Elyd 50 released in the wild

A great step took place today. My boat, the ELYD50 has been released full perms in SL, to I hope, further the advancement of sailing in SL. Available from word of mouth, or maybe somewhere in sailor's cove...

Enjoy

Urgent message to anybody on SL

Hello to all.

I do not have access to proper internet connection or a proper computer at the moment, So please inform Jojamela Soon or Izabella Bentham that the vendor on the dock at Sailors Cove for the ELYD 50 is not working anymore, so please remove it.

Also let anybody who has bought the boat and not received it contact me for a full refund, if the mishap is confirmed. Alternatively, the boat will be delivered manually. I will normally have access to SL next week (20th to 31st DECEMBER)

Sorry again for any inconvenience.

ELYD 50 available

Finally, the official version of the ELYD 50 is available. You can buy it on the dock at Fisher's Island. Do not hesitate to contact me inworld for a demo, and if i'm not available, try and contact Manul Rotaru, he's generally quite happy to go sailing ;)

Boat Show in Sailor's cove!

I will be displaying the current version of the ELYD 50 at the Sailor's cove boat show starting this week end. The beta version is available at the special price of L$1500, and you get free updates until the final version, which I expect to be ready in about a month. As all this has gone very fast, i'm not completely prepared for the show... for example, i don't have any explanatory notecards available, but don't hesitate to ask here or inworld. The boat is on display here

Now let's all go to the boat Show!

Have fun!

Canting keel !

I have added a canting keel to the ELYD 50, to make it more RL-Open-50 like. The keel has to be canted "manually" after each tack, and you can really see the difference it makes in the heeling angle. As the keel is canted to windward, you also need some kind of daggerboard to provide leeway resistance. This takes the form of (again, similar to the best current Open boats) twin assimetrical daggerboards forward of the keel. The downind one is lowered while the upwind one is raised. This happens automatically as you tack.

There are still a few bugs to iron out, the most annoying of which is that when the sails are set at zero angle of attack, the boat still moves forward... not very realistic!

Oh how i hate this alpha sorting bug!!!

So the first step is to remove as many bugs as possible, and then it will be available for purchase, at a price of between 1500 and 2000 L$. Order yours now if you like by leaving a comment below. It will motivate me to finish as soon as possible!

In the longer term, I plan to do a complete overhaul of the sailing physics, as they are still based on a (heavily) modified tako script.

The wake seems to be ok

I spent most of the day today working on the wake. There is probably still some fiddling to be done, as the bow spray doesn't quite look the way i want it.

Here we are fully powered up going downwind















And going upwind

It works !

At last, i managed to get my boat working... It uses the old tako script available on the lsl wiki at the moment, but i modified it heavily. The first important change is the fact that it uses apparent wind to sail, which the tako wasn't doing, ie: it wasn't taking the boat's own velocity into account when computing the wind. And secondly I have added an assymetric spinnaker, which is still a bit buggy at the moment, but should improve as time goes on...

The main problem with it is that I took a giant sphere prim as a base, cutting it every which way to get a proper spinnaker shape, but as the cut away part is underwater, it touches the bottom or land closeby and blocks the boat... Making it phantom doesn't seem to help... Also, the sphere is hollow, but still pretty thick, so the inside and outside textures are visibly separated, which is annoying visually...

3D sculpt maps as boat hulls

I tried modeling a hull in "wings 3d" and exporting it as a 3d scuplt map, but without any success. It seems there is a problem with the export plugin... I couldn't even export a sphere!

I think scuplties are a must to design boat hulls as it is the only to get a proper shape. However, i'll have to find adequate software. An IGES to sculpt converter would be ideal, IGES being considered the "standard" exchange format for nurbs surfaces...

On the left, what the boat looks like so far.

The rig is done

I got a bit sidetracked building my boat, but I managed to get the rig done finally, and the cockpit is progressing. I was thinking about using sculpted prims to do the hull, which would give a much nicer and more realistic shape, all in one prim only.

I downloaded a converter from rhino .3dm files to scuplt maps, but I can't get it to work... So I will use another 3D soft as an intermediary step. That's the plan, anyway...

My first boat

Here's what my first boat looks like at the moment. The hull sides are in place, as well as the deck and roof. I am left with the hull bottom, the rig and the detailing (winches, etc)

It's quite difficult to get a good result with the shapes I'm using. Nothing matches exactly. It's impossible to trim surfaces, so I guess there must be some tricks to hide those defects...

Yacht Design

Ok, so after a few days in SL, I saw that there was active sailing going on there... As I am a yacht designer in real life, hey! maybe I can start designing boats for my fellow residents, I thought. Well, there are already quite a few designs out there, the most common of which seems to be the Tako, a dinghy that is raced regularly. The scripts behind it are even available on the lsl wiki !

I tried my hand at modelling a boat in world, but I just don't understand how it is done. The editor is extremely limited. All I could manage was a triangular box...

Anyway, it doesn't matter because the shape has absolutely no influence on the performance. Everything is done is the script. The script I saw is not based entirely on physics, It seems to try and approximate the behaviour a boat, and I don't know how realistic it is as I never sailed one. For example the leeway angle seems to be based only on the angle of the wind, the strength of the wind and the heel angle. This is not true as boatspeed, sail angle of attack and sail angle relative to the boat all have to be taken into account. As I understand this script, if you are on a beam reach and sheet the sail in hard, the boat won't drift sideways like it does in real life, with both the sail and keel stalled.

So my goal is to develop a boat that has a more real life like behaviour, by using a realistic GZ curve, lift and drag coefficient curves for both the sail and underwatershape and solving the resulting equations 3 dimensionnally for the required variables (speed, leeway, heel, etc...)

It's a daunting task, but I think that It can be done. After that, I just need a boat to put this script in :)

I was born yesterday.

Well no, actually. I was born to my second life three days ago. I've met a few people already, and received a lot of gifts. I've also been sailing with brianzzz.