Dear Stormworkers,

We are hard at work on the upcoming updates, with head mounted displays due in 2 weeks, and the sails major update due in March.

Head mounted displays are effectively a lua driven screen that renders as an additive overlay on top of the players view. This is effectively a head mounted HUD.

Seats with the head mounted display option will have a video input node, which serves as the video feed. The screen is the same resolution as the overlay of the recent viewing scope component.

Sails are in their final stage of testing, and have been very interesting to work on, with sailing being a complex topic with many aspects.

Our implementation of sailing respects many real world behaviours. The size and shape of your sails drives the physics calculations, and the angle of attack relative to the wind controls the amount and direction of thrust. Very slight angles of attack creates an additional wing-like aerofoil effect true to real racing sails.

Real sail boats are very precisely designed, and adjusting any property such as size, center of mass, drag, sail positioning, rudder, etc. by even a small amount can turn a high performance boat into an ineffective design. Similar to real life, not all sailing concepts work. We have been testing and playing, and it is very rewarding to experiment with designs, and see the changes in boat performance and handling change as a result. Learning more about real world sailing has helped me with my in-game designs. We will include an example sail boat as reference in the presets.

As many have pointed out, the hydrodynamics in Stormworks are tuned to be more viscous, to balance the game to work with a broader variety of designs. To manage the impact of this on sails, we are adding the keel component, which applies additional forces to stabilize a sailing boat. These forces include rotational stabilization to avoid being rolled by the wind, as well as momentum stabilization to help ships carry their energy through turns.

We look forward to releasing these updates in the coming weeks and look forward to your feedback!

Much love <3,

The Stormworks Developers