Vessels and Situation Downloads Available
I’ll start out by wishing everyone a happy New Year, may 2025 be a year of good fortune for all!
We’ve had a few requests from people about what we would recommend as an initial set of boats and scenarios, also called situations on the splash screen. We put together a couple of downloads that we think might be helpful. These are generally for people building their systems based on this website as a turnkey system will have them by default, but you can save these in case you ever lose the files somehow. The base Virtual Sailor software only contains a small number of vessels, which in many cases are not necessarily the most useful for our purposes. Although your needs might vary depending on your area and situation, we also list the libraries and links to the items mentioned in this post, you can peruse to find a broad collection of vessels.
There was also a need for some preloaded scenarios which the software calls situations on the splash screen. The most requested was a docking scenario. The trick to these and in particular the docking one, is finding the resource within the scenery. Finding the docks is a matter of trial and error moving around in the scenery looking for likely locations along shorelines. You may very well find one in your local area. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to examine every area. If you find one please let me know and I’ll add it to the list. I have identified a couple and used them to create docking exercises. The downloadsare about 116M.
Vessels in the downloads
- BAYLINER 3058
- Carver3807
- Cruiser – General purpose cruiser with integrated radar and depth
- Day-Cruiser – Deck bost
- Finn – Small dingy sailboat
- HINCKLEY
- Jet_Ski
- Jts – Large Cruiser, workboat
- Justin – Small 21′
- Mako264 – Center console
- Mini_sub
- Mini_tug
- Ranger – Gunboat
- Sailboat_old
- Sail_boat
- Sunset33 v.1.0 – Cruiser
- Swordfish 23′ (Grey)
- towboat
Admittedly, it’s an eclectic mix, but you can pick and choose. We found that these served as a good base for creating situations with a mix of boats that can be loaded and operated both manually and autonomously, allowing for many possible scenarios and interactions limited only by your imagination. Some respond very aggressively, like the Mako, and some less so. You can try different models and configurations to see what works for you. One file in the download is instructions to install the vessels. It consists of copying the directories and files to the location shown.
Situations you can download
- Last Position.txt
- 1210 Training Chart.jpg
- 1210 Training Chart.txt
- California Test Scenery.jpg
- California Test Scenery.txt
- Cargo Delivery.jpg
- Cargo Delivery.txt
- Dingy Sail.jpg
- Dingy Sail.txt
- Docking.jpg
- Docking.txt
- Empty Scene.jpg
- Empty Scene.txt
- Harbor Patrol.jpg
- Harbor Patrol.txt
- Sailboat Race.jpg
- Sailboat Race.txt
- Situations.zip
- Tampa Docking.jpg
- Tampa Docking.txt
Many of these come with the software so they remain to be used for demonstration and practice learning the software. Feel free to delete any you don’t want/need but maybe keep a copy around just in case. The .txt file contains all the parameters that define the scenario, as long as you don’t save a situation with the same name it will always load the same so you have a repeatable exercise. The .jpg file is just a snapshot of the situation to make selecting the one you want easier. Like the vessels, the situations have an installation notes file included.
We are currently developing a comparable process for the suggested landscapes, which is more intricate and involves substantially larger file(s), about 10GB. However, we anticipate completing this task in the near future.
Become a member of our Facebook group, this is where we provide updates and general information. To witness some practical illustrations of the topics covered as well as others, check out the tutorial we conducted for our District.
