maturin

Yeah, that's sort of a good point. Harsh penalties for death in POTBS turned a lot of people away from PvP... but only because the rest of the game was so safe. If I have to put my life in danger every time I set sail, I will learn to live with danger and risk. There won't be that huge step from total safety with a PvE flag to deadly PvP. It would be good to make fights easy to survive or run away from. If ships are hard to sink and tend to disable each other in combat, the losing party could often slink away, especially in group combat.

Can we set sails individually with some sort of advanced options? It wouldn't be unusual for a ship to have only the fore course set, or perhaps furl the small mizzen topsail when dead downwind. Even if it doesn't have a big effect on gameplay, you'll make a lot of enthusiasts very happy for not very much effort at all. As I've said, people will want to play dress-up with their floating dollhouse.

He means that in the game the rudder will steer the ship steadily and uniformly along in straight lines. If you've ever steered a sailboat, you know that that's very far from reality, and that the reality itself would be monstrously complex to model.

Hmmn, Marion makes a good point. However, crew focus is one point where I would perhaps recommend 'over-modeling' crew focus for gameplay purposes. We want captains to have to make hard decisions when they want to repair shot-holes or rigging. We also want to give them the flexibility of sacrificing gunnery for maneuverability or speed, which would be useful in some situations. Raising yards, furling and reefing sail (if the last two are in the game) will happen VERY slowly unless you 'call up the watch.' And that definitely would mean taking men from the guns. On auto-skipper, I could see a high turning deceleration for a crew that's not focused on sailing, because you have a limited number of men trying to trim the braces and sheets with every course change, and they can't get to everything all at once. Here's another idea: Making crew focus commands have a longish warmup time that is dependent on crew skill and overall discipline. After all, the men can't change their tasks instantly, but a tightly-run ship will prove a more versatile adversary because the captain can quickly shift focuses. Bearing down swiftly on a sailing focus, only to switch to guns at the last second, etc. The basic three-focus feature is a sound one, it seems we all agree. More detail and control could be nice if it turns out playable. Here's a point I'm not clear on: Do square-riggers need a whole watch on deck in order to tack? Or perhaps you only need a lot of men if you are tacking with lots of sails set, in which case tacking without a sailing focus would require you to clew up t'gallants and go about under topsails. And Marion, weren't gun crews mostly made up of seaman (or their less-skilled comrades)? Never been totally clear on that point, besides there being only one official gunner, and Lieutenants to control divisions.

Huh, I was unaware of that. Still, she was over 300 tons lighter than Constitution for the same length on the waterline. That means you could build an entire new warship (brig or small post ship) out of the wood they pulled out of her.

Then you should have started running on the open sea map with time compression on. But also, positive identification is pretty much impossible beyond 1-2 miles, unless you have good intel that there is only one ship of the line in the area (for example), and that it is hostile. I really do hope there is fog of war on the world map.

Really? Unity must be a very nice engine, or you must have some talented people. Fantastic news.

The difference between POTBS and TW is night and day, believe me. Not so much that POTBS is a lot more realistic, just that it's actually gameplay that requires some actual thought put into it. If you try to handle a POTBS ship like a motorboat you will be defeated instantly, and the differences in vessel handling between schooner and brig and SOL is drastic. Anyways, Naval Action is going to go miles better than either of them, so I'll stop going off-topic.

The Chesapeake was MUCH lighter than the Constitution. Unless you read something that gave the exact thicknesses of their bulwarks, you're mistaken there.

Yeah, POTBS sailing gets a bit of a bad rap, though. While the game was pretty much devoid of realistic features for the enthusiasts to recognized and appreciate, at the end of the day, the wind really mattered. Being able to make 2 knots dead upwind will piss off all the purists, but no one actually sailed that way because they would be killed. So in practice, the ships in that game did nothing that real vessels couldn't do. If anything, they weren't maneuverable enough, not being able to sail backwards and with some artificial turn rate limitations.

Ryan, is clewing up courses mandatory? Or could a large man o war crew station hands at the sheets to control the slack and ease at the proper moment? If we tell players that speed=fast tacking, taking in sail will be counterintuitive.

No, like POTBS. The captain doesn't handle the helm itself, and the steering of a large sailing vessel is so nuanced that modeling all the quirks has never been attempted in a videogame, to my knowledge. And if we were expected to handle a realistic helm (with just two keys on a keyboard and none of the force feedback or sensory cues of real life, heaven forbid!), then we would be completely unable to keep an eye on the actual battle, give orders, trim sails, fire guns, etc. Edit: By no helm control, I mean that instead of directly influencing the rudders, your A and D keys really just select headings that the ships follows unerringly. There's no lee or weather helm, no easing in the gusts or sneaking up towards larger seas, none of the art of close-hauled sailing, etc. The ship follows your orders exactly.

I dunno, seems sort of like a false feature. Helm control is going to be basically absent from the game. It's more like we're just giving verbal instructions to the helmsman because the ships are going to steer in straight lines, whereas real life steering is a complex art in itself. So the helmsman might as well know to reverse the helm in those situations. Although I grant that backwards sailing won't be a typical part of gameplay that newbs will do much of.

There usually isn't one. Not worth it anyways as no one really minds.

Auto mode is the Easy mode, no? I think there should just be a tiny auto-skipper button in the corner that can be toggled on and off at will. I know I will use when making small downwind maneuvers so I don't have to constantly eyeball the perfect angle for the yards. Please don't be obnoxious. The Center of Lateral Resistance. Right. Because it is mounted close to that point and has very little leverage, especially compared to the foremost and aftmost sails with their large amount of leverage. And so you have acknowledged that what I was saying was factual, despite embarking on seemingly pointless rebuttals. You've never once responded to my actual point, but acted offended and introduced something unrelated, so I agree. Edit: The problem here is that we're talking about real life and videogames at the same time, and on occasion you seem to have taken my observations on prospects for videogame coding as commentary on real-world vessel performance.

You're only talking about the direction of forces, whereas I am talking about the direction and strength of forces. Read my posts carefully and you'll see that. It is all VERY complicated to model in a videogame, even if it's not that complicated to handle in real life. I'm completely on board with your explanations. But the fact remains that a sheeted-in headsail exerts additional force because of the leverage it has over the hull, due to distance from the point of pivot (and a hundred other factors and equations of standard physics). No sailor alive is going to pull out pen and paper and make a mathematical estimate as to the relative strengths here... but the videogame coder has to do ALL the math. And can you answer the question of how a staysail affects rig balance when it physically straddles the point of pivot? (I suspect it's not really relevant because of the low leverage, I'm just pointing out that the simplicity really goes away.)

Wouldn't it be better say 'rarely for downwind sailing?' If any square rigger would furl the headsails and spanker when reaching (which, on balance, is going to be an extremely common point of sail), then that is huge news to me. If the wind is on the beam, the mizzen and headsails are very easy to manage and not blanketing anything at all. No one has to go aloft or raise heavy yards... it's free knots. It is true that I have been thinking about rig balance and maneuverability only as regards tacking and performance on the wind. Maybe it would be good to simplify downwind sailing by excluding rig balance from the equation. With downwind sailing, we can assume that a square rigger has plenty of speed and momentum and will turn just fine in any situation. After all, the devs want to rewards players who are skilled at tacking, while making the game still playable with auto-skipper. I hear you. Not that I know, but I would guess that the large lanteen mizzen sails would just hang out on the 'bad tack' half the time. Must have been a huge job to shift a yard that large, and maybe not quite worth it, since the lanteen isn't so great upwind anyways. The principles of rig balance should be the same with lanteens, though, right? Those sails could be rendered as vestigial parts of the foremast yards, no? Just make the spritsail topsail fall overboard every other week. The difficulty posed by different rigs has occurred to me, especially in terms of the extra animations needed. I suppose I wouldn't be too crushed if the finer sailing mechanics of luggers and lanteeners was rendered with POTBS quality. It absolutely matters. You can't escape leverage. The foresails are just in a superior position for exerting force on the ship, so far as rotation goes. And then you've got braced yards and staysails that actually straddle the center of pivot and oh god I need a degree in something to know what happens then. That's why I want to simplify.

Do you have any idea of how the sailplan was reduced? Everything shrunk proportionally? Or just some yards cut down? Royals outlawed? Sail area limitations from the Coast Guard are hilariously pointless because they only limit maximum sail area, which will NEVER be carried in conditions that could become dangerous. Whereas you can easily drown an entire orphanage by carrying half your canvas in a gale. Anyways, since I don't want to get the tacking thread off-topic, I just looked at your boxhauling diagram and had a question. Is box-hauling significantly faster than wearing, or does it take a long time. That's way more maneuvers that I thought there would be. Edit: Another question. Do you rig bowlines on the Lady (or any other square riggers you've seen)? And do you have any videos of diagrams of them? Verbal descriptions really don't cut it here, and the whole know coincidence makes it damned hard to Google.

And I know that a large number of us would be thrilled to provide resources, suggestions and feedback for the needed series of animations at every stage of development. POTBS had half-decent animations for filled sails. If you added luffing and backing animations of that sort, you would already be well on your way to an excellent result. Edit: Also, that tacking video is beyond fantastic! I've been looking for a clip like that for weeks and it just kills me that they aren't to be had. It looks like no one even had to touch the mainsail braces, which I suppose is a sign of good timing.

Ryan21: I know that the fore-and-aft sails have a very secondary level of importance. And I know that you can manage the ship without them. I wasn't actually talking about driving power at all, just what the Surprise sim calls rotational thrust. In that game it seems like the headsails and spanker are primarily what determine whether you carry lee or weather helm (Assuming square sails are actually set on all masts.). This makes intuitive sense to me because the fore-and-aft sails are used at squarer angles to the wind when reaching or beating, have more leverage because of their placement and thus convert a larger portion of their thrust into rotational forces, rather than driving the ship. If you think this is incorrect, and that a close-hauled fore topsail will produce more lee helm than a large sheeted-in jib, I would be very interested in hearing about it. You misunderstand me in one other element. I recommend modeling rig balance for headsails and spanker not for the sake of simulation, but for gameplay. By manipulating headsails, we can use realistic maneuvers to improve turn rate. I don't want full physical simulation, just something like this: Sailing with jib and no spanker: +5 turn rate to leeward and -5 to windward. And vice-versa. Note that this would require controlling the sheets for these sails just as we rotate square yards with brace controls. This will create more interesting gameplay, and the rig balance effects of headsails and mizzen sails are intuitive because these sails are positioned at either end of the vessel. The square sails are less easily comprehensible on a full-rigged ship because the main and mizzen are so close to the center of gravity and pivot, which in itself is a mobile and variable point. Furthermore, no one clews up the foresail to tack, so when coding a rig balance system for square sails you would have to prevent abuse like that. In short, rig balance for head and mizzen sails sails is more intuitive and easy to implement and use in normal gameplay. After all, players are going to run around with all three topsails set 99% of the time, so the balance of those sails can be assumed to take care of itself. However, I would love to see penalties for carrying all your square sail forward or aft, as this would come into play when dismasted. The main point is that we should be able to effect bonuses and penalties to turn rate by changing rig balance. But there should not be a situation like in the HMS Surprise sim where the ship barely answers the helm if you don't set everything just right. And +5000 to missing stays and especially box-hauling. Wearing ship should be a fairly pain-free process, as I understand it. Lastly, do we all agree that a separate minigame is not needed for tacking?

No time to read through all Ryan21's post right now, but I skimmed it and probably agree with most of the recommendations. The two most important things while tacking are speed and timing. It sounds like the game already requires some speed, so that's good. (By the way, high crew skill could allow tacking at lower speeds.) A possible advantage of manual control over auto-skipper could be choosing the correct time for 'mainsail haul,' and bracing the yards around on the other tack. Auto-skipper would do things 'good enough,' leaving manual captains to achieve perfect timing if they can. Also, I disagree with Ryan21 on one point, which is about headsail and spanker rig balance. Based on the HMS Surprise simulator, at least, it's the fore-and-aft sails that have by far the greatest effect on rig balance. These sails can overpower the helm and cause very sharp, violent turns. If anything, it's the balance factor of the square sails that is really complex and could be left out. So to tack fast you should have a button to lose sheets and haul the spanker to windward. The latter (hauling spanker to windward) could be something that auto-skipper doesn't do, meaning that manual captains will have a tighter, faster turn into the wind. The headsails and spanker could be used like this at any time, meaning that captains who know how to momentarily unbalance their rig will get big dividends of maneuverability. To summarize: 1) Build up speed 2) Spill wind from headsails (Not furl, does loose sheets. This assumes that there is a button for disabling the power of certain sails. I know the square sails can be disabled by yard positions already.) 3) Haul spanker or mizzen sail to windward. 4) Back foremast yards at the right time. 5) Back main and mizzen yards at the right time. That's a four-step sail control process/ Three steps would be automated by auto-skipper, one step is an extra advantage you get from manual control. Just reassure me, please. Can sails be furled individually? Taking in topgallants or topgallants and main is crucial. None of the sailing buffs will have any fun if we can't dress our ships in canvas outfits like grown men with barbie dolls. Also, are you planning on an ability to clew up sails, so we can slow down without going through the trouble of furling? I don't want to see canvas magically disappearing into the yards like in POTBS or Total War. If anything, the default 'slow down' button should clew up sails, with furling only happening after several minutes.

And that's why detailed sailing mechanics are good for gameplay.

How can that be? Having all your flooding on one side of the keel seems a lot worse than having it level in the bilge, no matter how much it sloshes around. Lack of watertight compartments make you flood more, which then of course is going to be worse for stability. (Although I swear I read something by my dad the naval architect, mentioning that a flooded bilge can be like ballast at times. Stability is an attribute with a hundred different contextual meanings and components, of course. Rolling a lot or being crank doesn't even mean you're more likely to capsize.) Anyways, modeling all that requires a detailed stability simulation with a lot detail and flailing about and unpredictability. You won't see a ship develop a steady list to port simply because the hole is on that side. If she rolls, then that's because of the sea-state and her own movement and windage, not so much the water. It's probably easiest to have ships with flooding stay more or less stable until the point of no return, at which point they can flop all over the place. Edit: Or the ship just suffers from increase rolling in general, mostly to leeward.

Bumping this thread to stick my oar in an old debate. This is really wrong, in my opinion. If the larboard side of the ship loses a lot of guns, then you should show the starboard side. If the larboard side if full of holes and lets grapeshot in, then you should show the starboard side. But other than that, it DOES NOT MATTER. Realistically, roundshot penetrating a hull would disable cannons on both sides of the ship, without a big difference. In some situations, both sides of the hull would be penetrated. And leaks happen on a per-hole basis, so there's no progressive damage that can accumulate based on what side they are one. A ship with 6 shot-holes below the waterline on the larboard side and 6 on the starboard side will leak just as fast as a ship with 12 holes on the starboard side. (Assuming no heel angle.) This is the realistic objection. But I know you want to hear about why gameplay will be ruined. So here goes. The most realistic, interesting and thrilling maneuver you can make is to charge down from windward on a foe, cut across their bow or stern, raking them, and then take up the leeward position close by, preventing them from fleeing. Or sail circles around them, hammering them from every angle. In POTBS, this would get you killed because it meant splitting your fire between different sides of the enemy vessel, essentially wasting your shots. So a realistic, skill-based tactics that is fun to execute is ruined by a bad damage model not based in reality. Roundshot destroys guns and kills men. It does this from any angle. You do not need to concentrate fire on part of a vessel to accomplish this. So in a sense, ships do have one big hitpoint bar. It's called men. And another hitpoint bar for the number of guns. (We'll leave the rig out of this.) Holes below the waterline leak no matter what side they are on. This like bleeding instead of hitpoint. The integrity of individual bits of planking isn't really important. It is even preferable to cover the whole target in shot holes from every angle. Accomplishing this leads to more fluid gameplay with more maneuvers, more skill, more excitement. If you read any part of my post, read the preceding sentence. If you make it necessary to concentrate fire on one side of a ship only, you make maneuvers and raking fire a losing tactic. You force ships to sail alongside one another and not move or maneuver. All battles will be the same, a repetitive slugging match until one side loses. This is a false feature. It is false because it is unrealistic. These vessels would not heel while leaking because there are no internal compartments that are watertight. Water will immediately run down into the bilges and accumulate from there, leveling out. So there is no need to waste resources coding this. (Once the ship begins to founder, it will lose stability and anything can happen.)

Did you do it at anchor? It looks so... neat. I would have guessed it was just the lower yard of a split topsail and there was no bundle of canvas stuffed up against the yard at all.