Ideas for future additions
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@TinyBeard Currently the courses are being worked on. I don’t know if boat setups are planned or not. I haven’t heard anything about the top 2.
What boats have you designed?
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@CanYouFoush The past 2 years in Seattle the U-21 (Albert Lee) had my design on it. I can't say yet what the 2 boats are this year because it hasn't been officially announced yet.
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Sounds like a good idea, along the lines of car racing sims that have the racing line that you can toggle. The only hard part is that the lane sizes aren't fixed, most of the rules define lanes based on the width of the boat. I may try and implement this when I start working on the course map overlay.
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There likely won't ever be a way to paint the boats in game. Photoshop and Gimp are much better tools than anything that I could ever come up with. I was a little hesitant making it so people could add paint schemes this early on, since I am planning on eventually creating a new boat model for the Unlimiteds.
Anyway, there are Photoshop templates for painting the current boats, if you're a graphic designer it shouldn't be too difficult, its just a matter of exporting them to the correct DDS image format.
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More race courses are definitely planned.
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Yes, I would like to make it so the boats can be setup differently. I'd think of the current boats as just a place holder right now, I have some ideas for trying to make the physics more realistic as well as adding the ability to setup different parts of the boats.
Unfortunately, I'm just one guy working on this in my spare time.
Feel free to leave any ideas/suggestions you may have.
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@Scott-Przybylski One suggestion I'd make is about how the boat handles. I think the back end slides out way too much in the corner. I was racing with @DJ-Miller and he left me just enough room. I should have fit in the lane but the back swung out and hit the roostertail, and I hooked.
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@Scott-Przybylski Yeah I totally understand that it's just you working on this so I know that no matter how good of ideas get posted on here it's definitely going to take some time to implement. You've done an awesome job so far and I'm excited to see how this game evolves.
I can see how the lane thing can vary but to at least have some straight lines down the straights would help a lot. I find myself thinking that I'm running parallel to the buoys only to find out that by the time I get to the next turn I've drifted in or out 2 lanes.
I thought of a simplified version of boat setups that may be easier to do. You could make 3 presets; one that's conservative where the boat is hard to fly so it's less likely to flip but it's relatively slow. Another would be moderate where it's a little easier to fly the boat so it's a little easier to flip but you can go a little faster. And the third would be aggressive where it's really easy to fly the boat and therefor easy to flip as well but you can go a lot faster.
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A couple of thoughts on improving the boat handling (just shooting ideas out since I don't have a full understanding of how the boats interact with the water in the program). Either increasing the hydrodynamic lift or implementing some sort of non-trip surface in the boat model could help to solve the rolling issue. The increase in hydrodynamic lift might also help to reduce the likelihood of a boat stuffing.
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Since we are shooting ideas. A new home screen and maybe a screen inside the server. I was thinking a pits for the home screen. You on the trailer and then have a crane next to you. And for the sever you have a overview of the pits and everyone or just you is showing with cranes moving here and there. Just gives it a little something special.
Also, the roughness of the track. I feel like it should get rougher over time. By the end of the race it should be a lot harder to keep on the water (something to play around with).
Another, when we can change setups on the boats it will show. Iracing you can change a whole bunch to your car but it looks the exact same as everyone elses.
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One more, the rooster tail is too long at the end. Maybe having it the same in the turns for the right side but whoever is on your inside shouldn't have rooster tail in their face (unless cut off). The rooster tail also should have less physics at the end (causes people to roll or stuff it when not even close to it).
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All of these are great ideas, but one thing I really struggle with is the way it runs on pc. Frame rate is horrific, and the game lags out a lot, and freezes. So some graphics options that can improve frame rate and such would be fantastic. I love this sim, but I don’t have the kind of money to spend on a new computer that can run it smoothly.
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@Harley-Gray Maybe he could make two games. A advanced one with all the high quality things and then one that is a bit less but brings up frame rate for the people with slower pc's
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@Harley-Gray have you tried running the game at a lower resolution? I had to run it a 640x480 or something close to that on my laptop.
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@Harley-Gray What Ryan said, I've found that running the game fullscreen at half or lower resolution helps a lot. The shaders for the water are very GPU intensive. I will add a graphics settings menu eventually to allow you to tweak the graphics settings more.
@Cei I've always thought it would be cool to have the cranes lowering the boats into the water and other atmosphere details. Roughness of the water over time should be doable, it should probably take into account how many boats are on the water and for how long. I plan on exposing options for the server admin to adjust the water conditions.
@Ryan-Yates Yeah, the old algorithm I was using was trying to simulate planing and slamming forces better, unfortunately it seemed to stuff it in the turns even more. I also think that the center section shouldn't be simulated like a wing, I found some research papers on it (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266593645_Dynamics_and_Stability_of_Boats_With_Aerodynamic_Support) The hard part is figuring out how to actually use the equations.
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@Scott-Przybylski Most of the aerodynamic lift is provided by the air trapped under the hull. Not sure how it relates to the equations in that paper (although I may try messing with them a little), but here's a simple equation used to find the stable ride height of an outboard hydro. Note that outboards usually have the transom on the water, so this equation doesnt account for air leaving the rear of the air trap.
The basic takeaway, though, is that the air leaving the air trap via the sides and rear should equal the amount entering from the front. With inboards prop lift is a larger part of the equation, and actally works to keep the bow from rising.
I'll see if I can make sense of those equations, but until then hopefully this is helpful.
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Thanks @Ryan-Yates that is helpful. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how I'd use that in the physics calculations. What I envision for figuring out the lift generated by the hydroplane tunnel/air trap would be to setup a grid of points at an angle. I can then sample the water at the center of each square to find the height above the water. From there I'm not sure what the equation is to figure out the lift force exerted by the air pressure. I'm thinking it may be similar to ground effects.
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- Here’s a couple of courses I would like to see, Barrie, Ontario - it was a cool tri-oval, new challenge to drive. Milwaukee would be another cool one with the layout of the harbour. Would like to see Miami Marine Stadium and Pearl Harbour. Races that add some favour.
- Something else that would add some flavour. Is there going to be any boat design additions like the U3 piston boat or the 2 wing boats? Or how about being able to change your cowl design like on the U17 Red Dot, or say the U66 Sutphen Spirit, or maybe like the 1982 Pay N Pak, Leland’s Project X also comes to mind. In fact saw Mark Evan’s driving the Pico in testing at Detroit where they tested a cowl that was never run anywhere else to my knowledge, the intake was at the back of the cowl.
- Maybe go to a 8-12 race season?
- Can the parallel rollers off the log boom in Seattle be added? Maybe they are already there and I didn’t notice them.
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As far as I know, new hull options should be coming in the future since Scott is working on a new model that should be more accurate. When that happens, all the boat paint schemes will probably need to be redone which will take time.
I think more courses are planned for the future, but they’re not needed at the moment and Scott is the only person working on that aspect of the sim so it will take time.
Increasing the number of races might be an option in the future, but we’re trying to emulate the real schedule and these races do take up a lot of time (3-4 hours per race).
As for the parallel rollers off the log boom in Seattle, I think it’s already there.
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@cp65 From what I understand, the wakes and rollers are purely visual at this point. They don't actually affect the handling of the boat, but I could be wrong about that. Seattle as a whole should be rougher than it is but I know Scott was really trying to get that course out quickly so we had it in time for the season race.
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- I won't be adding any new courses right now, I'm going to try and start adding more detail to the existing ones first.
- New boat hulls are in the plans, but this is just a hobby for me and I only have so much time to work on things.
- That's up to whoever is running the league.
- With the current water library I'm using, wake effects don't affect the boat physics, but I can adjust how rough the water is for the entire course. I'm planning, in the future, to switch over to the Crest Ocean library which supports interactive wakes and other interactive water features. I've done some quick tests with it and reported some bugs to the dev. It's in pretty active development, so I'm waiting for some bugs to be worked out before I put in a full effort to switch to it.
Right now I've started working on some 3D models for the pit areas. Unfortunately, I've been really busy with work and taking care of a baby, so I haven't been able to get anything done the past couple weeks.
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@Scott-Przybylski is there a way to add force-feedback for controllers?
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@cp65 I would like to, unfortunately there isn't out of the box support in Unity. There are some assets that people have made, but most are very old and not sure if they work. I'd probably have to write a custom native plugin to do it.
