The virtual offshore sailing game V.L.M

A full test of the virtual offshore race game V.L.M (v-l-m.org), in which I will describe the game, explain which tools you should use and how to race seriously while keeping your time investment under control.

A few introduction words about virtual offshore sailing games

Before diving into the test itself, let’s start with an overall presentation of offshore sailing games for those who are not already familiar with them.

In an eSailing game, you control a virtual racing offshore sailing boat and compete with other virtual skippers to win a race that typically runs over hundreds or thousands of miles.

Most of the races mirror real sailing races and players can usually compare their strategies with those of the race real skippers as well as their relative positions on the map.

Races are hosted on servers that run 24/24 and boat positions are updated periodically whether you are connected to the game or not.

The games are intended to be realistic. As in real life, boat speed depends on wind direction and speed coupled with the race boat characteristics. Boats crash when they go ashore … but fortunately can resume their course, suffering a penalty in the process.

Wind characteristics used to calculate boat movements come from the most recent weather forecasts published by the NOAA, the US “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration”. Weather data is updated regularly to stick to the real weather as much as possible.

There are nevertheless many real sailing parameters that are not implemented in virtual offshore sailing games as current and waves. I suppose it is to keep the game reasonably simple and to avoid overload the servers.

All games focus on navigation only, that is building the fastest sailing course to rally point B from point A. So don’t expect to learn how to handle a sailing boat with these games. There were not designed for that and leave that matter to other specialized games.

Where does V.L.M come from?

For those who are curious about this strange name, V.L.M stands for “Virtual Loup de Mer”, “loup de mer” meaning “sea-dog” in French.

Started in 2005 by a French developer, the project has grown over the years to reach today an outstanding maturity. It is still very active, with regular technical updates and more than 100 races played every year. It is managed  and supported by a team of enthusiastic volunteers. V.L.M is a completely free to play open source game .

The game (v-l-m.org)

As a V.L.M virtual skipper, you “own” up to 12 boats. It makes possible for you to compete in different races at the same time, as long as you stick to the golden rule “One Man, One Race, One Boat” (OMOROB).

Races are very diverse, ranging from the regular week-end races (one each week, starting on Friday evening and arriving usually on Sunday), to middle term races spanning over 5 to 10 days up to big round the world races (at least one per year).

The weather is updated every 6 hours on the V.L.M server, as soon as new files are available from the NOAA service. The V.L.M team publishes in real time the weather files that are used on the server, so that players can work their navigation strategies out of the same data used by the game.

Your boat is equipped with a virtual automatic pilot that offers you a choice between 5 steering mode: “Constant heading”, “Constant wind angle”, “orthodromic “, “VMG” and “VBVMG”. “VMG” and “VBVMG” are very V.L.M specific. “VMG” will automatically set the best wind angle towards a specific WP. “VBVMG” will do the same with the addition of a useful automatic tack feature. You will find a full description of each of these steering modes in the V.L.M documentation.

The game also handles up to 5 delayed orders, meaning that you can program a maximum of 5 steering orders at specific a specific time. For each of your delayed order, you can associate one of the 5 available steering mode. It makes you possible to program a full navigation plan for several hours, or even several days in certain specific cases, meanwhile leaving you free to process other personal tasks.

The 5 steering modes associated with the delayed orders offer to the player a wide range of potential strategies that makes for me the game very interesting.

Regarding languages, V.L.M is already available in 5 languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian). Volunteers are welcome for other languages.

The modes

You can play according to 4 modes plus an extra fifth that can be combined with the 4 others. Modes have been introduced to make possible for anyone to play, and especially for those who want to keep the time they invest in the game under control. Each mode has its own set of rules, and exists to meet a specific need.

1 – Normal mode

This is the V.L.M native and most popular mode ; the only one also fully supported by the software. Here, all of the game features are available without any restriction as long as you respect the OMOROB rule. You can notably change your boat course as often as you wish. You will choose this open mode if your main objective is to win the race.

2 – LMNH (Look Mum, No Hand)

LMNH is an original mode, in that you can’t change the programmed delayed orders of your boat after the start of the game at all. You have up to 5 delayed orders that you need to set up before the start and then you just sit and watch.

This mode is popular for week-end races. You prepare everything on Friday evening and then you are free to enjoy your week-end. Your boat will sail without you 🙂

3 – OAD (Once a day)

In this mode, you are granted a unique one hour time slot per 24 hours to program your boat.

I am particularly found of this mode for long races like the Vendee globe or the Jules Verne trophy. The idea of this mode is to minimize the time that you need to spend each day to update your course. Perfect when you don’t have much time to devote to your race.

4 – SOS (Save Our Sleep)

This last mode is a recent mode that has been introduced for those who want to preserve their 8 hours of sleep, but feel frustrated by the unique daily OAD update.

In this mode, you can process a maximum of 3 out of 4 weather updates, the “silent” update giving you ample time to sleep as much as you need. The impact on performance is low as compared with the sleep gain advantage in my opinion, and I even succeeded in winning a race in that mode 🙂

I personally systematically use this mode for all small and medium races.

5 – NoRouter mode

This mode bans the use of any routing or optimization computer program. Some name this mode the “Brain Only Mode” 🙂 Navigation software is only allowed to visualize your route and facilitate dead reckoning calculations.

This mode exists for those who don’t find much pleasure in clicking computer buttons and prefer to use their brain 🙂 This mode can be combined with any of the first 4 modes

This set of playing modes is unique to V.L.M and gives to the player the ability to play according to his objective and his available time. It’s a big advantage of V.L.M over its competitors.

Finally, let’s note that all modes except the Normal one are handled by the community and rely on trust for its members to stick to the rules.

The Interface

The game web interface has been rebuilt recently and is a huge improvement as compared with the historical one.

You can from there control every aspects of the game: Create new boats, parse races, check their details, register in them, get ranking … and of course control your boat.

An important and very useful feature is the “track estimate”, which is a precise and reliable dead reckoning of your boat future full course. I say full course, because it includes the full set of your delayed orders. I personally use this feature to ensure I won’t crash ashore. It’s precise to the pixel.

So, does it means that we have here the perfect interface that regroups all that is needed to play and compete effectively? Well, unfortunately, it’s not the case yet.

First, the track estimate feature, although reliable, must be recalculated after a page reload each time you change a delayed order. It makes delayed course adjustments long and painful.

Secondly, you don’t have any routing tool available. These tools are today necessary if you want to be competitive in any virtual sailing game.

The tools

V.L.M players have 2 different tools to help them play and be competitive: qtVlm and frogTools.

1 – qtVlm

qtVlm is a powerful navigation tool available for every main OS (Windows, Apple, Linux, iOS and Android). You can use it in real mode for your real life navigation or in V.L.M mode. That is this latter mode that we will use to play V.L.M.

V.L.M is completely integrated to qtVLM. You can register in a race, visualize way points and competitors and send orders to the V.L.M server directly from the tool. It’s in fact almost a full V.L.M interface in itself.

Once registered in a race, you will typically launch a routing calculation that calculates the most effective course for the race or for at least a part of it.

Once the routing is calculated, qtVlm will automatically turn it into a route for your boat to follow. You can afterwards tune the route manually to optimize your course.

Once your route is ready, qtVlm will create automatically the right delayed orders and let you export them automatically to the V.L.M server.

Once the race has started, qtVlm will then automatically update in real time the boat position.

qtVlm can also display on the map your competitors, a selection of them or even the real boats position for V.L.M races that mirror real races, when data is available.

These are only the most basic possibilities of qtVlm. You have hundreds more to micro tune your navigation.

I finally would like to point out the exceptional support that the software creator offers to its users. I cannot count the number of questions I have posted that were answered within minutes. A must!

All in all, qtVlm is a perfect navigation tool for V.L.M, and the only one you will ever need if you decide to use it. Another advantage is that what you will learn playing V.L.M will be reusable in your real life navigation afterwards. qtVlm integration was for me one of the main reason why I chose V.L.M over its competitors.

Link: www.meltemus.com

2 – FrogTools

FroogTools is the second tool available for V.L.M players. I won’t be able to tell much about it, as it has been written with the Silverlight language that is not available for my Linux computers, and that more generally only works on relatively old browsers.

I will just say that frogTools still has a strong community of enthusiast users among V.L.M players.

Link: http://silverlight.v-l-m.org/frogtools.html

The community

V.L.M benefits of a very active community of players who communicate via the chat and forum https://www.virtual-winds.org

The community is helpful and answers very quickly to questions, usually in a matter of minutes. We can thank here the game administrators who all show an outstanding commitment.

Because of the game origin, most of its members are French, but there is an English speaking area. From my experience, answers are answered here as quickly as for its French counterpart.

Races typically gather around 100 virtual skippers, with 20-30 very good ones who will offer you a real challenge. After about one year and a half of regular practicing, I now regularly finish in the top 20, with a few incursions in the top 10 skipper grail 🙂

The V.L.M community is up to now the best one I found. Its reactivity, web forum technical quality and general atmosphere will help you feel supported and connected.

How does V.L.M compares to its competitors

V.L.M has 2 competitors that I know of: Virtual Regatta offshore and Sailonline.org

Virtual Regatta

Virtual Regatta (VR) is a commercial game widely known thanks to its very effective marketing and PR campaigns. Like most, I was introduced to eSailing games through it.

Although benefiting from a nice designed web interface, VR is unfortunately deeply tainted by its business model that makes your boat speed and other needed features dependent on your ability to give them real money. So you don’t really compete with other human virtual sailors, but rather with their purse.

Feeling constantly manipulated into maximizing VR profit and fundamentally disagreeing with its business model, I eventually decided to move out of this game. I play some time to time a race to keep in touch with the game evolution, but, up to now, all I’ve seen has confirmed me in my choice.

Sailonline.org

Sailonline.org is a non-for-profit and community-owned company and is not very different from V.L.M in its spirit: A few passionate founders whose objective is to provide the best virtual sailing game to their community without any profit maximizing goal. I like that 🙂

The game web interface is sober and offers basic functionalities to control your boat. Unfortunately, it completely lacks the critical ability to display the future course of your boat resulting from your delayed orders.

In order to do that, you need to rely on external tools that are difficult to find and install (DC checker, brainaid, kroppyer ) or to integrate to the game (qtVlm). All in all, it took me several weeks to find and successfully install an operational set of 4 tools that I need to chain to visualize and update my navigation.

The community is mostly English speaking and friendly. The main communication tool is the race chat, the forum being unfortunately almost dead (at least, that is my experience). Each race gathers about 200+ players.

Now that my tools are up and running, I try to play a few races during the year. I am thankful to its active and nice team, but it still lacks in my opinion a good set of easy to set up and fully integrated tools to become the shining game it could be.

All in all

After 2 years of intensive testing with all existing Virtual offshore sailing games I could find , I eventually chose V.L.M over its competitors.

The maturity of the game, its non commercial aspect, its perfect integration with qtVlm and its great community make for me a winning combo. It certainly has a learning curve and you will probably need a few races to be competitive, but all in all, I think it is really worth the effort and you won’t be disappointed.