The trailer, rendered from a recipe

The trailer for v0.28.1 is out: 21 shots in 107 seconds, from mirror-calm water at L’Anse-Saint-Jean to a 30-knot storm run. Watch it on YouTube.

Why a recipe

The game changes every day, and a trailer cut by hand is out of date within a week. So the trailer is a file, shots.json, that describes every shot: the place, the weather, the time and date, where the boat starts and what course it holds, the sails and engine, the whales, the camera move, the menus on screen and the title.

Each shot runs the game once and writes its frames to disk:

• 2560 by 1440 at 150% screen percentage;
• a fixed 30 fps timestep, so a shot renders the same way every time;
• the scenery is given time to load in full detail before the camera rolls.

Then an ffmpeg edit adds the titles, half-second crossfades and the music. After an update we render the trailer again, or only the shots that changed.

New in this cut

Seven shots show what arrived since the last trailer:

• visual wind, the light streaks that show where the air goes;
• a close-up of the masthead Windex;
• the jib wing-on-wing, dead downwind;
• a race checkpoint on the water;
• the storm run, 30 knots with rain and lightning;
• a tutorial card on the water;
• the Activities menu.

Close-ups now aim at the heeled masthead, and the camera stays two metres above the nearest wave crest, so it stays clear of the water in heavy weather.