SoG Game Tracker App (windows)

[Aaron]

(Please see the bottom of this post for a couple of questions I need answers for, thank you in advance.)

In anticipation for world travel mode / sea chases, I’ve already coded in sail degradation due to damage. Here is how it works:

Sail and yard health:
Generally each yard will have a single canvas (except when running studding sails). The canvas has both a port and a starboard half with a health variable between 0-1 (1=healthy). As the sails get shot through by chaser/bow cannons, the health will move towards zero. The effective sail area is the area of a sail times the health. Since the force of the sails is computed using physics the rigging will be impacted realistically.

The yards are modeled in two discrete halves that either are whole or broken. Since most of the canvas is secured by an upper and lower yard (except course), when a yard half breaks then half of the area of the canvas is removed in the calculation, with the stipulation of if the half lost isn’t the leading edge for the wind. If it is the leading edge then the whole canvas is effectively removed from the motive force. I may keep the drag force for the special case of running with the wind. Since most yards impact two canvas, this also applies to the associated canvas above or below.

Yard Brace rigging can also be damaged which precludes the ability to change the orientation of the yard until repaired.

This damage model will play nice with the bow/stern chaser cannons during a protracted chase adding tension. Because the ships movement is physics based it is rather easy to interject damage and let the physics sort themselves out without special code.

When tactical mode (SoG play) is entered then the damaged ships will start with sail hits (0-6)

I need some info if someone knows this:
* Once sails were damaged did they rip themselves apart or did they just keep working with initial holes keeping their shape?
* typically how many cannon balls were available per cannon (both frigate and SOL)
* which is faster, new tight sails or older loose sails that forms a deeper camber?