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Row Your Boat: typo fixes

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Tyler Hallada
2025-08-25 01:57:07 -04:00
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parent 08d5ab98da
commit cfa8480f5d
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_posts/2025-08-24-row-your-boat.md
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@@ -181,9 +181,9 @@ BoatRef.SetPos x, BoatX
BoatRef.SetPos y, BoatY
```
To actually change the angle of the boat depending on the player look angle, I developed a similar solution to Jason1’s. Except, instead of locking the boat angle directly to player angle, I kept them independent and instead _gradually_ modified the boat angle towards the player angle every frame. This made the turning feel much more natural and gave the rowboat realistic weight. The rate of turning also slows down as the boat speed slows down, which feels more natural.
To actually change the angle of the boat depending on the player look angle, I developed a similar solution to Jason1’s. Except, instead of locking the boat angle directly to player angle, I kept them independent and instead _gradually_ modified the boat angle towards the player angle every frame. This made the turning feel much more natural and gave the rowboat realistic weight. The rate of turning also slows down as the boat speed slows down.
I also added a dead-zone a few degrees out from either side of the center line of the boat so if the player moves slightly it doesn’t cause the whole boat to move. This made turning the boat much more intentional and avoided the boat from weaving too much side to side when the player is just trying to go forward.
I also added a dead-zone a few degrees out from either side of the center line of the boat so if the player moves slightly it doesn’t cause the whole boat to move. This made turning the boat much more intentional and avoided the boat weaving too much side to side when the player was just attempting to go forward.
The turn rate also decays. So if the player stops turning the boat by looking directly ahead, the boat will naturally slow turning until it stops turning.
@@ -333,13 +333,13 @@ After perfecting the movement of the boat over water, I already had the necessar
At this point in the project, I was heavily using [Claude](https://claude.ai/) to help me out with the script. To be honest, as a non-game developer, a lot of the 3D math involved in this project was starting to get a bit over my head. But, Claude was an amazing tool at breaking it down for me in a way I could understand and served as a great super-powered [rubber duck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) for debugging issues.
At some point while developing the boat dragging code with Claude, I had the great idea to suggest it create an [artifact](https://www.anthropic.com/news/build-artifacts?subjects=announcements) by converting the OBScript code we was working on to the equivalent in JavaScript and display an interactable 2D visualization of the dragging simulation on a HTML canvas. This was **super** helpful in debugging a ton of issues with the dragging code because it tightened the feedback loop between making a change and then testing it out to see if it worked in the visualization. I spent a lot of time waiting to Oblivion Remastered to start up and load saves while working on this mod, so this was huge. I also told Claude to include lots of sliders for all the different variables in the dragging simulation so I could quickly tweak with them within the visualization and get the feel of the dragging really refined without even needing to load up the game.
At some point while developing the boat dragging code with Claude, I had the great idea to suggest it create an [artifact](https://www.anthropic.com/news/build-artifacts?subjects=announcements) by converting the OBScript code I was working on to the equivalent in JavaScript and display an interactable 2D visualization of the dragging simulation on a HTML canvas. This was **super** helpful in debugging a ton of issues with the dragging code because it tightened the feedback loop between making a change and then testing it out to see if it worked in the visualization. I spent a lot of time waiting to Oblivion Remastered to start up and load saves while working on this mod, so this was huge. I also told Claude to include lots of sliders for all the different variables in the dragging simulation so I could quickly tweak with them within the visualization and get the feel of the dragging really refined without even needing to load up the game.
[![Screenshot of a Claude artifact web page with the title “Oblivion Boat Dragging Visualization” with a canvas displaying crude shapes representing a boat and rope and a bunch of “Dragging Parameters” slider inputs below](/img/blog/rowyourboat-dragging-visualization.jpg)](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/23380c6b-c9a4-430d-bd86-781ae588739f)
And, now that I have this artifact, it serves as great documentation for how the dragging code works! [Try it out for yourself here](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/23380c6b-c9a4-430d-bd86-781ae588739f).
I will certainly be using LLMs to create visualizations of tricky simulations in the future. This is the sort of thing where I think AI could truly help 10x the speed and quality of code projects. To do this in the pre-LLMs days would have taken hours. Enough time that it just wouldn't have felt worth it. But now that I can have an LLM spit it out in seconds, it would be stupid to not do it and reap the benefits of it.
I will certainly be using LLMs to create visualizations of tricky simulations in the future. This is the sort of thing where I think AI could truly help 10x the speed and quality of code projects. To do this in the pre-LLMs days would have taken hours. Enough time that it just wouldn't have felt worth it. But now that I can have an LLM spit it out in seconds, it would be dumb not to do it and reap the benefits of it.
The dragging code tries to simulate the player dragging the boat as if they were pulling a rope attached to the center of the boat. This allows the player to walk freely around the boat without it moving as long as they don’t make the rope taut by walking more than the rope’s length away from the center of the boat (the white circle in the visualization). Once they do, it will pull the boat with a force relative to how far away the player moved. The boat itself has friction with the ground which moderates this effect, since I wanted the dragging effect to feel slow and less practical than rowing it on water.