If you always dreamed of sailing but you couldn’t do it for some reason, let’s say you didn’t have enough money to buy your boat or don’t live in a city by the sea, this can be a nice way of getting in touch with this amazing activity. Virtual Sailor, which first version was released in 1999 – almost a decade ago - is maybe on of the most sophisticated naval simulator in existence for the PC today. This is thanks to years of feedback and improvement and years of accumulated experience in naval simulation. No need to say that is simulation software so, even when it has a great development, it won’t ever be like actually sailing, feeling the wind in your face.
In terms of simulation, this tool is quite accurate regarding to water and ship dynamics. Take into account that the behavior of sailing ships in the water is an extremely complex problem to analyze. The program creates mathematical models to recreate that behavior and it does it really well. So any experience you get virtually sailing with this software will count on your experience later in the real life sailing.
A strong aspect of this application is that, even when it works on a very complex problem, its interface is extremely easy to understand and use, so you can save all efforts to the sailing itself. Two main modules compose this simulation tool: sail in a boat, and create a boat. In the sailing module you just choose one of the boats available in the database and start sailing. In the creation module, you can start from a pre existing boat and create your own. In addition you will be configuring weather conditions, location to navigate, among other aspects. Sceneries can be made by importing elevation data found in many sources throughout the internet.
All data structures and formats used by the program are fully documented for the purpose of adding third party add-ons, and indeed over the years of its existence, thousands of these add-ons were made by many dedicated users of VS.
This application is available to be purchased online on the developer’s web site. Updates are published periodically so you can download them and install them in your version of Virtual Sailor.
Virtual Sailor can run on a wide variety of machines, since it is built to use DirectX9 it is essential that your computer has a video card which is capable of supporting 3D hardware acceleration, and is compatible with DirectX8 or better.
To make full use of the program the following minimal configuration should be met:

* Pentium 3 with 800 GHz with 256 MB RAM.
* Video card with DirectX8 compatibility and 32 MB RAM.
* Windows 2000, XP, Vista
* DirectX9 installed.