Version 0.5a released


In this version:

  • The sailing model is tuned to match historical performance, at least in low to moderate winds.
  • Wind now affects the spars and hull, not just the sails.
  • Spars and sails do not break so quickly - you are now at more of a risk of being blown over.
  • There are preset sail plans, which change automatically during fast travel.
  • (Some) coastal towns are shown on the map.
  • There is a button to show wind arrows on the map.
  • There's an indicator on the compass for wind veering or backing.

Sail plans - these are rather simplistic. There are six or so preset plans. Under time acceleration, they change automatically depending just on the wind speed. If you are before the wind, the plan is the same but with nothing on the mizzenmast and with the maincourse hauled up. Be warned that the way the damage system is now, I have seen courses blown off under the automatic setting (the damage needs more tweaking).

Towns - these are meant to give a flavour of the world around 1800. I have tried to get a town every couple of hundred miles, in densely populated areas.

Files

painted.zip 76 MB
Dec 19, 2019

Get A Painted Ocean

Comments

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Awesome!

What kind of changes were made in the first bullet point?

(+1)(-1)

I fixed some things on the physics menu to make it more useful. Then I settled on the figure I wanted for coefficient of drag in water, and then tuned the coefficients of drag and lift in air to see if I could get the right performance - drag for speed before the wind, lift for speed with the wind on the beam. The second wasn't quite working, so I also made the lift-curve (which is very simple-minded) adjustable, so that maximum lift occurs at a different angle.

I reduced the heel by lowering the centre of mass. This probably makes the ship too stable, and rather than messing with the buoyancy I am moving the centre of mass a bit when you heel a lot.

I didn't write about it because I'm not quite happy with the results, but I also tuned for realistic tacking. The timing works out okay, but the drag on the backed sails was maybe too high. For now I have reduced this drag to about 70% of what it is when the sails are filled. This is justifiable, as various adjustments would be made, including lifting up the sails a bit, to reduce their efficiency when tacking. But really this should be something you can give explicit commands for, e.g. doing something with the sheets of the courses, and this raises UI and animation issues that I do not want to mess with at the moment.

For tuning tacking etc., I have added a "griping" slider to this menu, that controls how far forward of the centre of the ship the (sideways) lift force of the water acts - i.e. how much the ship is by the head. The higher this is, the more the ship will want to turn.