POSSIBLY Bigger and more varied sails

[zarwil 393]

Since the devs plan to improve ships and sailing in a future update (1.9 I believe they said?) I should mention something that has bugged me for ages.

 

The problem:

The sails in Ylands are tiny in proportion to the ships in the game. The worst offender being the catamaran sail...  

Look at this image of a real catamaran boat here:

 

...and a catamaran with its sail in ylands here:

The sail looks laughably small, and that's with an unmodified hull part. If you start adding a structure and make the ship more massive, it's much worse. 

With the largest sails in ylands, this is still a problem. For a sguare-rigged ship, it's normal for the sails to be significantly wider than the hull. Let's say 1.5-2x the width of the hull. The largest sail in ylands is barely wider than the wooden hulls, and if you make a larger hull by yourself, you have no hope of making the sails look reasonably wide and proportional. 

As a reference for sail width: 

Then there is the issue of lack of variety. There are no jib-sails in Ylands. Those are the triangular sails placed at the front of the boat/ship, or in-between masts. (I understand the issue with adding this type of sail, and I haven't figured out a great way of solving those issues, so I can forgive this one...)

...And there are no gaff sails (the type of squared off sails attached to the masts in the ship above, and the boat below. Gaff sails would be a great addition to the game, as they are used with ships and boats of all types and sizes.

 

My suggestions:

In general there is a great lack of variety, both in terms of size and type, but I think you could help the situation greatly by adding two types of sails to the game. 

1. Introduce a new viking longboat ship type, with a really wide square sail, as seen below. This sail could then be stacked several times when building ships, in order to construct larger square rigged masts.

2. Introduce a gaff sail, as discussed above. Make it slightly larger than the sail area of the junk ship sail, and you're golden

With these two additions, you can keep to the cartoonish style of the game, while still allowing for some decent freedom when it comes to more advanced builds.

[NICO14973 65]

13 hours ago, zarwil said:

I understand the issue with adding this type of sail

I totally agree with your post, there should be more variety on ship sails and accesories. May i ask, what's the issue with that type of sail?

[zarwil 393]

7 hours ago, NICO14973 said:

I totally agree with your post, there should be more variety on ship sails and accesories. May i ask, what's the issue with that type of sail?

Since jib sails hang off of lines, rather than being directly connected to a spar, you have a problem of deciding where those lines should be connected. Should you have a new part with a fixed mast and bowsprit, with a jib sail connected between the two? That wouldn't be very flexible for creators. If you stray away from a fixed part, you pretty much have to introduce a whole new system for connecting rope and placing the sail between two arbritrary points, and that's not something we can reasonably expect imo.

One thing that could work for advanced creators is to have a part like the one described above, but have a checkmark in the part properties in the editor where you can disable the mast and bowsprit from being visible. The devs already have tools to change the hitbox of a certain part (sails for instance already change their hitbox when the sail is activated), but this option would have to be hidden in the editor. This would be a pretty big workaround for a niche audience in the editor, so again, you can't expect a solution like this.

Edited May 27, 2021 by zarwil

[Nikki Severin 1148]

Hey! 

This sounds great! We are planning to have a water-related update and I think this would fit right in there! Let me bring it up with the team and I'll keep you posted on whether we can do this  

[WijkagentAdrie 384]

I've written multiple posts/topics about what ships need as a fix to make them more fun. Please add the following:

- Modular hulls, existing of multiple pieces, so you can make boats of varying lengths.

- Hollow hulls: please make it possible to go inside the hulls.

- Make wind/sailing actual fun. The wind (used to?) change every 2 seconds. Make it so that different sail types have different speeds on the wind direction and make the wind steadier. This way sailing actually becomes a skill. It would be nice to have some sort of craftingstation/encounter quite lategame which will let you predict the weather including the wind.

[spiritchaser28 920]

On 5/29/2021 at 5:53 PM, WijkagentAdrie said:

Hollow hulls: please make it possible to go inside the hulls.

I like this suggestion, but I fear they would have to change the water physics to make this idea possible, and from what I unnderstand from the devs the water is a terribly complicated program to alter.....as an alternative maybe we could have players teleport to a small hull base map showing only the inside of the hull and allowing us to build inside the hull without the water physics? I don't know if that is possible either....just trying to think outside the box. I predict the answer to this suggestion will be a "no" for right now. Maybe a few years in the future?

Edited May 30, 2021 by spiritchaser28

[ocnoglittle 760]

Maybe they could make the ships slightly taller and have a hull area that is out of the water ?

[spiritchaser28 920]

49 minutes ago, ocnoglittle said:

Maybe they could make the ships slightly taller and have a hull area that is out of the water 

That might be the best solution....however I would hope it wouldn't mess with our pre-existing blueprints and builds. Maybe just add a few new hull types that would include a below deck option. I don't think Catamarans have a below deck though so I wouldn't include that one.

[zarwil 393]

@spiritchaser28 @ocnoglittle

That's why we build custom hulls  

Regarding having space inside the ship hulls @Nikki Severin, is it possible for the devs to disable water effects for a player during a game? If they can, why not have hollow hulls which you can enter from a "hatch", and once the player has entered through the hatch, the game makes water invisible and disables its effects? The player is technically still in the water, but he doesn't know it. As long as there are no windows in the hull, this would work fine.

 

[ocnoglittle 760]

11 hours ago, zarwil said:

The player is technically still in the water, but he doesn't know it. As long as there are no windows in the hull, this would work fine.

um... except drowning/floating

[Nikki Severin 1148]

16 hours ago, zarwil said:

Regarding having space inside the ship hulls @Nikki Severin, is it possible for the devs to disable water effects for a player during a game? If they can, why not have hollow hulls which you can enter from a "hatch", and once the player has entered through the hatch, the game makes water invisible and disables its effects? The player is technically still in the water, but he doesn't know it. As long as there are no windows in the hull, this would work fine.

 

That's an interesting take on this" Let me check with the team  

 

[zarwil 393]

9 hours ago, ocnoglittle said:

um... except drowning/floating

That's what I meant by disabling water effects

[spiritchaser28 920]

5 hours ago, zarwil said:

That's what I meant by disabling water effects

Not sure how that would work in multiplayer. I don't think it's possible. Who knows though? They may have a trick up their sleeves.

[ocnoglittle 760]

7 hours ago, zarwil said:

That's what I meant by disabling water effects

Sorry, I thought you just meant the visuals

[bojo2736 1016]

While we are at it, how about adding storage to ships, boats and rafts.   

[zarwil 393]

@ocnoglittle @spiritchaser28 

I'm thinking in technical terms here, at some level in the engine/code the water physics have to be "triggered" to apply to the character, so at some level it should be possible to change when a player is affected by water. It's not at all certain that this is something that can be "hacked" in the way I suggested, but it's worth a shot to ask.

Edited June 1, 2021 by zarwil

[spiritchaser28 920]

1 hour ago, bojo2736 said:

While we are at it, how about adding storage to ships, boats and rafts.   

I blueprint my ships with boxes and kitchen cabinets a lot. Gives me enough storage and I don't have to bother placing them. Just wish I could blueprint the other cabinets and storage containers.

I generally sink the boxes into the hull in editor so they are just barely above the floor level, gives me lots of room to move and lots of storage. Pics below are inside one of my ships.

Edited June 1, 2021 by spiritchaser28

[ocnoglittle 760]

but it would be cool if the hull automatically stored 5000 logs or something ?

[Nikki Severin 1148]

11 hours ago, bojo2736 said:

While we are at it, how about adding storage to ships, boats and rafts.   

I'll add it to the suggestions  I think that could be a part of the big water update (possibly 1.9)  

[spiritchaser28 920]

2 hours ago, Nikki Severin said:

I think that could be a part of the big water update (possibly 1.9)

We always love getting extra ship pieces and options.  Thanks Nikki

[WijkagentAdrie 384]

On 5/31/2021 at 12:37 AM, spiritchaser28 said:

I like this suggestion, but I fear they would have to change the water physics to make this idea possible, and from what I unnderstand from the devs the water is a terribly complicated program to alter.....as an alternative maybe we could have players teleport to a small hull base map showing only the inside of the hull and allowing us to build inside the hull without the water physics? I don't know if that is possible either....just trying to think outside the box. I predict the answer to this suggestion will be a "no" for right now. Maybe a few years in the future?

I've pointed it out multiple times already that there are multiple other games which do this, even with completely custom/bespoke player built hulls. There's been loads of other suggestions about ships already anyways but nothing seems to ever come from it.

[spiritchaser28 920]

2 hours ago, WijkagentAdrie said:

I've pointed it out multiple times already that there are multiple other games which do this, even with completely custom/bespoke player built hulls. There's been loads of other suggestions about ships already anyways but nothing seems to ever come from it.

Hopefully with the ship update some things will get better. Took a long time to make exploration better, but it was worth the wait.