Augustus Devlog Physics or Making Stuff Up
In real life sailing is a funny thing, its about knowledge of how things on the boat work and how to use them (physics) and a whole lot of luck (making stuff up). It seems the same can be said for sailing in a video game as Augustus points out in his latest Pirates of The Burning Sea Devlog where he touches on he recent work on the sailing engine in the game.
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06/17/2004
Findar
Much of my life in the last Milestone was spent first speccing the new sailing model, then testing it, and finally tuning ships with it.
As it turns out, the third time’s the charm. We started out with a sailing model that – while I thought it was incredibly simple – was still more complex than most pirate/naval games out there. But it proved to be too hard to tune properly, so we abandoned it. Then we prototyped a force-based sailing model that was rooted deeply in the arcane art of physics. After much experimentation and testing with this model, we decided that even this physics-based model was not giving us the results we wanted. As so often happens in programming, and especially game programming, we weren’t able to take enough factors into consideration with our physics model, so we weren’t getting results that matched our expectations. The problem was that we had a small set of controls that then cascaded into physics-based behaviors, and adjusting those controls to get the specific performance characteristics we wanted was a nightmare.
In the end, we arrived at a happy marriage of Physics and good old-fashioned Making Stuff Up. Fortunately, we have a good idea of what we want the results to look like, so our Making Stuff Up ends up resulting in a more accurate feeling sailing model than our pure physics model was giving us. With this third system, we can specify our desired results and then the code works out the required physics that will end up with those results.
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