Hacker News Reader

Comment by torlok | Hacker News Reader

There's a vague correlation between wind direction and sailing speed, but there's nothing real here. The mechanics of sailing upwind, downwind, or the cost of tacking are interesting mechanics that aren't explored here whatsoever. The dead angle on a ship with a square rig should be massive. This ship goes upwind like it has a motor.

View on HN

Yeah it's an arcade game. You can steer the ship as fast as you can turn a car too. Not real at all

The use of a ship's wheel to steer is also a little much. The manipulation of the sails had far more impact. The wheel was for fine tuning. Comming about took far more planning than simply spinning the wheel around. A realistic limitation would see a several second delay between large direction changes. And most ships during the golden age of piracy would not have had wheels, not until the 1700s.

Ugh, that's extremely disappointing. That's exactly the sort of thing I expected from a game touting 'real wind physics'.

Glad I know not to waste any time on it now, expecting it to be something it isn't.

It's still quite fun. The games industry figured out long ago that realism and fun are often diametrically opposed.

Decades ago, Sid Meier's Pirates had a more realistic sailing model, which made you feel the difference between triangular and square sails, in a game where the player had a lot of other challenges to master. And Meier is a designer who always put fun and playability above realism.

If someone says they will bring me steak, but it tastes like ice cream, I can still be annoyed, even if I like ice cream.

As a rule, combat in game does not interest me.

Wow you should really demand your money back!

I’m confused, is this HN or enforced groupthink?

ITT: complaining about free passion projects is the only way to avoid groupthink

He’s been harassing and insulting me in multiple threads for trying to learn how I can push the realism on my wind physics!

He has heart in the right place but questionable methods

I guess nowadays anyone can support their skills with AI and make a game in weeks vs months so he should copy paste ur idea with his mechanics and see which one gets more popular. See who will win.

HN has always been notorious for groupthink.

This thread is firewood splitting sim 2.0.

It's really not fun to spend an hour going zig zag against the wind... That's why there is no sailing simulator I guess.

There are plenty of sailing simulators (e.g. Windward), just none featuring large square riggers. In any case, my beef is more with the misleading headline.

If a game advertised "real weapons handling", and it turned out to have infinite ammo with no reloads or shell drop, wouldn't you feel a bit lead on?

Nadeo, bring back Virtual Skipper

Oh yea, I remember that one!

There is a few, from web browser games that still simulate the physics [1] to serious ones that include ropes, navigation and crew management [2].

[1]: https://www.sailrhythm.com/

[2]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/794860/eSail_Sailing_Simu...

It's not fun to spend an hour going zig zag against the wind? What about an hour doing it with a boat full of precious materials that can't go through the portal while you're being chased by some ungodly horror from beneath the waves?

Valheim was a blast.

That might be too realistic that it’s not fun. Maybe the game needs a simulation mode

Thanks for checking out the game! The correlation isn’t that vague it’s actually explicitly defined here: https://tinywind.io/wiki/sailing#point-of-sail

Always trying to find a balance of realism vs arcade feel on the gameplay. Let me know how you would handle sailing upwind/downwind instead, always love more suggestions!

E.g. on this link you can see a picture of how the yards on a square rigger would be set for each wind direction.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/patrickobrianappreciationsoc...

At no point should you (nor would it be physically possible to) set the yards in the direction of the ship. At most during sailing they would be turned maybe 45 degrees which would correspond to "close hauled" at which point you may be able to reach about 60 degrees from the wind direction.

Thus, a simple linear function that would show the optimal angle of the yards as a function of the wind direction (0 = wind straight ahead, 180 = wind straight from behind) could be something like f(x) = -3/8 x + 67.5.

And as a slight visual cue, please show the mast when it would be visible before the sails as well. I found that I was often confused whether I had the yards sheeted all the way one way or the other way.

Also I think it would be clearer to show the yard position indicator as 0 degrees when the yards are squared, that is perpendicular to the ship. Then sheeted to the maximum would be 45 degrees either way from 0.

Thank you so much, that function is so simple! I’m going to be updating the sailing realism in a future patch and will be sure to update the sail turning constraints.

I do this to a certain extent for galleons on the Spanish map but should update the rest too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com