Windward How To Play
Margaretha Palone
The Windward Mall play area in Kāneʻohe, Oahu, Hawaii, is an immersive play experience from the expert design team at Soft Play. This experiential play space enables younger kids to explore Hawaii-themed elements while their parents take a break from shopping.
Streamlining play was one of the main drives of the new design for the Windward Mall play space. The previous Hokulea canoe-themed area had kids coming off the play structures and landing directly onto the path of other kids playing, which caused a higher risk for accidents. With the new structure, kids can go down the slides or jump into the main pathways on the sides of the play space without running into others.
Since the audience of the Windward Mall play area is young kids, the team at Soft Play had to develop play elements to easily withstand heavy traffic. All structures have nonporous, naturally antibacterial finishes to make these elements easy to clean. We also use high-quality materials to ensure each structure remains in excellent condition for years.
Thanks to help from Soft Play, the Windward Mall play area saw a huge increase in popularity after completing renovations. Many local moms were quick to publish their praise of the improved play area as well. With the updated play space, kids have the opportunity to:
Since the creation of Soft Play in 1984, we have been a trustworthy provider of premier play equipment. Our expert team is happy to work with you to develop a custom theme that meets your budget and space requirements. We invite you to request a quote online or connect with a local representative to learn more about our custom-designed systems.
After my first two hours with Windward, the open-world sailing RPG from Tasharen Entertainment, I had a single thought in my head: is this all there is? After four more hours, I had another thought: if this is all there is, why the hell can't I stop playing it?
I'm of two minds about nearly every aspect of Windward. I love games I can pick up quickly, and Windward definitely fits that bill. Within a few minutes of playing you'll have entirely grasped the basics of the game. Engage in ship-to-ship combat with pirates and enemy factions, capture towns, sentry posts, and lighthouses (or build your own), turn a profit by transporting cargo or passengers from one port to another, and use those profits to upgrade your ship and crew or buy a bigger, better ship. Sailing is a snap, using either WASD or the mouse, and the space bar to drop anchor. Wind isn't much of a concern: it helps you reach top speed when it's blowing in your favor, but even when it's not you'll keep moving right along.
Thing is, there's really not much beyond those basics. Every town you visit will have a handful of missions, but these missions are nearly always the same and you'll wind up doing them dozens of times over. In combat, your gunners auto-fire while you and your enemy circle each other, and if you've unlocked special attacks you can use them to shred sails, entangle rigging, or set ships on fire with barrels of flaming grog. Despite dozens of victories and a number of losses, however, I have no memorable stories to tell. One battle feels like the next, and capturing towns only requires bombarding sentry towers and then parking offshore. With simple systems, repetitive tasks, and incremental rewards, Windward feels like a grind from almost the moment you set sail.
None of that really explains why I can't seem to stop playing it. I can't even really explain it, other than that there's is a sort of enjoyable mindlessness to Windward, a soothing and relaxing routine that I can settle into, letting the hours drift by while my ship carves a familiar path through the sea. Slowly chipping away at enemy territory until you've conquered a new section of the grid is satisfying, and the occasional worthwhile stash of booty found in the open sea can be exciting, but most of what I like is that it's a small series of activities that don't require a lot of effort.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Windward provides a beautiful little procedurally generated world to spend time in. The sun shimmers off the waves, wisps of clouds drift by overhead, barely visible shipwrecks lurk beneath the water, seagulls and sharks circle your ship, and friendly AI captains shout greetings or offer tips on where best to buy and sell goods. The physics are fun: while attacking land-based towers it's neat to watch your teeny cannonballs roll and rebound against the rocks, and explosions, while tiny, are still glorious. The music and sound effects are great, and the menus and UI are simple to understand and unobtrusive.
I guess the question is: how simple is too simple? I do appreciate games that don't require the endless scouring of wikis and a doctorate from Minmax University, but it's still hard for me not to wish for a little something deeper in virtually every aspect of Windward. A bit more of a reward for exploration, more interesting features in the worlds you can generate, perhaps a few more options for ship management and a shade more depth to the economy. Even multiplayer didn't feel appreciably different than single-player, there were just more ships sailing around (and a fair bit of lag). Windward is a wonderful setting and worthy framework for a game, but while the ocean is beautiful there isn't much beneath the surface.
Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Christopher LivingstonSocial Links NavigationSenior EditorChris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
Thanks to the recent Steam Pirate Sale and my friend Alex, I started playing Windward. For technical reasons, we had to set up a dedicated server which turned out to be fairly simple and has the added benefit of asynchronous play that since then lured in more players (shout out to Patrick!).
The third section explains the details behind some choices in the second section and is not required reading if you just want to set up your own server. If you want to understand why the service makes use of tmux in such a weird way, read until the end.
Also make sure to chose a zone (both for the instance and the external IP) that anticipates where your players will come from. E.g. on my server, all players are from Germany, so I chose europe-west3 (Frankfurt).
Once you can connect to the machine via SSH (see -to-instance#gcetools if you're unsure how), as a first order of business, create a dedicated user. This is to avoid running the server binary with the (sudo) privileges of your account. Also, in order to allow the server to start automatically when the machine starts, enable lingering for the newly created user.
The avid reader might be confused about the use of tmux here. Why not just start the server directly in the service and be done with it? That is exactly what I did when I first migrated the server from a tmux session to a "proper" systemd user service. On the same day, we noticed larger latencies in game but I didn't attribute them to the change. Only when I saw the CPU usage on the GCP dashboard the next day, I noticed that it had jumped from below 20% to over 80% the moment I moved the server to a systemd service.
Unfortunately, the Windward server waits for input on stdin. Running it in the aforementioned fashion will result in the server spamming the output and continously reading from /dev/null/. If you try to run the server as a systemd user service directly, you'll see many lines similar to this one in journalctl:
Another commenter suggests using the StandardInput=tty option. Unfortunately, this does not work here, as our user can't interact with the TTY. I'm not sure if this is because of the VM or because of insufficient privileges, but I couldn't get it to work so I started looking for alternatives. I also tried files and named pipes but none would reliably bring the load down.
The author of the aforementioned thread discovered that they could get the load down by running their executable inside screen. After knowing about the problem with reading from stdin, this is no longer surprising, as the process inside screen will have their own stdin and stdout. Using tmux instead of screen, and some insight from another discussion on Serverfault, I even found a nice way to terminate the server in the intended way: tmux allows us to send keystrokes to the running program, so we can configure the service to use that to bring down the server:
The dcor is reminiscent of preschool classroom with various alphabet, calendar, colors and shapes posters. Arts and crafts made by students are displayed on the wall. Further in the back is the bathroom. Next to the bathrooms is the infant section with foam mats and more baby-oriented toys.
Other parents remained outside and were sitting, chatting and eating at the provided tables. In fact, they were hosting a potluck for someone who was going away. It was sweet to see that Got Funn? had been a way for moms to get together and become friends! One parent had her laptop open and looked like she was working.
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