Broadside — WebGL Water

Rigging the ships…

➤ San Felipe — m

Revenge your ship

0 knN 0°sail 60%

Port guns

Starboard guns

rudder · sail · drag to look

Broadside

Draglook around · pinch / wheel to zoom the chase camera
A D / ◀ ▶rudder
W S / ▲ ▼more / less sail
Space / FIREbroadside from the side facing the enemy
Vhelm → chase → crow's nest
Msound

How to win

Get her on your beam within about 250 m and fire. The gun crews aim for you; a rolling broadside takes a few seconds to run down the deck, and reloading takes ten. Keep the wind behind you — a galleon barely moves head to wind — and don't let her cross your bow.

What is simulated

Sea. Four Gerstner waves on a 1.7 km grid that follows you, plus the ripple field for bow waves and splashes, refraction with depth tint, planar reflections, foam wakes.
Ships. Procedural galleons (lofted hulls, castles, three masts, billowing sails, rigging, 16 guns) are rigid bodies in cannon-es: twenty-one buoyancy points under each hull push up by how deep they sit in the wave, so heave, pitch and roll emerge from the sea; sails thrust, the keel resists leeway, the rudder yaws, the wind heels. Hits and rams shove the hull; a lost ship floods stern-first and goes down under gravity. Heel her past her beam ends — too much sail in too hard a turn — and she capsizes and will not come back.
Gunnery. Iron balls with gravity and drag at 110 m/s; the crews compute the elevation for the range and add their own error. Hits are tested against the hull's real cross-section.
Effects. three.quarks GPU particle systems with sprites drawn at start-up: flash and powder smoke, sparks and splinters, fire and smoke on a burning ship, splashes, and the magazine explosion with a shockwave.
The enemy. A captain who closes, holds you abeam, shortens sail in range and fires whenever a battery bears.
Sound. All synthesised: booms arrive late from far away, timber hits, creaks, wind, the bell.
World. The sky is a real HDR photograph (Poly Haven, CC0) that lights the scene, reflects in the water and gives the sun its direction; the islands are noise-sculpted terrain with triplanar PBR sand, grass and rock (Poly Haven, CC0), instanced palms and rocks, a lighthouse, gulls, dolphins and drifting wreckage. Post: lens flare, god rays, bloom, colour grade, SMAA.

Source: src/broadside/ on top of src/lagoon/. HDRIs kloppenheim_06_puresky and overcast_soil_puresky, textures coast_sand_01, rock_face, aerial_grass_rock by Poly Haven (CC0).