Hardly any heeling

[gazpodsimsociety]

I've noticed the boat hardly heels over, especially when I've found myself out in excess of 30knots. I would have expected the boat to be right over at 40degrees plus in strong winds. On a rival sim they have this set the other way and intesive heeling is present even at 16knots.

[cbaldwin256]

Hi Gazpode. I've just had a look at 'Locations/Shearwater Bay - Strong Breeze' which is at 25 knots apparent. Close hauled looks OK, although it could perhaps heel a little more. Going around to beam reach I agree the heeling seems less then expected. We may need to just modify that slightly. To me it looks like the 'lift' heeling is working but maybe the 'drag' heeling needs to be turned up.

[Lukoaldo]

the truth is, that its very easy to sail in windy conditions...

but i like the physics in this game. its nice to watch the boat going trough the waves. im wondering how its working... the game physics.. is it possible to implement this model on other boats with different parameters? can it work if you change the inputs? (dimensions, weight, sail area,... )

when you play other sailing sims, it is nice (graphics, you can sail in every ocean in the world, multiplayer...) but its nothing without good physics. after some time it gets boring.

eSail has the best feel of controling the boat. its the most importatnt thing in my opinion.

[cbaldwin256]

We are going to be working on this area more for the next main release (where we also add sail trim). When there is a lot of heeling the combination of wind spilling out of the sails and the difficult boat handling DOES make the boat perform worse as it should. The problem is there is not enough heeling (as Gazpode has spotted), especially on a beam reach, to trigger this behaviour, meaning there is no need to reef.

One issue we will have is how to not invalidate leaderboard rankings when we tweak the handling of the boat. Or should we worry about that? Any thoughts would be appreciated!

[Lukoaldo]

I remember similar situation when ive played racing game called live for speed. the devs (only three persons) released new patch with adjusted tyre physics and weight transfer while cornering or something like that. i was proud of my lap times records on some circuits and then it was gone. but it was for a good thing :)

please make eSail as good as its possible :)

[cbaldwin256]

yes we want it to be the best sailing sim!

[Axyl]

Reset the leaderboards and save the old ones on the web site or something like that?

[cbaldwin256]

My latest thought is to have the new boat handling as a 'high realism' mode: As well as the new sail trim there will be more heeling (so need to reef), and more weather helm which makes the boat harder to steer is higher winds.

The existing challenges would always have the realism OFF. Then we add new some new challenges which always have realism ON. For Live Sailing and everything else you would be able to turn on and off as you like.

Hopefully this will get around the problem (as long as we don't tweak after we have gone live!)

[gazpodsimsociety]

That sounds great! :)

[cbaldwin256]

A quick update on this: The heeling will be adjusted a little on the next release. Close hauled is currently working well but on a beam reach we are not heeling quite far enough to impact the boat's performance in high winds. We believe this is because we are only measuring the effect of wind on sails, not on the structure of the boat. When the wind is on the beam this could have a significant effect. So this is now being added in.

These changes taken together with the new trim controls will affect race/challenge times. So we will be taking Axyl's idea and archiving old leaderboards (still easily viewable) and starting again.

In a couple of weeks time we will be measuring the eSail performance against a similar real life boat (while having some much needed holiday)!

Look for the next release in October (provisionally). We may then come out of Early Access if all is looking good. (Don't worry that doesn't mean development will stop!)