If you always dreamed of sailing but you couldn’t do it for some reason, let’s say you didn’t have enough money to buy your boat or don’t live in a city by the sea, this can be a nice way of getting in touch with this amazing activity.
Sail Simulator 4 enables you to sail and navigate on your computer, pretty much alike to navigate in real life. The simulation gives an impressive view on the selected boat and sailing area. The comprehensive instrument panel contains a clock, compass log, depth sounder, windspeed and direction indicator, engine control panel and a GPS receiver. In addition you can also open a navigation window with a map of the selected sailing area. Furthermore, you can draw a route on this map. The breakpoints in this route will be automatically loaded as waypoints in the GPS receiver.
Sail Simulator 4 has improved the aero- and hydrodynamics of the boats so they behave more realistic than previous editions of the simulator. For every boat the hydrostatics and the wetted surface of the hull are calculated very exactly and real-time. The important ‘forced mode’ part of the wave resistance is also better defined. The wave system of the boat indicates how fast you sail and if you are already planing. During planing, the water under the bow sprays away. The flat wake behind the boat gives a real feeling of speed.
The boat can be steered with mouse, keyboard, joystick and the Stentec Control Unit. Sail Simulator 4 also offers Force Feedback support.
Sail Simulator 4 can be connected to a PC that runs a navigation program like WinGPS Pro by means of a standard cross-linked RS232 cable. The selected boat in Sail Simulator 4 acts as the real boat in the navigation program.
If you are wondering about system requirements, here's a list of the minimum requirements needed to run Sail Simulator 4:
* Pentium II, 233 Mhz with 32MB RAM. (or Pentium compatible)
* Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000.
* DirectX 7a or higher.
* 75MB of free diskspace for the DirectX and Sail Simulator 4.0 installation. (After installation DirectX takes about 15MB of diskspace and Sail Simulator about 60MB disk space).
* 3D Video accelerator card with 16MB RAM. 16-bit color support and DirectX 7 compatible.
* Keyboard and mouse.
* DirectX compatible sound card.
Comments