Sail Away v8.01

(previous releases used the working title Water World).

Sail Away is a multiplayer yacht racing game. It has no single player functionality other than to sail about.

There are two boats to chose from each with varying attributes and you can repaint your boat & sails.

The sea features localised weather (dark patches for good wind, light patches for poor wind) and localised tidal flow, as well as global influences for both.

The game visuals are configurable and so it should run on a fairly low specification system, but powerful machines are catered for too along with support for widescreen display modes.

As the game is multiplayer orientated it has a [rewritten] live update feature which will download and decompress any individual files which are not up to date.

This is a more complex race game than most because of the dynamic ocean surface and fatal nature of running aground. To control your speed you capture as much wind in your sails as possible by letting your sails out or pulling them in, try to have them fluttering just ever so slightly for optimal speed. If you are sailing due downwind you can goosewing (where both sails stick out either side) to capture the most wind possible, but this will slow you up if you dont capture the wind fully.

As the tide goes up and down you may find routes through the map become available, blocked, or risky. This becomes more apparent as you learn the map. This release has an all new terrain system with a very detailed texture (in high graphics mode).



Multiplayer is supported by either hosting whilst playing or a dedicated server mode. Currently the only way to start a race is with admin control, but I do plan to include player voting soon.

The pace of the races are such that whilst constant small adjustments are necessary to maintain optimum speed you do get some time to type messages, making it an ideal race game for internet play.



Errors in route planning or an unfavourable wind or tide can hinder even the most experienced players which meens even when there is a wide ability spread new players can still challenge for the win on ocassion.

Broadband can support up to 99 players in a single game and soon I plan to finish off the ultralow bandwidth mode which should allow even a 56k modem player to play with very large player numbers.

The game is driven by a console command system, which I intend to tie in with a graphical driven interface in a future update.

For now here are the important console commands:

TO ACT AS A SERVER
start server
auto

TO ACT AS A CLIENT
list
server <n>

TO RESET BOAT: reset

TO SET THE LENGTH OF A RACE (admin) : length <n>
TO START A RACE (admin) : race

Keys to play the game are:
Cursor left/right - rudder
Cursor up/down - sails
Right Control - goosewing
Home - Map
Numpad - Camera

Those running a server who have a firewall or router need to allow TCP/IP data over port 9999.



Download from http://sailing.bansheestudios.com

If you wish to play in windowed mode start the game by clicking "DONE" with the right mouse button on the options screen.

(NOTE: The irc-server operator is no longer in business and therefor the chat room feature will no longer work. This will be superceded with a dedicated meeting room system running on a 24/7 server in the future).

Programming, Models & Textures: Becky Rose
Music: Rachel Nusbaumer

Can't test it right now, but the screenies are lookin very promising so far. Maybe the water and landscape needs a lil polish. Other thatn that, sounds good. Now you only need to add a soft interface for Reds Sub game :)

YAY!!! It's Back :)

and i like the title... Sail Away... copyright that quick before i steal it :)

will test this evening... i wanna have a few free minutes to actually play, errrr i mean, test this out...

--Mike

I released v8.02 today which fixes a number of issues: Multiplayer tide settings where wrong, the dedicated server was broken and gnet was not working. All of these issues have been fixed throughout the day.

Also you can now check the total number of servers + players online from the games homepage: http://sailing.bansheestudios.com

Hi,

i would have liked to try it out but i wasn't able to download it.

What i can say from the stills is that the texturing looked a bit poor to me. Can't you just scale them down that they aren't so blurry? Or use multitexturing with a detailmap and some baked vertex colouring for instance?!


Regards,

taumel

Taumel,

It's the gameplay that this game is all about - Banshee is a coder and what she's achieved here is fab. The first version was a few hours from idea to realisation. You really have to try it to find out what Red's talking about!

I hope you get to download it soon and give it a go, make sure you get some pals to download it too, it's much better with more than one playing.

Regards,


IPete2.

Okay i can't judge how good the gameplay is but i don't see any point that a little bit more tuning on the gfx side would hurt the game, hmm?! Also if she's that good it should be done already! ;O) I suggest i can throw my own textures in...

By the way this wasn't meant as an offensive. I just looked at the stills and thought a) this looks interesting and b) the textures are not so great...

Regards,

taumel

Taumel you are quite right, I should add a detail texture to the boats. I've done multi-texturing in another game that has user-customiseable skins but didn't do it on the player models in this (earlier) project. The idea never occured to me at the time, frankly I was suprised I was able to make the model in the first place as I usually stick to modelling scenery.

On the terrain I think two of the screenshots are only at medium (default) quality terrain texture setting, the top screenshot is definately the high setting although i've improved the environment mapping since. I should do new beauty shots really - but I suffer from apathy quite badly!

IPete2,

Thank you for the kind words. As a racing game with 3 or 4 players I did find it a great deal of fun, but getting that many players at once is very difficult and is far too much effort for the reward :/.

I plan to put in player voting to start races without an admin and also a user interface to drive the console commands to make the game more accessible, then after I move house and get the broadband setup I will build a machine to run as a dedicated 24/7 server so you can log on anytime and hopefully find a race.

Hopefully this will start to attract a little user base, it doesn't need much, but the ability to log on and race with half a dozen or so people will totally change the enjoyment of the game. :)

I primary meant the terrain... :O)