Hey, I just watched your Timosthenes feature video and it's pretty impressive. One thing that bothered me (and bothers me about games with boats in general) is that they move more or less like cars. I was thinking of maybe getting involved and coding a patch for more realistic movement, but I wanted to check if it's something you'd actually want first. I had in mind:
Acceleration and deceleration based on mass and sail area
Heeling
Pitching might be nice too
Different points of sail with different speeds, based on some invisible global wind vector. So square sailers will be faster downwind, lateens will be faster on a reach, both will be slower upwind etc.
Let me know if any of that sounds interesting.
Thanks, I'll start reading through that documentation over the next few weeks. Let me know what decisions you come to about which features would actually work.