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sail movement

Hylie Pistof

Hylie Pistof

Curmudgeon
QA Tester
Storm Modder
Pirate Legend
In the work I've been doing on the very accurate ships coming into POTC is has become evident that the yards are rotating far too much and are fouling the rigging. Does anyone have any idea where the yard travel parameters are set? I would like to play with those settings.
 
Unless they are in the game engine, I'd expect them to be in RESOURCE\INI somewhere, most likely rigging.ini .
 
Ayup! There it is in rigging.ini. :onya

The MAXTURNANGL = 0.85 I will presume that to be 85 degrees. What is the 2nd number? ( ; 0.6 )

Anyway, now to get meself a good historically correct ship and adjust it to where the yards do not foul the rigging. That might be 20 degrees or less.
 
Usually they put angles in as radians, so it could be that as well.
 
Hmmm. Well, 0.85 radians is maybe 49 degrees. According to this screenie the yards can swing maybe 45 degrees to each side. So I will stick to degrees for now. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/76702168/POTC screenies/new lateen-3.jpg


What is really needed is a way to adjust each sail type individually. I have cut the angle down to 0.45 arbitrarily and it has really helped Le Dilligente Tartane. I suppose the other lateen rigged ships are better also. But gaffs should swing out more and I still don't know what square sails should do.
 
For now I'm thinking 0.45 is a good all around compromise. I still have not acquired a good accurate ship yet. Will probably have to settle for a class 6 light pinnace or light fluyt.
But! This screenie shows a Heavy East Indiaman with the sails just on the verge of luffing. It shows the main yards swinging too much, the top yards not swinging enough, and the lateen is just about right, IMO.
The lateen no longer fouls the rigging! Uh oh...DropBox is acting up.
sails at .45.jpg
 
So... recommend to change the line in rigging.ini to:
Code: 
MAXTURNANGL        = 0.45 ; 0.6
?
 
For now. I believe that the 0.6 is the original setting. GOF is set to that value.

I finally got the Neptunus and will be looking at it closely. At first glance the main yards swing a bit too much and the spanker does not swing enough. :rolleyes:
 
0.6 is the value commented out in the PotC file, so it looks like indeed that was the original.
 
Yards will always end up fouling the shrouds. Basically what we do on square riggers is keep pulling on the braces and pushing the shrouds as far out of the way as they can go. (That's why you'll notice chafing damage on the shrouds of most vessels at the level of the yards)

The exact angle varies depending on the vessel. Most loose-rigged vessels with squares'ls, like sloops and schooners, could achieve extreme angles of up to around 75 degrees. (Just search for images of Pride of Baltimore II. That's probably the best example.) I've also seen period engravings of some large frigates tacked at similar angles through the use of catharpins, which are basically lines that pull the shrouds inboard where they would meet the yards.

I would say that an average angle for square riggers would be something close to fifty five-ish degrees. I wouldn't worry about the fouling too much, as that invariably happens on real vessels as well.
 
Well, that is good news and bad news. All we have to do is set the yards way out in front of the masts and let them swing. The bad news is that spankers and lateens swing at the same amount. That still isn't too bad for spankers, but lateens do not want to swing
anywhere near that far.
This is food for thought for the future when we get a new engine working. I guess for now we should just leave it alone, but I still want to reduce it to make spankers and especially lateens look better.
 
For the record, I think this kind of movement could easily be controlled for each individual ship in a new game engine.
The limits of rotation of each yard could even be set with Maya's animation controls, so little or no tampering would be needed within the game engine itself.
The only complications would arise when getting the shrouds to move when the yards hit them, I guess.
 
Hylie Pistof said:
Well, that is good news and bad news. All we have to do is set the yards way out in front of the masts and let them swing. The bad news is that spankers and lateens swing at the same amount. That still isn't too bad for spankers, but lateens do not want to swing
anywhere near that far.
This is food for thought for the future when we get a new engine working. I guess for now we should just leave it alone, but I still want to reduce it to make spankers and especially lateens look better.
Click to expand...

It should be noted that spankers, and especially lateens, can be set really, really far out. Here's a common xebec maneuver for running downwind:

Edit: couldn't find the image I was looking for. The lateen gaff can basically be set at an angle of ninety degrees.
 
Yes. If I remember right they drop the sail, pull the yard around, and then pull the sail up outside of the rigging. We do not have that option and the whole thing ends up in the middle of the rigging.
 
I took these on Pilgrim's transit from the San Pedro shipyards last Wednesday. The sails haven't been set, just braced around to reduce wind resistance. They therefore have not been hauled up on their halyards, and are closer to the wider bases of the shrouds, preventing them from being braced around as far as they normally could be. They still illustrate my point about the fouling, though.
DSCN2884.jpg

DSCN2883.jpg

Edit: What are the lateen gaffs fouling on? They shouldn't be doing that at such a small angle.
 
Small angle? The lateens can swing around until they are perpendicular to the hull. They foul everything back there.
 
That is why I wanted to reduce the amount of swing to the yards. They all swing the same amount.
 
I just got to playing PotC, and the new changes didn't look realistic to me at all. After trying a few angle measures, the original looked the most accurate. The fouling is actually caused by flaws in our models- the yards in all of our models are up directly against the mast. The fouling I saw on trapezoidals was insignificant at worst, and I haven't taken a look at the lateen sails yet.
 
Post Captain said:
The fouling is actually caused by flaws in our models- the yards in all of our models are up directly against the mast.
Click to expand...
I guess we'd better keelhaul the modellers or fix this for all Hearts of Oak models. I don't expect the shrouds to be dynamic, so if we're sticking to static models for those, the fouling needs to be addressed.
 
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