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WIP 32 gun frigate USS Essex, 1799

I was only arguing for the sake of arguing, really. I have been known to like earlier vessels of certain types.
 
A flame war on the PiratesAhoy forum?! And there was me thinking we were much too civilised for such a thing... :p

Captain Armstrong said:
You mean like studying for exams? Haha I suppose, but I still have a few weeks yet, and its not like I can't do both. Though youre right, I shouldn't wait to the last minute :read

I've always favored the idea of building new ships to better designs to fill the roles of the stock ships, rather than fixing up the old ones, though your frigate Russia and upgrades to the corvette have turned out really well:doff I just dont think the stock ships are necessarily the best types of ships to fill their roles,and I certainly have no interest in working on galleons and fluyts and the like.

I am upgrading the Constitution right now, though I suppose it isn't exactly a stock ship:p
did you have any stock ships in particular in mind? what ships are currently known to be based off real ships? I had thought about building a cutter or lugger or something as a side project, though the stock ones are some of the better original ships.
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Yes I meant studying. We just tend to use the term 'revising' more often over here. Either way it's just as dull and tedious. What we need is some dancing monkeys to cheer things up: :monkeydance

Anyway... :cheeky I do realise your preference to build new ships from scratch, and I can see why that sounds much more appealing than working on inaccurate, low-quality models.
Currently the only model we 'know' has been based on a real ship is the stock frigate, whose counterpart is the Rossiya that I'm working on.
That is the only model that has a real-life spitting image, as far as I know. Beyond that, I only have some suspicions of ships that may have inspired some stock models.
The next-most obvious resemblance is the stock brig being possibly based on the Russian brig Mercury. Some tell-tale features are visible on deck in particular.
I also have a feeling the stock battleship may have been loosely based on the Russian 64-gun ship Ingermanland. Am I right in saying that Akella made a better attempt in the form of the PotBS Valiant?
Then there's the stock 'manowar' that I think may have been inspired by the Russian 106-gun ship Treh Heirarchov. That deck layout looks familiar, as well as the windows on the hull, but that's about it.
However, here's what I think may interest you the most. The Russian (noticing a trend, here?) 44-gun frigate Aurora looks to me like it could have inspired the stock corvette. The end result was under-gunned and vastly different by comparison, but the shape of the bow and stern do look vaguely familiar. It falls just outside the Build Mod's last period by 5 years, but that's hardly anachronistic in my view.

With the above ships, unfortunately the limiting factor is the availability of high-detail plans. The Rossiya's drafts are useful enough for my purposes, combined with all the excellent photos, but in most cases there are no drafts or plans mentioned for the other ships on that site. You'd have to trawl the web for them.
I'm not suggesting all of the above ships would be ideal replacements, however. In fact, I'd only consider the Rossiya, Mercury and Ingermanland as proper replacements.
The Treh Heirarchov and Aurora are far too different to their would-be stock counterparts, and would only be good as new ships altogether.

Anyway, more to the point: if you see an opportunity you'd like to take for any of the stock ships, do let me know so I don't end up duplicating any work.
I completely understand if you wish to carry on as you are with all-new models, though, and I'm fine with that. :onya
 
We all have our opinions and can express them easily here. All ships from all ages are being worked on. There are well over 300 years of history to explore after all, and it is such a waste to restrict oneself to one tiny sliver of time and space.
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Well spoken.:) the time periods mod really is great, because it allows such a diverse array of modders to work on the build mod that likely would be a much smaller group if it only included one or two specific periods.
While I would have agree with Post Captain that the frigate is far sexier than a carrack or galleon :p (in case you couldnt tell by all the frigates i've been working onxD) there are plenty of other modelers and modders like yourself who think exactly the opposite is true. I've noticed that almost all modelers seem to have a preference for certain time periods. for example, Rider88 and Nightwatcher seem to prefer the 1500s and 1600s, Seanorris, Kriswood, and Bava seem to prefer a collective span of about 1680-1780, and I prefer about 1790-1815. Of course I do like some ships from earlier time periods than 1790-1815, or I wouldn't be working on getting the Centurion ingame.

Armada,
that russian 64 and the 106 gunner actually look pretty good:) but as you said, I am not sure that akella followed the designs all that closely:facepalmI did find some useable plans for the 106 though
http://www.shipmodel.ru/Plans/3_Heerarhov.htm

and here are some for the 64, though they dont include the critical lines for modelling a hull, but for other details thay look pretty good.
http://www.shipmodels.byethost7.com/ingermanland.php
the POTBS valiant very well could be this ship, though I thought I remembered hearing it was based off an english 74 ( I probably remembered incorrectly, it was a long time ago that I heard that.)

and a fairly usable plan of the mercury with sailplan included is here:
http://www.shipmodel.ru/Plans/Mercury.htm

The Aurora certainly does look to have similar hull form to the stock corvette, especially the bow. akella seems to have given up on the stern, as the corvette has no quarter galleriesxD
 
Captain Armstrong said:
Well spoken.:) the time periods mod really is great, because it allows such a diverse array of modders to work on the build mod that likely would be a much smaller group if it only included one or two specific periods.
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For that reason alone, I reckon that mod is one of the best, if not THE best addition to PotC to date.
The fact that we can cater for many different historical interests is definitely a great asset. Just look at the diverse selection of ships we now have! :keith


About the ship plans, I hadn't noticed the others on that Russian site; nice find!
I had already come across the Ingermanland plans, and I downloaded those almost immediately because of the excellent quality and detail they contain (another possible future project... uh oh :rolleyes: ).
It's a shame Akella didn't put more effort into these ships in the first place. As you said, some of the results leave a lot to be desired.
 
Armada said:
For that reason alone, I reckon that mod is one of the best, if not THE best addition to PotC to date.
The fact that we can cater for many different historical interests is definitely a great asset. Just look at the diverse selection of ships we now have! :keith
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It's definitely high up there. And surprisingly enough, the Periods mod actually ISN'T that complex coding-wise compared to some of the other mods we've got.
The amount of additional research, texturing and modeling work done to make it as extensive as we've got it is really amazing though.
Six different time periods that are all unique and distinct in many different ways is quite an achievement!
Combined with the Storylines mod, we really do have enough content in our mod to call it several games rather than just the one. :woot
 
I'll just make one more addition to our off topic ramble. I don't know about any other Akella games, but for PotBS they used mostly inexpensive Russian kit model plans. While they've never stated this that I know of, if you look at the models and then look online for their real life counterparts, most of them have a Russian or other European kit model out there somewhere that is cheap, inaccurate, and easy to follow.

A couple notable examples are the Unicorn and the Mordaunt. The former is marketed as Unicorn 1794 but is loosely based on Chapman's plan of Unicorn 1748 with countless anachronisms to make it look more "modern". Mordaunt has no existing admiralty plans that I know of (as would make sense as it was privately constructed as a personal vessel for Lord Mordaunt, a privateer turned pirate from whom the navy commandeered it). Its kit model and thus the PotBS model are loosely based on photos of a model in the British National Maritime Museum. Its lines seem to have no basis in reality (perhaps they're based on another ship?) and its decorations are largely conjecture. If you compare to Van de Velde portraits the Akella model looks nothing like the real ship: http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections.html#!csearch;searchTerm=mordaunt

Point being, Akella obviously does not do their homework, and favors plans that are easily and cheaply available within Russia. I suspect there's a good possibility that most of the ships in Akella's games are based off plans, however loosely. They're just not accurate plans and are built with an eye on publishing timeframes rather than on accuracy. To sum it up, if you had to build several ship models in the space of a week or two and only had cheap Russian kit model plans to work from (perhaps you're an experienced game artist but have little or no historical knowledge of ships).
 
Very true, It's a shame how low quality akella's ships tend to be. Especially when there are better plans online, just think if all the akella ships in POTBS had been buillt from chapman's plans in Architectura Navalis Mercatoria!:shock the detail in the plans available online from it is probably equal to or better than whatever russian kits they based the ships off. same with the NMM..though i don''t think that database was online at the time. it appears that akella got it right once, they almost made a game set in the war of 1812 http://www.gamersgallery.com/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/20929 then changed the setting to the american civil war...:(
To get even more off topic:rolleyes: I think it's a real shame the direction that POTBS has gone. I wasn't aware of it's earliest developments at the time, but looking at screens and a few early articles it looked like it couldve been a sort of combination between a sequel to age of sail 2 and POTC/COAS on steroids. originally I think it was origanally a single player RPG (maybe it was always an MMORPG, can't remember) set in the Napoleonic wars, then they decided they could make more money off the golden age of piracy
http://bestgamewallpapers.com/files/pirates-of-the-burning-sea/burning-letters.jpg
http://bestgamewallpapers.com/files/pirates-of-the-burning-sea/best-mmorpg.jpg
http://www.rpgamer.com/games/mmo/potbs/potbsoldss.html
So it seems like the only times Akella actually did some decent amount of research the ships were never used...
 
:wp
essex6.jpg

essex7.jpg

she still has problems with deck view and she needs a walk file, plus the chasers don't work, but other than that she is good to go!:keith
 
Cool! You might want to post some pics on the ModDB page. :cheers
 
Actually they're probably using a different walk file. You had refShip.All set to 'Frigate1', right? That means any missing attributes will copy those of Frigate1, so the Essex probably inherited the walk file.

Of the modders left on the forum, I think only Craiggo and myself can make walk/sailorspoints files. This is somewhat annoying, as walk files are in high demand. :wp
We do have a tutorial for using the Sailor Tool here, but I don't think it's detailed enough for a beginner to use. I might have to revamp it to make it accessible to more people.
 
I started with the Indefatigable/Suprise, though the walk file mightve been changed somehow, I'll see if I can find a better one while I try to make sense of that tutorial.:keith I wish there were more who could make them! at least I can get my own ships ingame now, though I guess that creates even more demand for walk files:wp
 
ok, here are the latest files. added ropes for all the sails now, so i think she is about done. only problem last time i checked is that the ropes didnt raise with the sails when furled, and remained suspended to a point midair. not sure if there is a way to fix this? maybe i need to switch what end is which for the ropes. also a proper walk file is needed before the final release.
please test this version and let me know if you find any problems other than the ones i already mentioned, because i cant currently play potc myself.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/43901618/CArmstrong/Models/USS Essex/USS Essex v1.1.zip
 
Those ropes are easily fixed. The ropes attached to sail3 & sail4 need to be part of "saild" instead of "rey_b2" for instance. That way they will follow the sail up and down. I have another project to finish before I can look into this one.
 
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