Show HN: Sail a historical full-rigged ship in real global weather

This is a simulator of a frigate from about 1800. It has realistic physics, tuned to match historical performance. The UI is based around commands given in period naval language. Rather than use the current weather, it has a full year's weather data (for 1980 - taken from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html). This allows the weather to change realistically under time acceleration.

To learn the basics of handling a square-rigged ship, start the "Harbour" scenario, click on the instructions button at the bottom left, and follow the instructions to try to get out of Portsmouth harbour.

To go for a long sail, start the "The World" scenario. Open the map, control+click anywhere on it to move there; control+click on the compass at the bottom left to turn the ship to that heading; then activate travel acceleration at the bottom right.

It's a simulator more than a game - think MS flight simulator. There's no sinking, but you can lose sails or spars in high winds. It's windows only.

This was released a couple of years ago, but this is an updated version from the end of January. See the devlog (https://thapen.itch.io/painted-ocean/devlog) for the changes. You can also find some discussions there on historical sailing performance numbers.

Show HN: Sail a historical full-rigged ship in real global weather
thapen.itch.io

I've always been interested in sailing. I'm from Illinois. I once went to Jamaica and sailed a small catamaran for several hours on a protected bay and had great fun. For years afterwards I was reading sailing textbooks and dreaming about it, but given my location, I don't want to put money into it

I've played some sailing games and had fun, but they weren't simulations. I've never tried a sailing simulator. This one looks great, and I'll try it out, if I can make it run on Linux. (I notice you say that it's Windows-only, I take that as a challenge)

Sweet! I finished the Hornblower series late last year and couldn't find anything like this. Can't wait to try it!

This looks awesome. Will definitely try it out.

Also, does anyone remember Empire Total War from back around 2011? One of my favorite games of all time despite its millions of issues. This brought back some fond memories of high school, getting back from class and running back home to battle some 18th century French warships…

I'm wondering if the game requires you to know all the sail names. That could be a big impediment to doing things in it! It certainly adds some difficulty in even reading those books.