, and the effects don't have to be modeled in a detailed way. But I have to stress how happy you'll make the purists. We know that there's not going to be a full sailing simulator. But if the vessels look right, we can roleplay a little, and an immersed player will forgive any number of small flaws and omissions. It'll keep the forum's loudest voices happy so they'll keep giving useful feedback instead of complaining and whining.

Ooh, FTL could be an excellent inspiration here.

You saw how it took 8 HOURS to render, right?