The boat brainaid is available freely to whoever want's to play. The password is "sol".

I would want for your boat to wait for your return.

Fair winds.

I hope everything is OK, and wish you a speedy return to the SOL community. You are going to be missed!

Regards,

Toño

Hi. The basic idea is one boat-one player. Some users share boats and help each other out and that is totally ok, but SOL does not really like that boats are totally freely available as in the example above. I will therefore ask brainaid to change the password.

--- Last Edited by Jakob Kuttenkeuler at 2009-11-05 08:32:00 ---

OK. I understand. I will change my password back, so no public brainaid for you folks...

The original discussion between me and Jakob that lead to my (probably over reaction) resign was about fairness. Fairness is important to me, I fully agree with Jakob in this point.

A little background: I am a programmer on Unix. I have been using Unix since I first touched a computer (still young enough to say so ). In Unix, when you have to solve tedious recurring tasks you write a small program or a script to do the task for you. I do this everyday, I script google maps to resolve postal codes of addresses for example.

I did the same for SOL, programming DCs from routes that I calculate. I calculate a lot of routes, for Leg 5 of the Volvo from China to Rio I calculated about 15000 routes. I manually judge all this data and conclude with a track to follow during the next few hours. This is quite a bit of work, and it is not easy. More data is good, you can see that if you look at my results. But it is not easy to judge between all these options. I sometimes spend an hour to decide whether to up or down a single degree...

Now, after finishing the real brain work above, I use a script to program my planed track into SOL using DCs (delayed commands). I did not think about this being unfair at all, it simply was the logical step for me.

But I see this may make a difference, as the "normal" user with the client has to calculate decimal hours to enter as delay. And has to click for each DC to set.

So I will pause racing until I have some solution to make this fair again. As there is no way to verify I am still using this script or not (I can insert random pauses into my access to SOL, so this looks like a human entering DCs), I have come up with a different idea:

I will start building a SOL toolbox for everybody to use on sol.brainaid.de. This toolbox will contain a DC editor where you can modify DC times or CC/TWA values and be able to copy-paste a list of DCs into. I will also make other (smaller) utilities available in this toolbox. I will use stop using my scripts and only use this toolbox and the SOL client to do my boat control.

I hope this sounds fair to you all, I believe this will give some more insight on what I am able to do and some cool features to use for all of you.

Please give me some time to come online with this, I am away this weekend doing the last real life sail on our X-37 and away next weekend getting the boat out of the water. If there would not be the necessary job for money I would stay on board for the week in between, maybe do a quick trip to Scotland But that's an impossibility and of topic here...

Feel free to comment, even if you have objections against this. I want this discussion open to keep this a fair sport.

Cheers,
Eddie

Tools that enhance the feature
set available for everyone
sounds like an admirable resolution

~ Kudos

--- Last Edited by Aethereal at 2009-11-06 02:31:49 ---

I was with SOL from the beginning and we raced against eachother without using any extra tools... It was great fun because the winner of the race did it without support, just using his skills and experience of weather interpretation. Last night we had again a discussion with some die-hards of the first hour and they all agree on making a separate division within SOL for racing WITHOUT any extra tools. This is the only manner to avoid discussions as we have now for months. So I think we have a point to split up SOL in different levels, e.g. beginners (newbies), old school, routers, ... Still then it is up to yourselve to be honnest enough to take part in the correct category...

--
I long suspected as much and I feel it is not all that different from what others are doing. In the chat I read about people using homegrown tools all the time, varying from Excel spreadsheets to full-blown weather routing applications. You just took it a step further than most.

Eddie C. Dost said @ 2009-11-06 01:03:23:

I will start building a SOL toolbox for everybody to use on sol.brainaid.de.

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Please, do. I can use all the help I can get . However, you should not have to feel you have to. While I do understand where Sailport's objections are coming from, blaming the guy who is really good at it is the easy way out. I feel that excitement in play, a well-balanced playing field and so on, are primarily the responsibilty of game organizers, not its users. Already in January, shortly after I became member, it occured to me that in order to make the game more attractive to more people SOL needed a more advanced and varied ranking system, yet most changes since then appear to be cosmetic.

Eddie C. Dost said @ 2009-11-06 01:03:23:

Feel free to comment, even if you have objections against this. I want this discussion open to keep this a fair sport.

--
Again, it is my opinion that the game in itself is fair enough insofar that rewards will come to those who are willing and able to put in the large amounts of time, thought, dedication and energy you and several others are. Having said that, I feel Sailport should also accomodate for people who need their 8 hours of sleep and/or hold a day job.

Good to have you back.
Philip

Good News! Glad to know you are coming back!!

Your toolbox seems like a great idea! As far as fairness in concerned... You should never apologize for "building a better mousetrap"! Keep doing what you do best and don't listen to the naysayers!!

Regards

I thought about designing my own program right in the beginning but decided to have some fun first and learn the basics.

Make no mistake people, it is a very competitive world. IRL in the Americas cup for example, the teams eke out every last edge in boatspeed they can make. Be it in boat, sail, keel design etc. The weather would also be analised to the nth degree. Just to be able to better the opposition. In all walks of life there are amateurs and professionals.....Hmm. The choice is mine "Get better or accept my level as it is"

Ive been sailing SOL for maybe 4 months and my competitive instinct says, get the software and spend more time and thus take my finishing positions to the next level.

I say well done all you folk that have engineered your own systems to sail faster. You have set me a very high standard to reach and this can only be a good thing.

Nevertheless...Man I'm enjoying this new hobby and Hell its costing me lots of money for the internet access but its all worth it for sure