• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


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In game promo video

I see you managed to get animated flags. Very nice! I imagine you'll be trying the same for the sails as well, right? Looks a bit static at the moment.

How historically accurate are those ship models? They look very plump to me, but I'm not exactly an expert.

In any case, I'll be interested to see what you can do with this! :cheers
 
Thanks for your support :)

Animation on flags and sails is done in layers, so flags have just three - direction of the wind, strength of the wind and a "wave". Sails aren't nearly done yet as you noticed. When complete sails will be animated for wind direction, strength, luff, gusting and blended uing some noise animation to mae it a little more irregular. The idea being that just as in a real sailing caft you can tell how efficiently any one sail is operating just by looking at it, that same data is then passed to the AI contolled crew to trim the sails (based on their skill of course).

The two vessels shown are fairly accurate, but they are based on an English "Hoy", a small (about 40') coastal vessel, its a merchant hull and designed to get as much cargo into a small as possible, around 100 tons . I say "fairly" accurate, they aren't very detailed and are more for us to test our sailing model and rigging set up than be a finished game asset, but they are pretty much the simplest hull design available to a player.

What isnt very accurate on them is the deckplan, and I suppose that is mostly what can be seen in the video, the deckplan on them is a dutch barge, again as its the simplest deck plan we have so good for testing, in reality they would more likely have a slightly raised forecastle and quarter deck with a curved gunwale. Which would give a much smoother line to the vessel. In the west indies masts were ususally raked back as well.

So...long story short, they are "accurate", but are a very simple design whos only real beneift is cost, it seems unlikely that anything like them would have been used for more than short local trading runs or longline fishing.
 
When complete sails will be animated for wind direction, strength, luff, gusting and blended uing some noise animation to mae it a little more irregular. The idea being that just as in a real sailing caft you can tell how efficiently any one sail is operating just by looking at it, that same data is then passed to the AI contolled crew to trim the sails (based on their skill of course).
That DOES sound very cool! I reckon some of our other members here would be interested to see that work as well. :yes

I say "fairly" accurate, they aren't very detailed and are more for us to test our sailing model and rigging set up than be a finished game asset, but they are pretty much the simplest hull design available to a player.
Fair enough. Detailed models can be done later.
Shame though that many people will probably see it as being "close to final quality", which obviously isn't the case.
Just like when we post "Concept Renders" from Maya and people think they are in-game screenshots.
Software development seems to be difficult for people to understand. :facepalm
 
yeah, sadly that is the case :p

We are woking this week to create a demo of the modular ship design system, that will have most of the hull, deck and rigging set ups for single masted craft. We'll also try to demonstrate the way that some of the more common tasks on board are handled by the AI, so you can see what we mean when we say that the AI crew will actually sail the ship.

We can't realistically produce animated character models in time for that though, so I'm afraid the crew will be represented simply by their colliders.
 
Even spheres would probably get the point across to begin with. Rome wasn't built in a day either. :cheeky

Does sound good! :onya
 
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