maturin

If anything, the pirates on this show are deliberately un-flambuoyant. The extras would look unremarkable on any merchantman. I wish they would have researched a bit more of the lingo, though. Patrick O'Brian was great at that. The people on this show sound too modern, with their talk of pussies and condoms, when period slang can be really expressive and aggressive without the slightest bit of stilted Shakespearean historico-corniness.

In my dream version of the game, the fastest ship is different depending on the weather. Maybe there's another frigate that is faster than the Surprise in very light winds. Maybe the 74-gunner is better at bullying her way through heavy seas and will outstrip the Surprise in a gale. And then there's fore-and-aft rigs, of course.

It could be interesting once, but everything in an MMO happens fifty times.

Moving at a knot and a half isn't really compatible with excitement, to be honest, at least when you're just watching a screen.

Если есть опытный экипаж, вполне возможно отходить немного от боя и восстановить верxные мачты (topgallants) доволно быстро. Гораздо меньше час. Средные мачты (topmasts... извиняюсь за словарь) можно убрать через час, минимум, поэтому разумается что восстановить, тоже возможно. Когда погода спокойна. Просто помните что ремонтировать нижные мачты--невозможно кроме в порту. Но можно ставить временные запасные паруса. Обычно использовали реи как мачти в том случае. И конечно, ремонтировать под огнем--самоубийство.

I just watched the premiere, and it's about 200% less trashy than I expected, especially given the Michael Bay involvement. The shocking thing is that it's not just 'drama aboard a pirate ship.' Pirates of the Caribbean is drama aboard a pirate ship, completely divorced from history. It's very clear that while this show may not be particularly historically accurate, it is in fact historically-inspired. Power struggles between officers on a democratically-run pirate vessel, recruiting disgruntled seaman from prizes, New Providence as a lawless hub (albeit too fortified, with a luxurious plantation house on it), freed slaves everywhere, etc. The basic structure is lifted directly from the history books (not to give them too much credit, as reality has always been better than fiction in regards to this topic). It's just a question of how far they distort it from there. CGI isn't the best; I don't think there are any actual sailing vessels being used. Shooting is done in South Africa. It does make me want to look up how pirates fenced their goods, though. You have to hand it to a pirate series that gives economics and politics such an immediate role.

300 mph? Try three times that! A Napoleonic 12-pounder, depending on the powder charge, had a muzzle velocity of 439 m/s! The terrifying thing about this, is that it means that shot was supersonic for part of its flight. That means the sound of a passing ball would be akin a lightning bolt hitting next to your ear. Now imagine a point-blank broadside ripping through the rigging. It would sound like the end of the world, as loud and threatening as any WWII artillery barrage. Also, magazines were placed below the waterline, for obvious reasons, so no shot is going to hit it anyways. All explosions were due to secondary fires.

I know I'd work for peanuts and cred Better storytelling than Skyrim is actually not that difficult to accomplish. Bethesda tends to shed their best writers. But MP still needs well-written gameworld dialog, written orders, tutorials etc. I want to be a writer and historical consultant for your team, and I'm probably not alone. That would be much better than beta testing. Here's a writing sample, depicting the sort of thing I'd love to re-create in the game. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-TmCbH-99MIla_-kbRexf6heJwQnmkO3Tf6O5XGEc7c/pub

I think it would be really hard to diagnose a trim problem in a game, based only on the ill-effects of leeway/heel/speed. Obviously I would love to see sails do the complaining dynamically, but this will require really freaking good animators and is a complex system. And sometimes even AAA dev teams muddle through with very basic animations. If that gif of the ship in heavy seas was created from scratch, then there's reason to hope that GameLabs has some serious talent in that regard. But it could have just been pre-baked tech from the engine. Will this have significant visual impact on the trim of the sails? If not, it could be one of the hundreds of orders just assumed to be given. Could you elaborate on this? How would the sail 'twist' and what effects could you get out of it? Changing the peak of gaff sails would indeed be delicious. And I've been meaning to ask, if clewing up and easing halyards are two methods of very quickly easing a sail, when and how often were both methods used? And what about simply letting go of the sheets? Was that more of an emergency procedure, or common enough to be worth modelling in-game?

Small relative to power vessels? http://www.ctbasses.com/misc/BruceTrinque/WLively.jpg Because you could a couple bunk beds out of that thing.

Assuming the HMS Surprise simulator is accurate on this point (and I trust it far more in the quantitative minutiae than in the broad aggregated results), sailing on a broad reach, with a 15 degree lee helm, the rudder produces half again as much drag as the entire mainsail! That was from counteracting a rather nasty weather helm that I couldn't balance out without sacrificing all the thrust from my mizzen sails. I think we can assume that this is way above the pay grade of this game's sailing gameplay. Just a thought, the swells be much smaller relative to the enormous sails on a square rigger. I can't seem to reason through that should have less of an effect on them or not. Could you really get enough precise responsiveness out of a square rigger to adjust to each stage of a passing swell?

You have to allow me a chuckle at this one.

Telltales are going to be way too small and obscured to be useful on a computer screen, though. Not unless we zoom in on them from the quarterdeck view, blind to all else. Real seamen also don't use them; they know how to read the sails. You could integrate the tell tales into UI, but for sailing such large vessels, I think that the flying of telltales is way above the actual level of precision that we'll see in helm and sail control. The sail is simply going to be shivering, or not, which can be represented by animations or by UI hints. And as I understand it, you've got your first statement reversed there. You trim the sails to match a course, not the other way around. And given that steering is labor intensive in itself, and creates considerable drag, you do send the crew to the braces to make minute adjustments (nobody cares if they have to work hard). Also, when I think about sail trimming in game terms, I think about finding the best trim for a given course and wind. The constant corrections needed for little variations in course and windspeed/direction should not be included in a videogame, where we are limited to two out of (as someone else mentioned in this thread) six senses. Anyways, the devs mentioned that we can spill the wind from our sails by aligning yards to the wind. It's equally important that we can loose our sheets to let the sails fly and dump speed that way, as it requires less effort to revert. And the basic slow-down key should clue up the sails, with furling being something you do last, for long-term tidying up (or storms).

Yeah, I think the biggest difficulty with manual sail control is the deciding whether or not it gives an advantage over autopilot. Becauase if it doesn't, almost no one will use it in PvP. If it gives a large advantages, the community will regard it as mandatory. Another very important point is weather and lee helm, relating to rig balance. We have been told that the basic control scheme is WASD, with A and D clearly controlling the rudder. But do these keys set a couse for a virtual helmsman, or do they directly control the rudder? Because in almost no cases does a vessel sail perfectly and uniformly in one direction. You always need to make minute or even large corrections at the helm. So in practices, will we press A and D to change course, or will we have to constantly maintain course by making corrections? If the latter is true, rig balance suddenly becomes very important (as anyone playing the Surprise Simulator can attest), as manual adjustments will make steering much steadier and reduce drag from the rudder. If the helm command merely sets a course, and moves automatically to maintain it, then manually balancing your rig could have big dividends for turn rate. Want to fall off? Sheet in the headsails and spin to leeward like a cork. To tack at any decent speed, haul the mizzen sail out to windward and fly up into the wind. These two examples would be difficult to implement in an autopilot feature because they require guessing the player's intentions. Thus, they could be advantages reserved for manual control. Constant small wind changes requiring trimming of the rig could also give speed advantages to manual captains, with forewarning of squalls as a passive skill.

Can't possibly be louder than the muzzle report itself, can it? Anyways, the reverberation of the sound makes me feel like I'm at least surrounded by six-foot bulwarks.

Ship names could be a toggle. You turn off the custom name visibility and just see the name of the ship class, Victory, etc. An approved list is probably the ideal, but difficult and problematic. Bottom line, we should be able to name our vessels HMS L33th4xxor, so long as other people have the option of not seeing it.

Small ships can always fight each other, and privateer brigs can threaten under-crewed merchantment many times their size, while cutters and the like can escape from square-rigged naval vessels by running away to windward.

Currently we can only view the last dozen or so of a user's posts. Tracking everything the devs say is a great way to disseminate information and prevent duplicate topics. People will make FAQs with dev post compilations. Also, is there any practical way to segregate the English and Russian forums in the View New Content menu? I actually read the Russian forum from time to time, but everyone else has to sort through the clutter to find new posts at a glance.

Pretty badass, actually. Clearly the perspective is below decks somewhere, which makes a big difference.

I'd like to see time-compressed fast travel, like a map in an Indian Jones movie, where you make periodic adjustments when the game alerts you to wind changes, worsening weather, spotted sails, etc. Edit: Oops, off-topic. Very much not a skilled sailor here, and as for traditional vessels, except for the 'yawldory' my dad built, the HMS Surprise simulator is just about it. Has anyone figured this bad boy out yet? I can finally sail to windward and everything, but with your only indication being numbers, I always get the strangest outcomes, with Rotational Thrust balanced to port but the ship still flying up staboard into the wind, or zero Heeling Thrust and no sail set, yet the ship still rolls through a full 100 degrees, probably capsizing (the rolling seems sort of glitched, or am I wrong?). Also, never hit more than 7 knots.

Exactly how the first Patrick O'Brian novel ends. Although then the British characters end up watching a large-scale fleet engagement from the highly un-safe vantage point of the officer's head. But they make great friends with the captain who captured them, before shredding his fleet two novels later.

Admin has said that you can be taken aback and drift sternward. I'm not sure if he means you can sail backwards (which was possible), heave-to with sails backing, or both. The sailing model in the game doesn't have to have the completeness of the HMS Surprise simulator (I doubt this is even possible). I would be perfectly fine with a 'heave-to' button that trims the sails accordingly but engages a virtual 'brake' that makes the ship start slowly drifting. It doesn't have to rely on the same movement model as everything else, although it would be nice to be able to manually tune the yards to heave-to.

Sweet! Do you have plans to implement some basic sail backing? Just the topsails could be used as a sort of 'brake.'

Thankfully, the magazines are below the waterline, so those fireworks are reserved for the truly unfortunate. Fires could often get out of control, though, especially on dismasted vessels where sails fell over the guns and ignited.

It seemed more to me like she was just pitching into the oncoming seas. Swells can move pretty fast, or so I hear.