Aaron's Sailonline tools

Yesterday I have finally updated the client that we have used to know as "beta" to be the default version. Aaron (or AGage as we used to know him in SOL) was the key person in the SOL development group and his unfortunate passing away of in June set us badly back but hopefully we are again catching some speed.

The client version we now use was last updated by Aaron just 4 days before his death and he had also just started development of the tools that he planned for helping people sail their boats better.

It is really fortunate that he had asked me in May if I could host these tools on my SOL site so that we have them in our use. He also gave me access to their sources so perhaps the development of them will continue some day. However they are written in Flash which I unfortunately am not at all experienced with.

Most people are probably aware of them by now but I have written a short introduction anyway. And if you are not aware of who Aaron was and what he has done to help SOL I would suggest that you should read this thread about people remembering him and his accomplishments.

Aaron was also the person helped me in developing my sollog site and who then asked me to join the SOL admins. We had an enjoyable 5 months of collaborating which was abruptly cut short.

WxInspector

The WxInspector (wx is short for weather forecast) can be used to analyze the weather and it has actually many tools for this:

• Horizontal Profile - display the wind speed and direction along a line on the map. The display changes according to the weather slider in the bottom of the page.
• Ruler Path Profile - same as Horizontal Profile but the line is a ruler path so it doesn't have to be just a straight line.
• Meteogram - display the wind speed and direction on the marked map point over time. This is mainly useful for spotting when a wind shift is forecasted to happen.
• COG Isochrones - display how far your boat would sail if it sailed a direct line from it's current position to different directions according to the current forecast. You can change the display interval and limit from the advanced options.
• TWA Isochrones - display where your boat would sail if it sailed continously to different TWA's from it's current position.
• Clear Isochrones - clear the isochrone lines from map.
• Optimal Angles - this is the same as the optimum angles tool described below.
• Wind Log - the historical data of the wind your boat has experienced during the race (the history goes as far as this WxInspector window has been open).
• Boat Log - the historical performance data of your boat: speed, course and TWA.

Optimum Angles

The Optimum Angles is for easy calculation of VMG (both upwind and downwind), maximum boatspeed and especially VMC (Velocity Made Course) from the boat's polar. I will not go into detail what these terms actually mean but to be a good virtual sailor understanding them is a must. A good place to start learning is 76Trombone's blog.

Other boats speed and weather data in sollog

Other boats course in SOL can quite easily be roughly estimated from the client. It's also possible to get the current wind speed and angle on the location of a boat by setting the cursor on top of it. With this information together with the polar information you can roughly estimate the other boat's speed.

My understanding is that the more technically advanced solers might even have some automatic ways to get other boats speed and other information but for newcomers and not so technical people getting them can be time consuming and difficult.

Brainaid's sol toolbox has also the NMEA proxy which brings similar data from other boats as simulated AIS data to your computer. If you have the right navigation software installed you can see this data.

I have now added the other boats almost real time speed, course and wind data easily available to anyone interested in sollog. It can be educational to see how the top players sail and of course it's handy if you want to cover an opponent.

I was a bit uncertain first should I add this feature or not. It certainly reveals quite of a lot of information from the other boats. But when people in the race chat told me that similar information is already available I decided that it's probably more fair to have the data easily available for everyone.

Instructions how to see other boats data

The current data is showed only for boat lists, so you have to first define the names of the boats you are interested in seeing data from. For example for the Global Challenge Leg 3 which is currently running you can do that here (if you are reading this after that race has ended, you can't see any current data there as the boats are no longer sailing).

Type in the box name of the boat and click add. You can repeat this for all the boats you want and when ready click the "Latest data" (you can always come back to this page to add more boats later).

As an example you can look what the data looks like for the boats which were in top-5 when I was writing this.

You can then see the speed, heading, TWA, wind direction and speed of each listed boat. The data should be automatically updated every minute and it should be quite near the actual numbers the server is using. The data is calculated in the same way as you would do manually if you first estimated boats location & course from the client. Then do the same for the wind and estimate the speed from the polar information. The only difference is that the computer can do that same faster and with more detail.

DTF calculation problems near the polar area

As I shortly mentioned in my previous post, the DTF calculation can be weird if there are mark roundings near the polar area. I'll try here to explain how the calculation happens and why it fails near the poles.

For this explanation I must admit I have not tested it manually with the server code so I am not sure that everything is 100% correct. This is more like explanation of the way what I believe happens. There are other experienced SOL'ers who have also tried to explain this in the race chats and you are welcome to correct me in any detail I might have got wrong.

DTF calculation when rounding marks

As I explained in my previous post, SOL considers a mark rounded when you cross the line which represents half of the outer angle the mark makes to the route. If we again use the same example of approaching the mark from west and turning north the line would be SE of the mark (135 degrees).

How DTF calculation is affected by this theoretical "rounding line" then. Sometimes in sailing the best route around the mark doesn't go the near it which is the shortest path but boats can choose to round them "wide". SOL tries to anticipate this by calculating what is the boats shortest path to round the mark (cross the rounding detection line) and the shortest path from the rounding point to the next mark.

If the example we have is not near polar area or the distances are short, the boat's DTF is calculated via the mark until the bearing from the boat to the mark is 45 degrees (90 degrees to the rounding line). Only if the boat continues more southeast than that, then the anticipated rounding point comes into play and is used in the calculation. Usually this means that the weather pattern near the mark is such that wide rounding is better or the boat is wide for some reason and the route boat is going to sail can be pretty near the path used for DTF calculation. 

How this changes near the polar area

If we now think of the rounding line in Cape Horn, the rounding line starts from the mark and continues roughly in the direction 145 degrees SE ending to the South Pole. If you wonder how it ends to the Pole think of a vessel which starts from Cape Horn and continues to the compass course 145. If we ignore the problem of it running into ice or Antarctica it will end up as south as possible which is the South Pole. 

So, when the boats are at southern Pacific the DTF calculation tries to find the place where each one is nearest to the rounding line. One end of the line is at Cape Horn and the other is at South Pole. So, when the boats are still really far away from Cape Horn there can easily be a situation where a boat is nearer the pole than the next mark. So the path the DTF calculation uses is first from the boat's position to pole and then from there to the mark after Cape Horn (which is finish in case of Global Challenge leg 3). 

As the boat's distance to the South Pole depends how far south it is, in effect this means that before the boats are near Cape Horn (and here near means more than 1000 miles) their DTF is calculated via South Pole and the DTF's the game displays have no real meaning. Partly because of this I have added the distance to next mark as one of the parameters my sollog site displays. 

In reality SOL race engine tries to anticipate this problem a bit and the rounding line is limited not to go as far as the poles. The actual point SOL uses in the case of GC Leg 5 is at 83 degrees south and 34 west.

Possibility to fix the problems

The method SOL uses has it's obvious problems in the polar area as described above. Also other situation where it doesn't work very well is when the angle of the turn to the next mark is not very big, especially if the two marks are very near each others.

However, the method also has it's benefits. By anticipating the rounding point there very rarely are abrupt changes in the boat's DTF when rounding a mark. The algorithm is also relatively simple for the computer to calculate. 

The DTF calculation with it's problems is one of continuing subjects in SOL. Many different improvements have been suggested and some of them can perhaps be taken into use in the future. 

However, one essential thing has to be remembered when thinking this calculation. The server runs the DTF calculation after each "hop" (as described in last post) of the boat. This means that this code is run every 15 seconds for each boat racing so too complicated DTF calculation has the danger of slowing the server down.