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Sailing model goofs


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Hi Devs! Don't you have anyone on the team with some sailing experience? I have been sailing for 14 years, could not help but notice the following departures from the real life:

 

1) Wind direction arrow should be pointing to where the wind is coming FROM, not the where it is blowing to! That's the convention for all marine instruments. Your indicator must confuse the hell out of real-life sailors. Also, is it "true" or "apparent" wind? I think you show true, but in that era only apparent could be available to the captain. Consider recalculating it (adding vectors of wind's speed and ship's speed over ground).

 

2) When a ship is close hauled (going against the wind), all sails should be sheeted in. The mainsail boom should be on the center line. Yours is always slack.

 

3) The boats of that era should not be able do sail closer than 50-60 degrees to the wind, and their head sails should start luffing when they come too close and during coming about (turning to the opposite tack with bow into the wind). This flapping is a warning sign that there is no propulsion. Your sails are always full, which is incorrect and disorienting.

 

4) Going downwind with moderate winds - the more you bear away (put the wind behind you) the SLOWER the ship should go. Think: you are deducting the ship's speed from the wind's, creating less pressure for the sails. The closer you are to the wind, the faster you should go (beam reach (90 degrees to the wind) is usually the fastest). You have the opposite dynamic.  

 

5) Then the wind is too strong for a given ship and the captain did not reduce the sail's area (by pressing S key), coming to beam reach should create broaches - excessive heel and uncontrollable turns into the wind, after which the sails luff and the ship slows down. Basically, each ship should have her polar diagram programmed - what speed is attainable at each wind direction and power, for each set of sails (from dead slow to full, in your terminology). Chance of broaching should also be programmed.

 

6) When one ship approaches another from windward, she blocks the wind. The other ship should start flapping her sails and slow down. When from leeward, the attacker should suffer the same effect and fall behind. So the overtaking should always be done from upwind, if with 2-3 boat lengths, and the defending ship should not let that happen by coming up.

 

More realistic sailing simulation would make your game so much better! If interested, I can help you with the model improvements.

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Just to comment on 4. if you look at the sailing profiles under the ships here(click on any ship) you will see that most ships if not all ships sail worse running with the wind than broad reach or beam reach(depending on the rigging which is better). What is faster depends on sail plan, what you say is most definetely true for fore and aft rigged ships, not so much for square rigged ships(where broad reach is usually the fastest)

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1)

We do not have any drifting thus we always have the ships movement over ground altho it would be very different in RL.

Ive never seen the wind direction iverted 180degrees like you say. If I missunderstand you, please feel free to elaborate.

 

2)

The sailing model is a compromise between RL and gameplay.

The visuals have been adressed by many users. Luffing sails, slacking in the wind etc. The answer from devs was that animations are taxing performance. And if they made semi-good looking animations they would be very apparent.

Hence there are none. (maybe sometime inthe future they can come up with good visuals but that we dont know)

 

3)

gameplay bevore RL is the motto here. We and the devs know about RL ship performance. Still the game is not meant to be a hardcore simulator. Luckily our square ships are at least getting considerably slower close hauled - not RL but gameplay.

 

4)

Olav said it. Our ships have individual wind curves. sailing 180 in a squarerigger obscurs the forward sails and creates a windshadow - hence the reduced speed.

 

5)

If the wind was getting even stronger a ship's crew would also haul down spars and sail under only heaviy reefed curses. And yes Id like to see such gameplay in heavy winds,too

 

6)

Windshadow is off due to its potential of abuse/ trolling.

Just imagine a 6 year old kid, constantly sailing to your windward. Beeing an ally you are unable to do anything against him.

 

___

a bonus:

the game calculates each sail and its preassure indivdually.

Loosing sailHP on your jibs, flying sails etc will cripple your speeds close hauled.

Au contraire - if you loose integrity in your square sails you loose performance bevore the wind.

 

edit:

also the devs plan on finalizing the acceleration and decceleration model which will affect sailing considerably. At least thats the plan.

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Then make the wind shade only from enemies. I think shaders+sound for sails flapping is not too taxing. Apparent is not due to currents, but due to ship's movement over water.

Edited by Impalor
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dont get me wrong.

I am not defending the system to bits. There is still room for improvement.

What I wanted to do is to explain you some of the reasons behind the desicions made towards the mechanics we have in game.

 

As said. There is plenty room to improvement. But one have to give the devs credit for what theyve done till now.

And things can only get better

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4) Going downwind with moderate winds - the more you bear away (put the wind behind you) the SLOWER the ship should go. Think: you are deducting the ship's speed from the wind's, creating less pressure for the sails. The closer you are to the wind, the faster you should go (beam reach (90 degrees to the wind) is usually the fastest). You have the opposite dynamic.  

 

5) Then the wind is too strong for a given ship and the captain did not reduce the sail's area (by pressing S key), coming to beam reach should create broaches - excessive heel and uncontrollable turns into the wind, after which the sails luff and the ship slows down. Basically, each ship should have her polar diagram programmed - what speed is attainable at each wind direction and power, for each set of sails (from dead slow to full, in your terminology). Chance of broaching should also be programmed.

I think you are speaking from your experience with small marconi-rigged yachts here.

 

It takes a hell of a lot of wind to put a large square rigger at risk of broaching, and they have nothing to fear from a beam wind.

 

The ships do have polar diagrams, with proper reductions in speed for sailing with the wind aft. Many historical square riggers did just as well with the wind after as they did sailing large, however.

 

 

There is no apparent wind in the game, to keep things simpler from a gameplay and programming standpoint. And apparent wind is less important for a large heavy warship than it is for a racing or cruising yacht. In light air conditions where the discrepancy between apparent and real wind is large, these ships wouldn't be going anywhere fast anyhow. A modern sailboat might use light airs to sail close-hauled and get a boost from apparent wind, but a square rigger wouldn't be able to build up enough speed to do the same. And sailing slowly to windward with square sails and a large hull results in loads of leeway.

 

 

 

 I think shaders+sound for sails flapping is not too taxing.

I'm not sure about the feasibility of shaders. But I remember calling for luff/flogging sound effects back in 2014. 

 

BTW, the sails do go slack and come aback properly. The by-the-wind angles are just exaggerated to keep things playable.

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Quite a few of us have real world sailing experience.  A few even have real world square rig experience in historical vessels.  Bungee has addressed quite a few of your concerns correctly.  I'll add that fore/aft rig performance is definitely not great, however, adjustments to that sailing model haven't come to the top of the list yet.

 

Thank you for your feedback.

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1) Wind direction arrow should be pointing to where the wind is coming FROM, not the where it is blowing to! That's the convention for all marine instruments. Your indicator must confuse the hell out of real-life sailors. Also, is it "true" or "apparent" wind? I think you show true, but in that era only apparent could be available to the captain. Consider recalculating it (adding vectors of wind's speed and ship's speed over ground).

 

Modern wind instruments do indeed point to where the wind is coming from and yes it did confuse the hell out of me. 


5)

If the wind was getting even stronger a ship's crew would also haul down spars and sail under only heaviy reefed curses. And yes Id like to see such gameplay in heavy winds,too

Me too.

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1) Wind direction arrow should be pointing to where the wind is coming FROM, not the where it is blowing to! That's the convention for all marine instruments. Your indicator must confuse the hell out of real-life sailors.

Are you a confused real-life sailor?

 

I sail, and I don't have to rely on the little tail of the arrow to see where the wind direction is. I don't see an arrow, I just see a line. And it's always obvious which end is which.

 

If you get disoriented by a full 180 degrees without this arrow, then you have major situational awareness issues.

 

 

 

I think real sailors might be annoyed by the failure to follow convention, but they can figure it out. It's non-sailors who would be confused by the authentic arrow, if anyone.

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I think real sailors might be annoyed by the failure to follow convention, but they can figure it out. It's non-sailors who would be confused by the authentic arrow, if anyone.

 

 

I concur with this.  The large majority of NA players now and to come - I have no statistics but it's pretty much guaranteed, and I would venture a guess at 80% or greater - are not seasoned and serious sailors like the OP.  They're gamers.  For that contingent, it's much more direct and sensible to show the wind in-game exactly like it is now.  This isn't a real-world simulator, why make it harder for the gamers than it should be?  (even if it's more true to life as pointed out).  There's lots of discussions on the forum about what is good gameplay versus realism, this is another good example.  Leave the wind pointing to where it's going.  People associate an arrowhead to where something is headed.

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"If you get disoriented by a full 180 degrees without this arrow, then you have major situational awareness issues."

Yes but in real sailing you have actual wind. You can tell the direction from getting blasted In the face or the back of the head.

The indicator in NA shows where your hat just blew off to lol.

Edited by SeaMist
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Wind is always discussed in terms of where it is coming from and not where it going to. Just look at any wind gauge on a building and you will see it points where the wind is coming from and not were it is going. There is a simple reason for this, because that is the direction that weather will be coming from.

 

Now did it confuse me? No, but that does not mean it won't be confusing to others. Some people can adapt to some things quicker to others. Mentally I just viewed the representation to be an indicator of the flow and not the origin. Someone else may not make that connection so intuitively.

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"If you get disoriented by a full 180 degrees without this arrow, then you have major situational awareness issues."

Yes but in real sailing you have actual wind. You can tell the direction from getting blasted In the face or the back of the head.

The indicator in NA shows where your hat just blew off to lol.

As a sailor you can look at your sails and immediately tell what tack you're on. This will verify how the wind indicator works.

 

If you are not a sailor and cannot read the sails, then you are helpless.

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That's actually what confused me. I was asking myself how that sail configuration could possibly be right for that wind direction. It doesn't help that the cutter sails so well in OW close hauled. Then after a while I realised........good goddess, the wind direction is reversed!

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That's actually what confused me. I was asking myself how that sail configuration could possibly be right for that wind direction. It doesn't help that the cutter sails so well in OW close hauled. Then after a while I realised........good goddess, the wind direction is reversed!

No wonder so many of you old salts get Lost at sea.  :rolleyes:

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Maybe change the indicator first from true wind speed to apparent instead of introducing wind speeds?

It'll create enough panic. :)

 

I really hate how the jib trim is strangely tied to the mainsail trim. Can't we get that disconnected?

If I want to stop, I keep doing the "wrong" thing. Take down jibs (T key), then take the main down (S key)...

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However I feel like this would add some extra tactics to the game, I fear it will be too complicated for allot of normal players who don't sail IRL.

 

 

Not really and two things would help out a lot, even if I do not sail IRL.

 

1. Jib power/depower control dettached from the rest

 

2. One more step of sail with only courses and mizzen and no staysails up ( if it makes any sense for a age of sail combat ship )

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Hi Devs! Don't you have anyone on the team with some sailing experience? I have been sailing for 14 years, could not help but notice the following departures from the real life:

 

1) Wind direction arrow should be pointing to where the wind is coming FROM, not the where it is blowing to! That's the convention for all marine instruments. Your indicator must confuse the hell out of real-life sailors. Also, is it "true" or "apparent" wind? I think you show true, but in that era only apparent could be available to the captain. Consider recalculating it (adding vectors of wind's speed and ship's speed over ground).

 

2) When a ship is close hauled (going against the wind), all sails should be sheeted in. The mainsail boom should be on the center line. Yours is always slack.

 

3) The boats of that era should not be able do sail closer than 50-60 degrees to the wind, and their head sails should start luffing when they come too close and during coming about (turning to the opposite tack with bow into the wind). This flapping is a warning sign that there is no propulsion. Your sails are always full, which is incorrect and disorienting.

 

4) Going downwind with moderate winds - the more you bear away (put the wind behind you) the SLOWER the ship should go. Think: you are deducting the ship's speed from the wind's, creating less pressure for the sails. The closer you are to the wind, the faster you should go (beam reach (90 degrees to the wind) is usually the fastest). You have the opposite dynamic.  

 

5) Then the wind is too strong for a given ship and the captain did not reduce the sail's area (by pressing S key), coming to beam reach should create broaches - excessive heel and uncontrollable turns into the wind, after which the sails luff and the ship slows down. Basically, each ship should have her polar diagram programmed - what speed is attainable at each wind direction and power, for each set of sails (from dead slow to full, in your terminology). Chance of broaching should also be programmed.

 

6) When one ship approaches another from windward, she blocks the wind. The other ship should start flapping her sails and slow down. When from leeward, the attacker should suffer the same effect and fall behind. So the overtaking should always be done from upwind, if with 2-3 boat lengths, and the defending ship should not let that happen by coming up.

 

More realistic sailing simulation would make your game so much better! If interested, I can help you with the model improvements.

 

1)  It's a pretty minor thing, and even as a real sailor it doesn't confuse me at all.  This is a game after all, and I don't set my sails by hitting 'W', or turn by hitting 'A' and 'D'.  Additionally, all wind in this game is true, as there is no apparent wind created (simplicity here).

 

2)  No, this is only true with more modern vessels.  Many vessels do not do well with the main boom sheeted all the way in, as it will give the vessel way too much weather helm.  For modern racing vessels, this is pretty much the case, but for more traditional vessels it often isn't.  Heck, my cutter likes the boom to be eased about halfway to the rail when sailing close hauled.  She steers better that way, heels less, makes less headway, and generally makes better speed.  Only when I reef do I haul the boom in any tighter (especially if I haven't reefed the jib).  For square riggers, the spanker was used more for balancing than driving, so the sheeting angle does not need to be 'for best speed' anyway.

 

3)  Yes, but gameplay enjoyment of the non-sailing masses has taken over on this point, though I think they do a fair job at giving the boats different windward capabilities anyway.  As for the graphics/sound point here, as stated earlier it's just a matter of system requirements and the fact that this is still in alpha.  Heck, not too long ago the OW ships had all their sails set square, so it was very confusing figuring out the wind at times.  Give it time and it's sure to get better.

 

4)  Again, this is for modern boats.  Most (probably all) boats in game do not sail fastest dead down wind, but in real life square riggers generally do best on a broad reach (obviously this is very ship specific as well).  Remember, most modern racing vessels are designed for close hauled to be their best point of sail, as most races have a long upwind beat, then additional downwind sails are set once rounding the mark.  In this era, ship were designed to hopefully be decent sailors on just about any point of sail.  Additionally, for non-racing vessels today their fastest point of sail is often not close hauled, but on some sort of reach (depending on rig).

 

5)  There's been a lot of call for this, and many possible solutions from reducing speed with too much sail, increasing heel (which does happen, but not as much), to sail damage and more.  Hopefully something is done eventually, but remember this is still alpha.

 

6)  It's been mentioned and would be realistic, but there is also a lot more momentum in these vessels than modern racing boats, and getting a partial wind shadow for 20-30 seconds wouldn't generally slow down the boat too much.  Now if you were camping directly to windward, it might have an effect.

 

Just to comment on 4. if you look at the sailing profiles under the ships here(click on any ship) you will see that most ships if not all ships sail worse running with the wind than broad reach or beam reach(depending on the rigging which is better). What is faster depends on sail plan, what you say is most definetely true for fore and aft rigged ships, not so much for square rigged ships(where broad reach is usually the fastest)

 

As mentioned above, close hauled is not always the fastest point of sail even for fore and aft vessels.  I've sailed many that prefer close reaching or a beam reach; especially with a gaff rig.

 

"If you get disoriented by a full 180 degrees without this arrow, then you have major situational awareness issues."

Yes but in real sailing you have actual wind. You can tell the direction from getting blasted In the face or the back of the head.

The indicator in NA shows where your hat just blew off to lol.

 

In lighter wind you don't get 'blasted' with wind, and when sailing large you can be left with very little apparent wind.  Tell-tales were used back then as well, such as small bits of yarn from certain shrouds, flags, etc.

 

Agreed. I only tried the cutter so far in the game

 

Well, while I appreciate newer players' input, insulting the devs by asking if anyone has any real life sailing experience while only having sailed one beginner boat so far seems rather unfair.  As for your 14 years, have they been on modern vessels (I'd assume based on some of the assumptions you've made)?  Has it been mostly racing?  Have you had any actual square rigger or other traditional craft experience?  Have you done any long stretches of cruising/ocean crossings?  I don't ask to be insulting, but because 14 years of experience is rather meaningless if it isn't fleshed out about what kind of experience you have.  14 years on various tall ships is probably quite valuable to the game; 14 years of weekend sailing during the summer racing season is nearly (though not completely) meaningless.  I know I've got over half my life (let's just say more than 14 years and leave it at that) with a broad range of experience of different vessels from racing, to tall ships (both original and replicas), to a host of other craft.  It's my profession, passion and hobby.  And I know that there are people here with much more experience than me.  It just might be good to tone back the insults a bit when you're just starting off yourself, and the devs have been working on this for years.  Heck, even if they didn't have any sailing knowledge when starting out, they could probably fit right in at any sailor's bar by now!

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Wow, in my opinion you both sound expert, true or not.  Kudos to everyone for the expert input, really.  You're all waaaaay over my head with this stuff.  Really I'm just a guy who thinks the age of sail is/was cool, I like gaming, and putting the two together makes for a whole lot of fun.  I'm sure all these points are pretty valid, but seriously if they never changed a thing from here on out, I'd still be as happy as a pig in mud with this game. ;)   Honestly if they changed half these things I don't think I would even be able to notice, again kudos to you guys for your keen insights here.

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