Sailing in Kitely

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Trouble Ahead
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Sailing in Kitely

Post by Trouble Ahead »

I want to introduce to you this ship, built in the Netherlands and replica of a 18 th century sloop: Statenjacht Utrecht
http://statenjacht.nl

Last year I visited this ship in RL, took pictures from all its details and did an attempt to make a ships model from it for virtual worlds.
Kayaker Magic was willing to help us with scripting the ship , by adapting his scripts on this type of ship, and the result is wonderful!

For those who have no idea what's sailing in the virtual is about:

- our 16 sim area Tessin is prepared for sailing , meaning there are are different spots with different wind directions and wind speed ( we can do that with special scripted buoys for that).
- The ships sails can be furled or unfurled , and there are 3 types of sails, mainsail, jib and square topsail. Every type of sail has a different mathematical system that makes the ship respond on all sails in realistic way. The sails are even chattering when they don't catch wind.
-Captains will get a hud: the hud shows the sails icons to furl or unfurl, to moor, to use cannons and a link to website with tutorials.( and many more functions) It also gives the wind direction , and also the ships flags show wind direction. (for impression: http://magic.kayaker.net/Sailing/HUD.html)
-ability to navigate ship both in hud and with arrow keys ( to make turns and make the sails turn)
-the ship has an engine too.. this sounds very silly, but the RL ship has that as well. Nice for lazy or drunk captains :) Statenjacht Utrecht was also made for promotional purposes for the RL ships organization, its captains, crews and guests. Statenjacht.nl will do a promotion on facebook for the virtual ship.

The fun part of sailing this ship is that's its realism is very close to RL sailing: you need to turn, furl or unfurl sails to catch wind, and chose the best position to make best speed. And.. the wind behaves different on different spots as well, so its a challenge to navigate!

We thought it's a very nice idea to moor the ship at Tessin's docks, give the Navigation HUD to guests and allow visitors to learn to sail the ship. As we did races with Bwind scripted ships, its the idea to organise races with Statenjacht as well. In a few weeks we will experiment with sailing battles.

For those who are interested to give it a try: here is the URL to the ships docks:

hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Tessin/503/70/24.

or just simply type Tessin in search, and use the teleporter at the landing point. All information needed is provided near the ship.

The ship will be for sale too, but before that, give it a try and experience the realism of virtual sailing!

Have fun !
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Re: Sailing in Kitely

Post by Kayaker Magic »

Everywhere you go in virtual worlds you see giant pirate ships parked in the harbors. These look like sailing ships, but they are mostly just static props. I had a vision to bring all these ships to life and I think I have succeeded! Trouble seemed surprised to learn that I had a kit for making ships sail in-world. I've had realistic sailing working since 2013, and made a kit to allow others to convert their boats into working vehicles since early 2014. Then I made "Living Sails" that work with the boat script to turn with the wind and behave in a realistic way. (Now with many sail types including jib, Bermuda, gaffs, lateen, lug, square and spinnaker). Just link as many sails as you need into a boat and my script sets them all to turning realistically with the wind.

The main script and the sails communicate with “link messages”, and the same system is used for a bunch of “instruments” like compasses, speedometers, tachometers, throttles, propellers and others. This means all you have to do is link a propeller (for example) into your build and it starts spinning in proportion to the throttle setting with no additional scripting needed. Like the instruments I have a “Magic Cannon” system that was originally designed to fire in environments where rezzing cannonballs was not allowed. This means you can have battles on your land and still leave building disabled to protect yourself from griefers.

I've combined a bunch of the instruments into a HUD that comes with the boat script kit, so I assume I'm not going to sell many on-ship speedometers any more. But I also sell an advanced HUD that has a NAV Compass which helps you sail by showing graphically how close you can sail into the wind.
The scripts are very mature and I have converted some sailing boats in half an hour! Unfortunately (for some people) my sailing scripts implement non-physical vehicles. So they don't collide with each other or docks. Fortunately my sailing scripts are non-physical, so they work on any OpenSim grid despite which physics engine is running. (I am not a big fan of any of the physics engines).

I used to have a Chandlery (a store selling parts to boat builders) in InWorldz. Because there has not been an overwhelming demand for boat building in Kitely I don't think all the Chandlery items are in the Kitely Market yet. If more people become interested (or just ask for a particular boat part) I will get them up on the Market here.

And I have a bunch of demo boats to try out on my world Panthalassa: https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Ka ... anthalassa
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Re: Sailing in Kitely

Post by Trouble Ahead »

For those who are used to the SPD scripted ships in other grids and SL.. the difference here is , you don have the parameters like sails angle , speed etc near the mast in floating text, but all info you need is shown in the hud. The hud shows wind direction and shows ships direction and speed, but u still need to figure out yourself a bit whats best sails angle to get best speed, and in what situations u need to raise different types of sails. Another difference is that your able to allow crew members on your ship to take over control over the sails, so captain and crew can decide who s sailing and who's gunning. Also very nice for passengers, who want to try sailing!
Getting in irons with this ship means, your sails wont catch wind and you need to turn your ship slowly into right position, but no " kedge" buttons in the hud.
Also a difference is, in battle the SPD scripted ships only take damage when hitting the hull, but this ship will take damage when hitting hull and sails. This means the target is bigger than in the traditional SPD ships battles.. but on the other hand , the canons ranges are also very different ( longer range ), plus you don't just click the cannons up, down , left or right but many positions are possible. In combination with the changing wind at different area's , gunning might be challenging , but we need to find that out the coming weeks!
When the ship is taking damage, it slowly lowers in sea until it finally set fire and sinks to the bottom. When the ship is not damaged that bad, it can repair at docks ( if I understood right) .
Of course , there is not the disadvantage of ramming ships during battle , and .. if there are any krakens around, they will be harmless..
Oh ... and SL captains will notice as well, no need to attach the sails to avatar. A big plus .. no sim crossings and no lag.
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Re: Sailing in Kitely

Post by Kayaker Magic »

When your sails are in the "no go zone" there are two ways to get out of it in my sailing script: turn until the sails catch the wind again or tighten the sails down more. Of course no matter how tight the sheet is on the sail, it will never sail too close to up wind. That is "in irons". I have an advanced NAV HUD that displays the "no go zone" as a pair of bars on the compass. You can see the bars get closer or farther apart as you trim the sails, and you can see the bars outside (sails pulling) or inside (sails flapping and not pulling) the bow of the boat. You trim the sails until the bow is just about to cross over the line. Then your boat speeds up, the apparent wind angle changes, and the bow crosses the line anyway! You have to keep your eyes on the sails and constantly trim them. Contact me for free sailing lessons and you can try out one of these NAV HUD compasses.

RE: taking damage on the sails. Normally I recommend that EVERY PRIM ON THE BOAT must be set to Physics type:NONE except the bare minimum hull and deck. This makes your boat much lower lag on the SIM. If the sails are taking damage then either: 1) you needed to make them type:NONE anyway, or 2) I think there is a bug in OpenSim 0.8.2 that makes some weapons call work with phantom objects. You can force the cannons to use physical cannonballs to get around this problem.

Yeah, you can't ram two non-physical boats into each other. HOWEVER, I have a version of Modee Parlee's Kraken that uses my Magic Bullet system, so it can attack boats! Plus I made it smart enough to swim around autonomously and attack any boats that wander by. We should have a Kraken battle!

As for the sails that you had to wear, that was a really old trick used on SL to get around some old limits on prims on physical vehicles. There are better ways around that now and I'm pretty sure that nobody uses those wearable sails any more. Not is SL nor in OpenSim.
The NAV HUD on the Catamaran
The NAV HUD on the Catamaran
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Re: Sailing in Kitely

Post by Trouble Ahead »

"I'm pretty sure that nobody uses those wearable sails any more"...... in the SL battles in the pirate estates , I think almost all are using those!
Im joining them a couple of times in the week :)

Good idea, lets do a kraken battle when we are ready for that ! :)
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Re: Sailing in Kitely

Post by Trouble Ahead »

Ahoy sailors! We had a fun battle on Tessin tonight and we all got some more experience in gunning and sinking ships. What is it all about? Let me explain a little.

Every visitor gets his or own ship, and the navigation is working with a HUD. Once all are sailing, the battle commander calls out in the group chat when the battle is on , and every captain uses his or her cannons to make the other ships sink. The last standing is the winner. Its all more about fun and less about winning and competition, although its not bad for your reputation when you win some battles :)

After more than a year of hard work we achieved to built sims who are very good for sailing and we have wonderfully scripted ships to play with. Now its time to get it rolling!

After summer holidays we will start with racers and battles every other week. People interested to join the fun and want to learn to sail, please Im Kayaker Magic or Trouble Ahead. More information is also on this website https://tessinkitely.wordpress.com

At the Tessin docks you will find 3 types of ships, in rezzers.. so you can test different ships ( yacht , frigate/ clipper and tall ship ).

I wish you all wonderful summer holidays and I hope to see you all in September in our new events.
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