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Brainstorming Consistency and quality in GoF

Darkhymn

Darkhymn

Freebooter
Storm Modder
So I picked up CoAS on GoG recently, and naturally I came back here and checked out the latest version of GoF, and I've been enjoying it a great deal. What I've noticed, though, is that the quality of the mod varies quite significantly. There are some really beautiful ships and models that look great and fit in nicely... And then there are the descriptions, stats and names of the same. I've found these to be wildly inconsistent, with the big issues being that; 1) Spelling and grammar are very poor throughout. 2) Many ship 'classes' are identical or nearly identical, with quite a few being direct copies down to word-for-word descriptions. Several ship 'classes' are simply individual ships from history, with Wikipedia blurbs for descriptions, resulting in an absurd number of schooners and 4th rate light corvettes which are basically interchangeable ( my fleet for much of yesterday's play session was two unicorns and a light corvette, each with approximately identical stats. Worse, several ships which have descriptions that imply that they're fast or well armed or desirable are slow, wimpy, and mostly outclassed by other ships in their rate. See: The Black Pearl or the HMS Interceptor for excellent examples of all of these issues. 3) Ship values are a mess, with some ships selling to the shipyard for enough to buy several similar ships. Rate 4 is especially bad for this. Most ships in the rate go for 60-80k, but at least one goes for 12k and a couple more go for 300k or more. Does anyone else feel like cleaning up the mod a little bit ought to be high priority? I've begun work on names and descriptions, but I'm not quite ready to be playing with stats yet.
 
Is it completely abandoned at this point? If so, is 1.3 the last stable version? I'm not ready to bugfix the 1.4b release (which for me was very crashy), but since I've started working on polish for my own use, I'd be fairly happy to work toward a more consistent, polished general product. I also have some ideas for reworking the Complete Sailor's Guide to Privateering for a more consistent tone and more balanced gameplay bonus-to-cost ratios. I've also noticed that the version of CSGtP in GoF is not the finished one, but a beta from way back before Combined Mod got rebranded, so I've rebuilt the completed version and am playtesting it for a "full" release for all of the different major mods (Vanilla, CMv3.2, GoF and even ERAS if MK is interested.) once I'm sure the fixes are working and the balance is how I envisioned it.
 
Darkhymn said:
Is it completely abandoned at this point? If so, is 1.3 the last stable version? I'm not ready to bugfix the 1.4b release (which for me was very crashy), but since I've started working on polish for my own use, I'd be fairly happy to work toward a more consistent, polished general product. I also have some ideas for reworking the Complete Sailor's Guide to Privateering for a more consistent tone and more balanced gameplay bonus-to-cost ratios. I've also noticed that the version of CSGtP in GoF is not the finished one, but a beta from way back before Combined Mod got rebranded, so I've rebuilt the completed version and am playtesting it for a "full" release for all of the different major mods (Vanilla, CMv3.2, GoF and even ERAS if MK is interested.) once I'm sure the fixes are working and the balance is how I envisioned it.
Click to expand...

A flavor of GOF is indeed still worked on and we would really appreciate your skilled participation, if interested. PM sent.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
I never understood the versions of GoF, so I honestly don't know.
Thought version 2 was supposedly the redone and more stable one?
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The numbering for the CoAS mods was always more than a little obtuse. GoF version 2 has a 1.3 patch and a 1.4 beta patch. 1.3 is quite stable. 1.4b crashes a lot on my rig, so I'm working from version 2 patch 1.3. There are a few things I'd like to see worked on as outlined, as well as the audio issues I'd like to find a way to address. Past that, I'd like to find a way to replace the hackey fix that was used to avoid crashes on mast destruction (namely making sails indestructible) with something less detrimental to gameplay. Mostly it's beyond my abilities, but I find it depressing that none of the newer Sea Dogs games has a quality mod like Build, and I'd like to at least give CoAS some dignity lol
 
Darkhymn said:
I find it depressing that none of the newer Sea Dogs games has a quality mod like Build
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Definitely agree with you there. There are definitely mods aplenty.
But to get something on the level of the Build, it really takes good cooperation between all people involved.
There is no reason that cannot also be done for the newer games and it would give me great pleasure indeed to see that happen one day! :woot
 
Darkhymn said:
The numbering for the CoAS mods was always more than a little obtuse. GoF version 2 has a 1.3 patch and a 1.4 beta patch. 1.3 is quite stable. 1.4b crashes a lot on my rig, so I'm working from version 2 patch 1.3. There are a few things I'd like to see worked on as outlined, as well as the audio issues I'd like to find a way to address. Past that, I'd like to find a way to replace the hackey fix that was used to avoid crashes on mast destruction (namely making sails indestructible) with something less detrimental to gameplay. Mostly it's beyond my abilities, but I find it depressing that none of the newer Sea Dogs games has a quality mod like Build, and I'd like to at least give CoAS some dignity lol
Click to expand...

I'm curious about the audio issues you mention? I abandoned the old fmodex from 2007 and am now using the newest FMOD released 6/17/2017.

The crashes on mast fall are due to certain facets in the ship geometry that the geometry.dll was not originally written to handle. While I don't know exactly what the individual differences among the ships are, I did eliminate the crashes due to mast falls in my version by reworking some of the geometry code. Without going through each and every ship model and trying to figure out what specific attributes differ from ships and whether they cause the crashes in the stock .exe/.dll, I doubt anything else, like altering script code files will have any effect; that seems an almost hopeless endeavor because how can one tell between two ship models what might be causing the crash, without the ability to trace through in debugger mode of the executable?

Anyway, the game plays all flavors from POTC/NH to COAS and GOF mods, but does require script modifications...if you want to see if it addresses these issues you speak of, for one of the GOF mods (like that mast fall...I actually used GOF to test my fixes as it was the most notorious for those crashes), we should talk and I might be able to be persuaded to give you a copy of 1.2, 2.0 or 2.5 to work with.
 
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