The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has been updated with part two of their treatise on Tuning, where they take a detailed behind the scenes look at what makes a ship a ship.
Ship Tuning
Ship tuning is all about the details and numbers. We define ships in text INI files. Each INI file is a long series of values, amounting to nearly 500 lines in length for the biggest ships (many of those are blank lines). There is also a 100-line base file that's included in all ships. A good chunk of the values are set once and left alone for a long time, and many of them are used for the ship art. Once those are stripped out, there are about 150 values (not lines) used in tuning ships. Obviously, we cannot show players every single one of those values in the UI.
Acceleration
Setting the values on ships is often more complex than the output that players see in game. For example, players see the speed and best wind angle for ships. Those two stats are the key values out of the 24 values that are used to set a ship's speed. On top of that, there are numerous values to determine how fast a ship turns, how fast it accelerates and decelerates, how much speed it loses when it turns, how quickly it accelerates into a turn and how well it turns at different speeds. All of those values come together to determine how the ship handles in combat, and I use the data to make simple charts. Here's a chart that compares the acceleration over 30 seconds for the Cerberus, Stralsund, Defiant, Capricieux, Lexington, Mediator, Invincible and Oliphant.
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Read the full article here.
