maturin

In the heat of battle, relying on a minimalistic UI, there are two indicators that I constantly lose track of: 1. UI element indicating Manual/Auto yard control 2. Whether I am making headway or sternway These are really freaking important to keep straight. I am often trying to fight at the same time as I tack, and miss the transition between progress ahead and progress astern. Therefore I neglect to switch over the rudder and end up impeding my progress. After I finish tacking, I often forget to re-enable auto-skipper, and end up try to turn downwind in manual. As a result, everyone sails circles around me until I realize my mistake. Request: Optional UI feature to make make Manual Skipper and negative vessel speeds highlighted in red. I just need more eye-catching warnings that I have neglected something.

Same way you know you've found the G-spot. But in all seriousness, it's both very simple and very complex. For sailing fast in a straight line, you should just use auto-skipper. The game knows perfectly how to trim the sails to make them most efficient on a given course. After all, the game just simplifies reality here, standardizing yard control across different vessels. The most experienced seamen can't do better than the auto-skipper, because the auto-skipper follows its own internal rules and is perfect. I, like pretty much all other experienced players, use auto-skipper for sailing fast in a straight line, and only use manual yard control when I want to turn. And here is where everything is rather simple. A square sail is most powerful and efficient when it is perpendicular, or at right angles to the wind. A square sail is least powerful when it is parallel to the wind. So if you want to turn fast, you put the sails one one end of the ship at right angles to the wind, and the other sails parallel with the wind. If you can't quite achieve those angles, get as close as possible. So you don't actually need force vectors. You just need to strive for two ideal angles: 90 degrees and 0 degrees.

I think he's under the impression that the sailing model is based on first-causes physics like the HMS Surprise simulator, rather than a hull just having inherent stats and sailing abilities with certain levels of thrust provided by various sails. Tigger, I think you're asking too much of the simulation here. Wind doesn't exist at all as a moving force or object in the game. So far as I can tell it is really just a direction that determines how sails and flags animate, and how much force a given sail is allowed to impart to the hull. For example, the HMS Surprise has a config-defined top speed of around 14 knots, and a main staysail can provide a maximum 11% of that speed if the sail is angled 90 degrees to the wind. This is true no matter how the sail might be blanketed, how the sail might be tilted from heel or a collision, whether there's an island in the way, etc. If you tilt the sail any closer or farther from the wind, it will start losing efficiency, until at 170 degrees from the wind it is at 0% power. If you shoot a hole in it, it loses power. And when you press S to douse sail, the aggregated power of the sails starts slowly decreasing 60%...59%...58%...57% until the speed reaches the percentage that is appropriate for that reduced sailplan. The sail isn't doing anything or interacting with the wind 'in reality.' The game just tracks the angle between wind and canvas, and then tells the ship how fast it can go and quickly fast it can turn. There's no airflow anywhere. In short, this is a videogame. It 'fakes' everything because otherwise 95% of development time would be spent tweaking the physics models, and there would only be time to add one single ship. Basically, it would have to be like DCS: Surprise. But a tall ship simulator is much more complex from a development standpoint than a flight sim. Planes only have two wings and an engine which never changes. A ships has about forty different wings and engines for different conditions. And to bring up the example of HMS Surprise simulator, even that sim's exhaustive physics modelling results in some rather strange outcomes. Even it can't get the intricacies of tacking right, for examples, or balance all the limitations. The game has to mimic real-life behavior with arbitrary stats, shortcuts and smoke and mirrors. This is necessary and correct. Naval Action can reach a very high level of verisimilitude if balanced attentively and imaginatively. I certainly hope that the wind will become more of a dynamic, changeable force with local variations. But this would not be accomplished with any airflow modelling. Rather, you would just have an island, and an arbitrary, randomized area to leeward of that island would have a different coefficient for wind force. There won't be any detailed flow modelling. That would be prohibitively complex for the coder and taxing for the server. So could you reiterate your specific feature requests? How should the game's vessels act differently? Certainly the gaff rigs are too effective upwind. In fact, they can sail at 6 knots a mere 15 degrees from the wind. But fixing this doesn't require complex physics. I imagine there's just a spreadsheet with a performance curve defined somewhere in the config. Simply define the efficiency of gaff sails to be 0% at 40 degrees to the wind, and you're done. Same result achieved.

Force vectors raise more questions than they answer, since the force vectors on the sail are useless unless they have the resistance of a keel to counteract them. On a beam reach, for example, the force vectors are just pushing you downwind.

Luckily there was no danger of getting savaged by a 74, since the British ship was apparently only a 32-gun frigate in reality. They just called out the name of an SoL commanded by a renowned captain as a ruse.

But sails are only really going to wave and shake when they are luffing (yards are parallel to wind direction) or when the mast is falling. These are relatively rare occurrences, only likely to happen to one ship at a time. And the animations are only necessary at the highest LoD. So you might have a fleet of 50 ships, but only four of them will be using this animation at once in normal conditions, and probably in different parts of the map.

I doubt the map they're making is to scale. That would mean about 14 billion individual trees on the coastlines. Maybe that's achievable if everything is procedurally generated local to the player and not saved, but even Daggerfall's map was only the size of England. https://daggerxl.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/ryuranx_sod_1.png

And you can swivel quite easily while anchored by putting a spring on your cable. This is a downright banal maneuver. We once used it to watched 4th of July fireworks without having the rigging in the way as the tide swung us bow-on to the display. ...and then the pile of pallets they mounted the mortars on caught fire and we had fireworks exploding ten feet off the ground and shooting up at random, with the crew walking around the blaze in Hurt Locker suits. I digress.

Yeah, you probably hit a staysail and then a topsail. Or the spritsail and then the bowsprit. So the game is actually counting misses and hits, not initial shots. Global damage is probably how the game resolves unsynchronized hits where the server drops the packet and doesn't know where the ball landed.

I think you're overstating the case, Crankey. Fleets fought at anchor all the time, albeit only when in the shelter of some landmass that prevented them from being flanked. To fight in harbor under sail was just asking to run aground or afoul of each other.

I hope for your sake that the devs implement squalls. Then you can all capsize and sink in the other vessels and be laughing out of the other side of your face.

I had seen upper masts go by the board on occasion, but never three at once. They are just too high in the rigging to hit easily. Almost impossible to get chainshot up there. For both realism and gameplay's sake, I think the dismasting damage model should be balanced to make the result in the video more typical. For instance, most the time I aim for the fighting tops, where the masts double up. This is an easy aim point, and the largest target. When you shoot a mast here, it tends to break off right at the deck. But it should actually break above the lower sail, leaving the mainsail or foresail intact. This would cripple the ships less. If you had been sailing astern of me at a proper speed, and not suffering from tunnel vision, this collision wouldn't have happened. But let's imagine that I did pay attention to where your frigate was. This was the situation: I had lost a mast and lots of speed. I had an unloaded starboard broadside and a larboard broadside loaded with double shot. There was a Bellona that was rapidly pulling out of range. We were staring defeat in the face because we had one SoL player crashed to desktop, and the enemy fleet had just won the ability to kite us indefinitely. I had to get some damage on that Bellona to aid our 3rd SoL player, who was close engaged and outnumbered. If I hadn't turned into you and gotten that shot, it would have meant losing our only chance to hurt the enemy for many, many minutes. It was the cusp of the battle where we still had a chance to bring them to close action and destroy them. A single good broadside from an SoL is worth more than anything your Cerberus could have done during the battle. I would have turned to take that shot even if I had known you were there, and even if you were going to sink from it. Also, I noticed you stopped recording before you starting calling me a douche.

You can lie to under a reefed spanker in a storm. And of course plenty of diesel-powered lobster boats around here set a tiny little marconi mizzen to make the boat lie quietly at anchor.

Actually, they provide too much. 90% of warning bells are false positive, especially in the opening moments of a game. However, they could still be a useful feature if the sounding of a warning bell gives players that heard it the right the sound their own warning ping. And it would have limited audible range. This would cut down on the traffic jam car horn honking.

You can tow ship's head around with boats, or use an anchor. But the turning in-game is waaay to fast and instantaneous to boot.

Uh, heck yes, it's a storm. Put tour camera at deck level and see what it looks like from there. Bearing in mind that videogames, like cameras, shrink waves by four times. Seas that would have you crapping your pants in person look like ripples on-screen.

That guy is fast! Funny how those modern shrouds work. Just be glad that it's not like an old square rigger, where you have to hang forty degrees upside-down on the futtock shrouds. Helmet cams make everything terrifying because you feel like you are being sucked backwards into the void every time the wearer cranes his neck.

Which is pretty bogus. Was I going to repair my hull with that sailcloth? Separate repair pools and cooldowns for everyone please. No one in the history of the universe has never repaired a rudder or pump, so it's a fake feature anyhow.

The auto-stabilizing guns are probably here to stay. I am proposing that roll continue to have a negligible impact on gunnery during mild conditions, UNTIL you try to play at sea forts. Than we hit your over the head with the realism stick!

10% sail damage from chain and the roundshot player can be kited forever and whittled down. But chain will almost never dismast. Trying to dismast with roundshot in a duel is suicide.

I recommend posting broadside weight of metal for the historical complement of long guns. Leave the carronades out of it.

It's very interesting to see how the proportions of those numbers change. Temeraire spends 7.5 of its 10 minutes falling off from the tack, but the modern frigate splits the time equally. Probably because the 74 was a much more ardent ship than the frigate, luffing up readily but reluctant to fall off. For the records, S. Trinidad tacks in a little over a minute at max speed. Same goes for Bellona at 6 knots. Tacking and wearing take about the same amount of time at that speed for Bellona. At max, I imagine she would tack quite a but faster.

The main question is: How can we develop a 'shorthand' for reality that will function easily and simply in the game, in order to punish playing at sea forts? I'm sure most people think I'm always pushing for a hardcore tall ship sim, but actually I just look for ways to simplify reality in a playable way that is inspired by real techniques.

Unfortunately, in the game right now, a cutter can heave-to perfectly... but only when running dead downwind. Ie, the opposite of reality. You just sheet in your boom all the way and sit there happy as a clam. How we prevent that, I'm not sure.

That's actually already implemented for square rigger. Unbalance your rig and the ship will naturally turn. Weather/lee helm is always very manageable in the game, but you do have to correct for it with manual skipper. You can actually wear ship without touching the rudder.