Behind the Helm
We just put The Boat Docker through its biggest refit since it launched; a full pass on the look of the site and a real dig into the physics under the hood. None of it changes how you play. All of it changes how it feels. Here’s the rundown.
A dockside makeover
The setup page got rebuilt from the ground up. What used to be one long list of dropdowns is now organized into clear sections, Dock & Scenario, Vessel Setup, Wind & Current, Input. so you can see the shape of your session before you cast off, instead of scrolling through settings blind. The whole page now runs on a navy-and-brass palette pulled straight from our own logo, with a proper hero section and a styled “Cast Off” button that actually looks like something on a helm.
Speaking of the logo — it was nearly invisible against a dark background before. It now sits on its own backing plate so it reads clearly no matter what’s behind it.
The “New to the simulator?” and “Have suggestions?” links also got a promotion. They used to live in slide-out tabs on the screen edges — easy to miss, easy to ignore. They’re now proper cards with icons, sitting right where you’ll actually see them.
The simulator, repainted
The docking simulator itself kept every line of its physics untouched, but the whole visual chrome got a pass:
- The dashboard, gauges, buttons, and indicator needles were recolored from generic grays and silvers into the same navy-and-brass palette as the rest of the site.
- The boat, the water, and the dock texture were all regraded — richer navy-teal water, warm weathered-teak dock planks, and a hull rendered in a navy/steel/cream duotone instead of flat gray.
- The simulator page itself picked up a branded background and a small “Setup” badge to get back to the configuration screen, instead of dropping you onto a bare white page.
Water that actually behaves like water
This one took a few passes to get right, and it’s worth explaining, because “make the water move” turned out to be three separate problems:
- Getting it moving at all. The water now scrolls based on the actual current speed and direction you set on the setup page — and it moves at the same rate the current physically drags the boat, so what you see matches what you feel at the wheel.
- Making the tile invisible. A single water image repeating across the screen shows a seam where it repeats. We fixed the texture so its own edges blend into each other, then found the real culprit was a second issue: an overall light/dark gradient baked into the original photo (one side was measurably brighter than the other). Flattening that out, and switching to the canvas’s native tiling instead of manually stitching copies together, got rid of the seam for good.
- Getting the speed right. The current’s motion was tuned to move at the same physical rate that it actually drifts the boat — so a strong current looks and feels equally strong, instead of the visual and the physics disagreeing with each other.
Physics with more consequence
This was the deepest change of the round, and came out of a straightforward question: is there room to improve the physics? Four real gaps turned up:
- Hitting things used to be free. The boat would bounce off a piling or a wall with zero speed penalty — you could ram the dock at full throttle and lose nothing but position. Now, contact with anything bleeds off speed fast, and it compounds the longer you lean into it. Running aground now actually feels like running aground.
- General handling got more resistance. Both linear and rotational damping were increased, so the boat settles and stops turning a bit faster once you ease off — less floaty, more deliberate.
- Mooring lines stopped being rigid rods. Lines used to snap the boat’s position back the instant they came taut — like hitting the end of a chain. They now pull back gradually, like an actual line stretching under load, and bleed a bit of speed while they’re under tension.
- Wind now cares which way you’re facing. A boat presents a lot more surface area to the wind broadside-on than bow-first. Wind’s push now scales with your heading relative to it — point into the wind and it barely nudges you, lie broadside and it really leans on you. Exactly like the real thing.
- A quiet bug got fixed along the way. The collision system was already built to detect multiple obstacles at once: clip a corner where two walls meet, and it was supposed to account for both. A single overwritten variable meant it only ever remembered the last one it saw. That’s fixed now, so corner cases resolve the way they were always meant to.
One experiment that didn’t make the cut
We also tried giving the boat sprite a bit of drop-shadow depth, to make it feel like it was sitting above the water rather than printed on it. In testing, it ended up hurting performance enough to make the whole simulation feel sluggish — so we pulled it back out. Sometimes the honest update is “we tried it, and it wasn’t worth it.”
Try it out
Everything above is live in the setup flow and the simulator. If a current shoves you further than expected, or a taut line finally feels like it’s got some give — that’s not your imagination. Go put it through its paces.