Trimming two sails at once.

While workking on sail trim controls, I have been having some difficulty providing a good set of control keys for providing both fine grained (+/- 1) and fast (+/- 5) trim adjustments.

SL only gives us 9 control events, which include Fwd, Backward, Left, Right, Up, Down as well as Left Mouse Button, and SHIFT Left/Right. This makes it impossible to provide seperate +/- 1 AND +/- 5 trim keys for both the main sheet and the spinnaker.

So I'd like to pose a question to you all.

Would it be acceptable, if you were only allowed to trim one sail at a time? You would be given a toggle key, and could only adjust either the main sheet OR the spinnaker at any given time.

From what I understand, a sailor in a properly rigged single handed boat can in R/L trim two sails at one time, but it can be very difficult.

How about the quick keys ctrl / shift F2 t/m F12 ?

For controlling the switch between main sheet and spinnaker?

Just in case you've missed it in my previous posts and what I've talked about in-world, the idea is to eventually remove at least spinnaker chat control (which would include gestures and button huds) thus returning the Tako to once again having a "difficult to trim" spinnaker. I would also like to get rid of chat controls for main sheet.

However I know that not everyone believes that Tako sailing should be about mastering control key control dispite lag, as well as tactics and seamanship. There are those that have the opinion that sail control is secondary and as such they focus on tactics only. I have been trying to find a happy medium...

I'm confused as I don't script, so I don't know exactly what you're talking about. Right now the Tako has the up/down key for the mainsail and the pageup/pagedown for the spinnaker.

I figured you'd have up/down for the +/- 1 mainsail and shift up/down for the +/- 5 mainsail.

I'm guessing the conflict comes with the spinnaker because to do something like shift pageup/pagedown (if that's possible) would conflict if you wanted to control the mainsail at the same time since mainsail also would use a shift key combination.

I don't like the idea of using the left mouse button to control my Tako. I suspect left and right arrows are out because you're using that for direction. What do you mean by Fwd and backward?

I wouldn't mind the option of just holding down the keys to get a large trim adjustment, assuming it didn't work like the last beta Tako I tried where the mainsail from 20 to 90 degrees in a flash or the spinnaker took two minutes to go from 0 to 90. But I also have no problem with the unpredictable nature of the control keys with the current Tako in my normal sailing conditions. However, I do know that reducing the bloat from the scripts is necessary for the lower load sims (and probably make for responsible scripting).

Well, I can tell you what I'm planning as the control scheme for the t/5.

We basically want both coarse and fine-grained control for the mainsheet, spinnaker, and, in my case, the jib, while reserving the left and right arrows for the rudder. I don't see a problem with relegating fine-grained control to chat commands, mapped to function key gestures as the skipper sees fit, because complex gestures limited to 1-degree steps would be prohibitively slow for anything over a few degrees. Bearing that in mind, my working model is as follows:

L/R - coarse and fine rudder control (curve to be determined)
F/B - coarse mainsheet control, 10-degree increments
U/D - coarse spinnaker control, 10 or 5 degree increments (asymmetric spinnaker with less trim range, increment to be determined)
Shift-L/R- coarse jib control, 10 or 5 degree increments (increment to be determined). I might bypass the coarse control to leave the jib fine-trim-only as detailed below, since its trim is generally over a very narrow range.

Fine-grained +/- 1 Mainsail, Foresail, Spinnaker trim - chat commands/gestures
Mooring, Mainsail, Foresail, Spinnaker, Centerboard toggles - chat commands/gestures

That's eleven chat commands for the basic controls, and I imagine most folks will map them to unmodified F-key gestures. That leaves shift-F-keys for things like standard hails and other system-level boat commands, which is how I hail in Tako races right now and it's pretty usable.

I would love to, but the 9 events that I listed are the only onces possible.

LSL doesn't let you detect shift Fwd/Back, or shift Up/Down. Only shift Right/Left -- which has to do with straffing (1st person shooter term.)



The keys you push to move your avatar forward and backward.

If there are only 9 events that LSL recognizes, then what's the trick to get it to recognize pagedown/up as well?

My suggestion would be not to overhaul the Tako commands too much because there is a wide range of sailing styles. From what I understand, the biggest problem with the current Tako is how several skippers holding down the control keys are inundating the server with requests. The trick would be then how to limit the amount of information to the server while still maintaining quick use of the control keys.

So that said, I think all you need are the controls for coarse mainsail and spinnaker control, leaving finer control to the chat commands.

Actually, I'd probably want the fine control chat commands included with the Tako by default if that were the case... but I don't really know, I just suggest.

No trick, they are two of the nine.

1: Fwd (Up Arrow or W)
2: Backward (Down Arrow or S)
3: Left (Left Arrow or A)
4: Right (Right Arrow or D)
5: Up (Page Up or E)
6: Down (Page Down or C)
7: Left Mouse Button
8: Shift Left
9: Shift Right



I understand that there is a wide variety of sailing styles, and some of my updates will be limited to a new lines of boats because they will impact peoples abilities to sail the Tako "as they always have." Although it has not been an issue previously, with small fleets and sailing in full classic sims, some sailing styles are inherrently lag producing.

I am also of course, influenced by my own preference to see the chat trim commands removed. Chat commands create a slippery slope that can very quickly and very drastically effect the performance of a sim.

People lobbied to add spinnaker chat controls, because the void (open space) sims in hollywood were "so laggy" that it make spinnaker trimming very frustrating. By adding the spinnaker chat controls however, the Tako now has one more set of commands it has to parse each time it hears chatter -- thus slowing the response of the Tako, as well as generating more lag for the sim as a whole. Additionally, the fact that there is a new set of chat commands, means the total amount of chat in a sim has also gone up. This has created additional load and thus lag in the sim for everything from sail updates, to hud updates. So in this case the solution made the problem worse for those whose sailing style does not involve using chat/gesture/button commands.

The addition of the chat commands for spinnaker has also spawned a whole new style of sailing the Tako, which no longer even uses the control keys for sail trim -- where people are using gestures/chat exclusively. This means that given two sailors that are on equal footing in understanding the concepts of sailing a Tako as well as equivalent tactical skill, the winner will be decided by who has the more clever (more efficient?) gesture/chat system. This is *forcing* people to change from the style of sailing they prefer, to one they don't prefer -- just so that they can be competitive...

At this point, with the way Tako sailing is currently headed -- the "best" solution will likely be to provide more then one option for the Tako control systems, with a certain amount of control customization available to each skipper. But although this would be the "best" solution for people that want to enhance their sailing without changing their style, it is also the hardest to maintain and update.

I suspect the solution that'll be rolled out in the near future with the least number of complaints, is to flip the switch that limits the control message bursts to the Tako (which is the single largest source of load/lag from the Tako), clean up a few other things that'll give us another 5 to 10% less load, leave the control keys essentially "as is" which will make them extremely diffcult to do precise sailing during a race and just tell people "If you want to be competitive, you'll just have to use the chat/gesture/button commands."

Additional improvements and fixes will likely then be rolled into new classes of boats like Myrrh's t/5, my Scurvy Dog Pirate Ship, or the dozen or so other classes of boats I've heard people are working on. Rolling those into new classes of boats will allow people to be more accomidating with "new" control systems.
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Oh dear... That got a bit long...