Real-Time Simulation of a Sailboat

Game programming and real-time simulation systems are usually based on key-framed and motion-capture animations. Introduction of HAVOK and AGEIA PhysX technologies released game developers from some burden of predefined animation paths and shifted problem to autonomous modeling of physics. Recent developments of graphic shader languages along with the interoperability of COLLADA opens path to interchange of geometry, textures and physics between different run-time environments. Real-time computer graphics systems are currently limited to rigid-body physics that is in sharp contrast with off-line rendering environments. The paper presents a proposition of real-time simulation of a sailboat exploring both rigid-bodies and soft-bodies. The elastic model is based on cloth simulation without ripping capability.