maturin

Not to mention, all those interior walls disappear during combat. Personally, I'd rather see a bit more detail on the exteriors: boats in the waist, course sheets and a full set of braces. I realize that a furnished captain's cabin has more value to the 95% of players who don't know anything about rigging, though.

Очень советую найти все видео Ryan21 на английском форуме. Просто потрсяющие.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Are you guys dead-set on a global map? Because it seems like a waste of resources to model every little island in the East Indies, where no one will often go. (Indiamen and that's it.) Why not cut the world into slices and assign dates to each separate server region? You could have a North Atlantic and Mediterranean server/gameworld for main econ and RvR, with a set date of 1790 or so. And restrict the vessels appropriately, to a 50-year range. And then a separate 1600s Madagascar piracy server restricted to that region. And a British Channel/North Sea 1600s server for the pre-line of battle Anglo-Dutch Wars and more heavy piracy with the Dutch Sea Beggars. This would let the pirates have some real importance, as opposed to being bullied by battlefleets and superior frigates in the Napoleonic era. By the way, do you have many vessels from 1700-1750?

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.

Well, your HMS Surprise is already a lovely little French design, in point of fact.

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?

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.

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.