itch.io

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.