eSail Sailing Simulator News

This new beta brings a number of small enhancements and bug fixes:

Enhancements

• Added new 'Heaving-to' tutorial
  
• Leeway added to drift boat sideways with and without sails
  
• Added 'Input Focus' keyboard control to move between panels (default =), so you can press this key to move between mooring and anchoring panels for instance. The panel with focus will receive the Options Keys (1,2,3,4). So the special anchoring keys are no longer needed (although still work at the moment)
  
• Added 'Pause' keyboard control
  
• Made lighthouse lights able to cut through mist and light fog so they can now be seen from over 10 miles in reasonable conditions
  
• Added a 'splash' to the camera as you go underwater
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed: Anchor not colliding with concrete jettys
  
• Fixed: Anchoring Challenge (Mosquito Bay) erroneous 100 point penalty at start
  
• Fixed: Chart cursor coordinates were displaying with check box off
  
• Fixed: Issue of pins being added to alerts when there is no point pinning them
  

All feedback is welcome. Please add any comments to the eSail Beta forum!

eSail Update 1.5.39 has 2 new features and fixes a few small issues.

1) There is now a hand compass. See the yellow button near the main compass on the dashboard.

2) You can now pin alerts. These are the little pop up windows. We will be using these more as things get more advanced, so this will make it easier to refer back to the pop up information. At the moment the pins only last during a tutorial or challenge.

3) Fixes a missing 'close up' window on the course plotter in the charting module, making it hard to see the numbers on the protractor.

4) Stops points being deducted on challenges when fenders hit the jetty.

5) Further work has been done to avoid screen dragging while dragging on the throttle.

Thank you to all eSailors and beta testers for your feedback!

This version has been released to fix or improve anchoring issues in eSail.

These issues should now have been fixed:

1) The anchor was tending to slide along the sea bed (except when the chain was hidden).

2) When the chain was hidden it tended to break on retraction. This should be improved but that doesn't mean its impossible to break the simulation!

3) Live Sailing saving of anchor / chain sometimes caused the anchor/chain to vanish.

4) If you motored with the anchor compartment open, the anchor could fly off. Now the top chain links and anchor are locked when not being extended/retracted. (We have also added some notes to the anchoring tutorial about being careful about speed and steering to avoid breaking the simulation - as in real life you would want to avoid breaking the windless!)

5) Weird anchor behaviour - floating/ not digging in etc.

6) Anchor sliding down hill - see above. It should now lock to a slope when not being pulled or when chain is extending. It will still slide when being pulled.

7) When swapping between users (from inside eSail) sometimes Live Sailing got confused and saved the wrong location.

8) Some physics changes have been to improve chain stability.

Thank you for all our testers and beta testers for your feedback.

This new Beta version has been released to fix or improve anchoring issues in eSail.
You can also help improve performance by testing different settings. See below on how to help and how to swap to the beta.

These issues should now have been fixed:

1) The anchor was tending to slide along the sea bed (except when hidden).

2) When the chain was hidden it tended to break on retraction. This should be improved but that doesn't mean its impossible to break the simulation!

3) Live Sailing saving of anchor / chain sometimes caused the anchor/chain to vanish.

4) If you motored with the anchor compartment open, the anchor could fly off. Now the top chain links and anchor are locked when not being extended/retracted. (We have also added some notes to the anchoring tutorial about being careful about speed and steering to avoid breaking the simulation - as in real life you would want to avoid breaking the windless!)

5) Weird anchor behaviour - floating/ not digging in etc.

6) Anchor sliding down hill - see above. It should now lock to a slope when not being pulled or when chain is extending. It will still slide when being pulled.

7) When swapping between users (from inside eSail) sometimes the Live Sailing got confused and saved the wrong location.


Help testing anchoring settings

You can now gain access to 2 development control panels. By submitting any observations on the best settings you can really help us improve the performance. Please submit to the Betas forum.

Main (Ctrl+Alt+M) . Fixed time step is how often physics calculations are done. Smaller numbers are better but have more processing cost.

Anchoring (Ctrl+Alt+A).
You can change the chain link solver. The default is 7 but larger numbers may help, giving greater accuracy but at higher CPU cost.

Collider len is how long each chain link collider is. The chain link is 1 unit long so I doubt if going longer than that would help but you never know!

NOTE: You will notice that changing 'detailed water effects' and the quality settings changes FPS a lot. If you are down near 30fps then you could be running out of CPU to do the physics calculations.

All feedback would be very useful. Please let me know whether you are hiding the chain and any other details you can if you submit some settings.


To install the Beta version:

1. Right click on eSail in your Steam client.

2. On the drop down menu click 'Properties'

3. Click on the BETAS tab.

4. Select the beta from the drop down list.

We are experiencing some problems with anchoring at the moment, which can affect the anchoring tutorial and all anchoring situations.

This issue affects anchoring when using the full chain. In this mode the anchor is not holding properly on the sea floor. As a short term fix, go to Settings and hide the anchor chain. This will make sure that the anchor works properly, but you will not be able to see the chain underwater.

This should be sorted out in an update due by 7th Sept.