SoG Game Tracker App (windows)

[Aaron]

Update 1/12/18: The Game Weather

So, as my recent posts go, I've been hard at work on realistic sailing physics (both wind and water forces on the ship). It would do little good of having a good physics model ship sailing about in a poorly modeled environment. In other words, if the wind isn't modeled correctly then why go through the trouble of modeling a sail that uses that wind. Ive looked at several options ranging from making my own simple model, using an existing one (haven't looked hard), or in lieu of that, just using the the current weather or a snapshot of it.

An interesting way is to use the current weather and overlay it on the world map. This would add to the whole feel of the game being more grounded to our world since it will be persistent. The negative of this is that the weather will run at real time and the game will be 7 times faster.

Or, more probable, I could also just have a set of distinct data for the seasons (old snapshots - these are available) and load them in according to season. My first try will be just to load the current weather and keep it static for a time and refresh it slowly.

Anyway, so how would this work? I would take the public available GFS weather data for the world and use software (which I already am trying out) to read the data and store it in lat/long grids. I would then overlay this data on my world map which also has the lat/long cords. The weather data would reside in grids that you sail through. Each grid has a wind, wave, etc data that drives your ships.

Once the wind is known, the ocean swell and waves can then be calculated using wind strength, how long it has been blowing at that strength, to output fetch length, wave height, wave frequency, wave length, swell speed, etc.

Here's an example of GFS data from the site https://earth.nullschool.net:

This is from today: This is the wind pattern for the Atlantic.


Anyway.. I hope to have an example of at least wind strength overlaid on my world map this weekend if things go well.