Hello everyone,
Back to playing with Virtual Sailor after a little absence. I'm a ship pilot and simulation enthusiast, and have been using virtual sailor, then vehicle sim, and now VS NG for over a decade. I have also used other simulators that run on home computers (such as Ship Simulator Extremes, European Ship Simulator, etc), and VS is my favourite by far, the sheer amount of possibilities with ship and environment customisations makes this simulator amazing, no other comes close.
I was very happy to see the number of improvements hat were made in recent updates. Congrats on a fantastic job, Ilan!
I particularly liked the throttle efficiency addition, which will make it much easier to tweak ship performance to match reality, the new traffic system and the new rate of turn instruments. The ROT indicator especially, very cool.
I mostly like to play with the larger ships, similar to the ones i handle in real life, and have a couple of suggestions i think would approach the handling of these vessels in VS to reality:
-RPM and rudder angle change delay: in real, large commercial ships, to change from rudder angle full to one side to full to the other side, it can take almost 30 seconds. RPM from full ahead to full astern can take several minutes in some ships. Maybe a parameter in the elements that allow you to set the amount of time the rudder/rpm goes from zero to full and vice-versa for that element, would be great.
-doppler instrument: some ships, especially larger ones, have doppler logs that show sideways speed for both bow and stern, as well as longitudinal speed. It would be great to have the option to add this instrument to the panel. The ROT indicator was already a great addition, most ships have this nowadays.
-bring back the positive throttle option for joysticks. This option was in vehicle simulator before. Now any external controller behaves like it is a plane throttle, going from full ahead to 0 rpm, not allowing you to go astern by just pulling the throttle lever back. You have to press shft+e to get the engine to go on astern, and then you have to push the throttle lever fwd (instead of pulling it back) to give astern thrust. This is amassive bummer, it ruins immersion especially in close quarter maneuver, like docking, which is supposed to be the most fun part...
These are improvements i think would greatly improve the VS NG experience! What additions you guys would like to see?
Ilan, congratulations again on keeping VS NG awesome and ever improving!
Cheers, Diego