Come Sailaway with us and dev Richard Knol at 3 PM ET on Twitch!

Modeling believable, realistic physics in simulation games is tricky business -- especially when the world your players traverse is the shifting, bobbing, roiling expanse of Earth's oceans.

But that's exactly what Orbcreations' Richard Knol is trying to recreate in Sailaway, a new game that bills itself as "the most accurate simulation of sailing for PC and Mac." Even if you aren't into the actual sport of sailing, Sailaway is worth studying because it puts so much emphasis on realism, modeling everything from boat physics to the dynamics of wind on sails to the position of the stars in the sky. 

Knol himself is an avid sailor, and he's agreed to join us on Twitch today at 12 PM Pacific/ 3 PM Eastern to chat about his work on the game, as well as what he's learned from developing and selling a hardcore simulation game on Steam's Early Access service.

We'll be playing Sailaway and doing our best not to run aground or smash into any other sailors (did we mention it's all online, and pulls from actual NOAA ocean and weather data?)  so tune in and float your own questions to Richard via Twitch chat.

If you want to be automatically notified about this stream and others we do in the future, make sure to subscribe to the Gamasutra Twitch channel for a smorgasbord of gameplay commentary, developer interviews and editor roundtables.