itch.io

Hello! The shift key works for me - I hold it down while clicking on the game icon, and it gives me the resolution menu. I don't know what to suggest; did it work on earlier versions?

The saving is very basic. There is no option to save, it just saves your position when you quit the game. Next time you start, there should be a bookmark-thing on the menu screen that you can click on to start from that position and time.

Did you get my email about this?

Well, the game doesn't model supersonic effects (mainly drastically increased drag). About the 3d models, I don't exactly remember. They are the .obj files in the meshes directory; the .mtl files are probably the colours. I made them in wing3d and exported them as obj; I have a feeling the game uses the names of the meshes in each file to know what is the main fuselage, what is an aileron, etc.

Thanks for asking, but no plans.

Thanks! Saving the position is something I'm thinking about. 

Thanks! I should get the name right; what about "wind right aft"? I imagine "before the wind" is too broad.

Thank! No, I think it's done.

Since you can interact with the main menu, the engine (such as it is) is running okay. I have seen behaviour like this when I build the game and forget to set up the data directory correctly. It should come correctly out of the zip file, but who knows.

- do you have the correct directory structure - in the root directory "painted.exe" and a subdirectory painted_Data; this contains a subdirectory Data with some stuff about ships and weather in it?

- when you click on one of the menu items and nothing happens, does the game hang, or can you still interact with the menu?

- what is in "output_log.txt" in painted_Data?

Thanks very much for the suggestions.

About the mainmast stay sail, I got it into my head, I'm not sure from where, that it was not usually used. Do you know when it would be used?

Removing topgallant masts is something I would like to add to the game, along with studdingsails. The problem with both of them is that there is code at the moment for breaking things off the ship, but not really for sticking things on. Hopefully I will get to it someday.

Where can I read about lowering the yards? Was it something that was done to reduce sail quickly, say if there is a sudden change in the wind?

I thought a lot about how to handle anchoring, and was at one point planning to put it in the last build. Maybe next time.

Sadly too much stuff is hard-coded now to want to mess with different rigs.

Thanks, that's very kind of you.

Thanks for the interest. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea. Let me say that it's using Unity 4, which is pretty long in the tooth. The code was never very well-structured, and once I realized it wasn't going to be a complete game I stopped being careful where I put things. So it's a real mess now. 

Thanks. The physics ought to be taking care of that, as the forces should be applied at the centres of the sails. I will check if something has got messed up there.

Do you mean that it's not heeling, or that it's heeling but it's not having the effect you expect?

Belated thanks for the feedback. I looked at the strength of the fore-and-aft sails, and made them weaker in the new version. If I left too many headsails out when the wind increases, it was to balance the sail plan.

I'm glad to hear it holds up. If there's anything about the handling or behaviour that stands out as bad, I'd be happy to try to fix it.

It should start the "world" scenario at a random date (with some checking for a reasonable wind), and then you can change the time and date with some of the controls at the bottom right.

Yes, I've been following it. It's looking good.

This is running from it's own directory, right, not from the unzip program?

I'm sorry, I don't know what to suggest. It looks like it's some problem with OpenGL, but it may not be -- it's a long time since I followed how things like that work. Conceivably updating graphics drivers might help, but really I don't know.

I would be interested to know what graphics card and what driver for it you have.

Do you mean through the itch app? 

- Does it work if you download the zip file, unpack it and run it from the exe file? If it doesn't work, what is in the log.txt file?

- What OS are you running it on, and what sort of hardware?

Thanks.

- What exactly is happening?

- Have you played it successfully before, and do you know what has changed since then?

- Are you playing it through the itch app?

Thanks.

I sent you an email. I think getting the actual game code to compile is going to by a struggle, as it's old code in D and I expect the D ecosystem has changed since then. 

But the missions, and I think the aircraft, are set up in plain text files (plus some 3d files for the aircraft models) and should be fairly self-explanatory. You can test scripting commands by opening the console and just typing them. There's some discussion of it further down this comments page, from six months ago.

What are you running it on, and what exactly is the problem? And what happens when you toggle the post-processing off and then on? e.g. v to turn off, v to turn on again?

Thanks, that's neat!

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoy it. 

I'm afraid the game is never going to be much more finished than it is now. I am doing some work on it at the moment, mostly to make sure the sailing model works well, but I don't plan to add any big features or systems. The "cutter " files are from way back; unfortunately the code and the UI are specialized towards a full-rigged ship now. 

I'm not sure what you mean by driving the stern away from the wind. Surely when you start off in eye of the wind, then whichever way the stern turns, port or starboard, it's into the wind?

This is the behaviour I see now. If I start off in the eye of the wind, and set just the mizzen topsail and topgallant, braced up on the port side, then as expected this pushes the stern over to port (so the head of the ship turns to starboard). However if, after the ship has gathered some sternway, I then brace the mizzen sails up on the starboard side, the stern continues going slowly to port, rather than coming around the other way.

What's happening in this second part is that there are two forces fighting against each other. The hull going backwards has some angle of attack on it, so the lift force is generating torque making it want the stern want to turn even further to port; while the sail is trying to push it the other way. I think the hydrodynamic torque is way too strong now, because the lift force is acting too far aft. Essentially it's the same issue as the "griping" control, but when going backwards. Effectively the backwards griping is set at 20. A quick test shows the sails having more effect if I set this to 10, but I'm not sure what the correct behaviour is. 

Thanks for looking at this. How do you find tacking, if you reduce griping to 3? Does it become much harder?

That's weird, for me this build doesn't seem to change anything about AA. If you hold down shift while double clicking on the game icon to run it, Unity opens a graphics quality menu. This is supposed to default to "fantastic" but maybe I did something to mess this up. Anyway, you can change it and I believe Unity remembers the change.

I have replaced the uploaded build with a new one, still 5b but marked "February 2022" which I hope has the right default.

The double arrow is deliberate. It's one arrow for light winds, two for medium, three for strong. Is it a problem now to see where the wind is coming from?

This is what I see tacking, in the test build in the world scenario (17kt wind):

I start with the wind 1pt free, going at 7kts. I order the helm hard over, and ease the headsails and take in [edit: haul in] the spanker once I am clearly turning. I am pointing at the wind after 60s, and still going at 1 or 2 knots.

If I start 1/2 a point closer to the wind, going at 5kts, then this takes 120s, and for the last minute I am nearly motionless or moving backwards, being pushed around just by the foresails.

Maybe this is as it should be - to tack snappily, you need to build up some speed. I haven't tried it in a lighter wind.

I also observe the following. Start the world scenario, set the waves to 0 and bring the wind right on the beam, with physics time acceleration on high. You will reach 9.7kts. Take in all sail abaft the mainmast, and you slow down to 9.3kts.

So far so good. But now do the same thing, starting one point closer to the wind. You will reach 7.1kts. Take in all sail abaft the mainmast, and you speed up to 7.3kts.

What is happening is that with the sails set in the second case you need one spoke of weather helm to balance them, and the drag caused by the rudder slows you down. With the sails taken in, you have a tiny bit of lee helm, and essentially no drag from the rudder. This is deliberate behaviour, sort of, because I wanted drag on the rudder to be a consideration in your sail plan. Possibly it is too strong right now - but I'm not sure how to tell. Reducing drag from the rudder would also make tacking a little bit easier.

Edit: Substantially decreasing the drag from the rudder doesn't change this, so my explanation above is wrong. It may be something to do with the extra leeway, with more sails set, causing more drag; but that doesn't work by itself, because removing sails forward would also decrease the leeway. It should be the torque from the sails that is the problem.

Thanks! It's meant to be a small, one-person game (and it's 10 years old). With an HD version, where you have to spell things out rather than just suggest them, I think it would be a lot of work to get the same kind of feeling.

Those times don't sound unrealistic, given the numbers here Historical data  . I'm also seeing 4-5 minutes to tack with that wind, losing a couple of ship-lengths. Of course, for a game it makes sense to be towards the snappier side of realistic. 

Things to try would be reducing wind drag and increasing water lift coeff, both say by 0.1, and maybe increasing griping to 7.

(I also notice that the helm is incredibly slow when ordered to simply turn - I should set it back to the standard speed.)

To reduce speed loss, you can limit one or another kind of drag.

Good tests are to get the right speed first right before the wind, and then with the wind on the beam. Before the wind, you are only dealing with being pushed by aerodynamic drag and slowed down by hydrodynamic skin drag, so it's only two things to balance with each other. With the wind on the beam, you are only being pushed by aerodynamic lift, but now you will be seeing some form drag.  (The "form drag" should come in to play when you have some angle of attack with the water.)

The water lift coefficient controls how big a side force you get from an angle of attack with the water, and the "griping" slider controls how far forward is the point where this lift acts on the hull.

I looked in Harland, and he discusses this a bit, but doesn't treat it as a standard part of tacking. So if I did put it in it would be its own command, perhaps "haul spanker to windward" (?)

I wrote something about it here: Sailing test version - A Painted Ocean by Neil Thapen (itch.io)

I have been looking at this. If you want to mess with it, I have uploaded a file painted_TEST_VERSION which has two extra physics sliders. I would be very happy to hear what you find is most realistic.

One is a multiplier for the wind force on the masts and rigging etc. I have found a couple of (not great) sources describing ships making 11 knots under bare poles in a hurricane. The 0.5a build would already do this. The default in the test build is to increase this drag by a factor of 1.5;  you could partially justify this by saying that the 11 knots is presumably with no topgallant masts (or topmasts). Like this, the force on the bare poles is about equivalent to half the force on maintopsail.

The other is a multiplier for the lift force on all the fore-and-aft sails. It doesn't affect the drag. I have set this to 0.6.

These two seem to make it much more difficult to make any progress to windward under only fore and aft sails, while keeping the staysails still a little bit useful, and not changing the usual performance too much. But I haven't tested tacking etc. properly, and it's possible that there are still some of the effects I noticed while tweaking it, that when sailing with the wind on the beam you can go faster by taking in most sails behind the mainmast. Maybe this is realistic, or maybe it needs some tweaking of the hydrodynamics.

I looked at this and you're quite right. In a fresh breeze, under all fore-and-aft sails, I can do 3 and a bit knots four points from the wind, which seems way too good. I will see if I can make some time to mess with it over the holiday. I can try some combination of making the fore-and-aft sails less efficient (essentially making them smaller) and increasing the drag on the masts and rigging.

It was a long time ago, but I believe most of the tweaks to aerodynamics are things that are exposed. In the physics menu on the left, wind lift coeff. and drag coeff. should have straight linear effects on the lift and drag forces. Lift is zero at angle 0 (the wind is parallel to the yard), reaches a maximum at some angle (currently 30 degrees), and falls to 0 when it is perpendicular to the yard. I think it's modelled just as a sin curve, except you can use the max lift angle slider to shift where the peak is.  Lastly "griping" on the right isn't aerodynamics, but controls how far forward the lift force on the hull acts. If you put it higher, the ship gets less stable around the yaw axis, meaning that tacking is easier, but on the other hand balancing the sails is more important; and vice versa.

Edit - I'm pretty sure the aerodynamic sliders don't do anything to the drag on the masts etc.

Script commands look like e.g.:
spawn meteor
position (-4020 4000 40)
direction (1 0 0)
speed 125
power 1.0
rename "Meteor Red 2"
pilot_name McKenzie
handle red2
make_wingman_to red1

That's creating it; positioning it etc. ... the last two lines are giving it a name red2 to use in later commands, and then making it a wingman to red1 (assuming we an earlier plane the name red1) . There is also something about factions I don't remember - you'll have to look at the other files in the scripts directory.

That's not exactly a bug. There are commands to reposition planes after spawning them. Look at the files in the scripts directory for what these look like. 

You can also put your own scripts there, and run them by typing "run <script name>" in the command console. Try "run test".

There are no plans for updates - it's a ten year old game now.

It's not using any game engine, like Unity, but just some fairly basic graphics, sound and physics libraries. There isn't enough going on in the world to need more. 

I mean open the file "settings.txt" in notepad or similar. 
There are some lines
#resolution 640 400 fullscreen
resolution 640 480 fullscreen
#resolution 800 500 fullscreen
#resolution 800 600 fullscreen
#resolution 1680 1050 fullscreen
#resolution 640 400 windowed
change this to
#resolution 640 400 fullscreen 
#resolution 640 480 fullscreen 
#resolution 800 500 fullscreen 
resolution 800 600 fullscreen 
#resolution 1680 1050 fullscreen 
#resolution 640 400 windowed
and save it. See if it works any better. What I hope will happen 
is that your monitor will recognize this as a valid fullscreen resolution
and will rescale it to fill the whole screen (the game is supposed to be 
a bit pixelated). If it doesn't, there may be some monitor setting you
can change in windows. Otherwise just try your monitor's native 
resolution (so you will lose the pixelation). You don't really need to 
mess with the commenting and uncommenting; you can just delete "800 600" 
(or whichever line is uncommented) and write whatever numbers you want.

Is it running full screen, or in a window? And what OS are you running it on?

In any case, the problem may be that the default resolution, 640x480, does not work well on a modern system. To change it you have to edit the file settings.txt. Comment out (with a #) the "resolution 640x480 fullscreen line" and uncomment, say, the 800x600 one.