A few questions

[FlayedOne]

Could you please upload your modified files? We can include them in the next Build release.

Sure, after I playtest them

The storms, I think, are related to the sailing model, but I'm not sure.
I don't know if the spinning bug was part of the stock game or if it's something the Build mod introduces.
I've been suspecting the enhanced ship inertia to have made a stock game bug much more obvious, but am not at all sure if that's the case.
The sailing model is pretty much hidden in the DLL files and it seems we can't change too much with that.
But people have been able to add stuff to the game before that we thought impossible, so I'll never say never again.

Now that I think about it, I believe I had the spinning bug in stock game as well, but it's been a while since I played it.

And those dlls are optimised, which makes decompilation impossible. And they are too big to play with disassembling... damn...

The whole "ship upgrades" mod was done by kblack for the Build Mod, so the code is 100% outside the DLL files and freely editable.

Would you happen to know where it is, because I can't find it? :?

What do you want to do with those? I think part of that is at least in the PROGRAM folder, but I'm not sure how much.
Check PROGRAM\BATTLE_INTERFACE\LandInterface.c; I think that's your best bet.

I managed to disable the world map entering, but the icon in the upper-left corner still shows when applicable. It's not a big deal(you can't enter the map anyway), but it would be good if I could remove it as well.

I think your quartermaster's skill is used if his/hers is higher than yours, but I'm not 100% certain. In any case, that is something we can change.
In fact, if you're interested, I'll add you to a PM conversation about the new officer system that's a part of the Build mod.
That includes a lot of our ideas, as well as some notes about the coding and how to tweak things as far as the officers' skills are concerned.

Sure, thanks
I'm surprised you want to change it though. It's so much better than the original already.

For the question about the ship being worth more after selling the cannons, i believe its not a bug. For example after selling 52 cannons off a ship, i made 150000, and i just captured them so my trade increased. This made my character sell the ship for more.

It's a bug in the sense, that you should get the money when selling the ship anyway. After all, either way you sell the cannons.

And two more things. How the weather is works is a masterpiece, but is there a reasone for limiting wind to 30 knots? And what are the effects of difficulty levels?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sure, after I playtest them

Fair enough; thanks very much.

And those dlls are optimised, which makes decompilation impossible. And they are too big to play with disassembling... damn...

That's been annoying us forever, but we can't seem to get the source code for the Storm 2.0 engine in any way.
We DO have the source code of the Storm 2.8 engine (Age of Pirates II: City of Abandoned Ships), so there we can do what we want,
but we don't have enough coders to work on that and want to finish PotC Build 14 first anyway.
But if we do get Build 14 completed and we can somehow find enough interested coders, we'd like to one day port over as much as we can to AoP 2.
And then we can do whatever we want.

Would you happen to know where it is, because I can't find it? :?

I think the majority should be in PROGRAM\KB_routines.c with a couple of #defines in PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h .
Then the interface code for it is in PROGRAM\INTERFACE\shipyard.c .

I managed to disable the world map entering, but the icon in the upper-left corner still shows when applicable. It's not a big deal(you can't enter the map anyway), but it would be good if I could remove it as well.

I think you need to stop this code in PROGRAM\BATTLE_INTERFACE\BattleInterface.c from loading:

	if(bMapEnter)
{
Log_SetActiveAction("Map");
Log_SetActionLabel(BattleInterface.Commands.Map.note); // KK
return;
}

You might want to check the other MapEnter code in that file as well though.

Sure, thanks
I'm surprised you want to change it though. It's so much better than the original already.

I added you now.
Aconcagua did the work on this, but never got the chance to finish it 100%; it works well for the most part though.

And two more things. How the weather is works is a masterpiece, but is there a reasone for limiting wind to 30 knots?

I'm not entirely sure. I did find a note in the code saying that twisters start above 28, so maybe the maximum is 30 to prevent storms from taking too long to decrease in strength?

And what are the effects of difficulty levels?

Enemy HP is increased and money received decreased, I think. You should find all effects if you search the PROGRAM folder for "GetDifficulty".

 

[Pieter Boelen]

-made it, so that player recieves a brief info on wind strength even without a compass(or with a cheap one). After all, everyone can feel it. I'm contemplating simply adding an info with beaufort scale level, since sailors are able to tell it without any equipment.

In real life, I am an officer on a ship (this one, if you're interested) myself and we've sailed a couple of times without a working windspeed indicator*.
Although it's quite possible to match the Beaufort Scale pictures to obtain the wind strength, this is only accurate for a fully developed sea,
which you're hardly ever going to get. When we were sailing up the St. Lawrence river, with land all around,
this becomes completely inaccurate, so we had no proper way of telling wind strength anymore.
Of course in the PotC game, you're at least never on a river and usually away from land, so should be able to judge it reasonably well.

As for wind direction, you can tell that from the wave direction, of course, but this is sometimes quite difficult at night.

* = The speed indicating propeller had been blown off by hurricane Igor.

 

[FlayedOne]

That's been annoying us forever, but we can't seem to get the source code for the Storm 2.0 engine in any way.
We DO have the source code of the Storm 2.8 engine (Age of Pirates II: City of Abandoned Ships), so there we can do what we want,
but we don't have enough coders to work on that and want to finish PotC Build 14 first anyway.
But if we do get Build 14 completed and we can somehow find enough interested coders, we'd like to one day port over as much as we can to AoP 2.
And then we can do whatever we want.

I've never played it. I must check it out. Wouldn't it be better to start porting as fast as possible then? At least bugs would be avoidable.

I think the majority should be in PROGRAM\KB_routines.c with a couple of #defines in PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h .
Then the interface code for it is in PROGRAM\INTERFACE\shipyard.c .

Thank you very much

I added you now.
Aconcagua did the work on this, but never got the chance to finish it 100%; it works well for the most part though.

Thanks I haven't seen anything that doesn't work, but I guess I'll see the problems when I read the discussion.

I'm not entirely sure. I did find a note in the code saying that twisters start above 28, so maybe the maximum is 30 to prevent storms from taking too long to decrease in strength?

Hmmm... I'll try and play with it a little bit.

In real life, I am an officer on a ship (this one, if you're interested) myself and we've sailed a couple of times without a working windspeed indicator*.
Although it's quite possible to match the Beaufort Scale pictures to obtain the wind strength, this is only accurate for a fully developed sea,
which you're hardly ever going to get. When we were sailing up the St. Lawrence river, with land all around,
this becomes completely inaccurate, so we had no proper way of telling wind strength anymore.
Of course in the PotC game, you're at least never on a river and usually away from land, so should be able to judge it reasonably well.

As for wind direction, you can tell that from the wave direction, of course, but this is sometimes quite difficult at night.

* = The speed indicating propeller had been blown off by hurricane Igor.

You can judge the wind direction from the direction in which flags wave.

That's an awesome picture of your ship

As for the judging from the pictures it never even occured to me I have a pretty limited(roughly 400 hours) experience of sea sailing on yachts(Yep, I'm one of those people who spend their money sailing in those little boats pissing professional sailors like yourself off ), but I can judge the wind's strength pretty well +-1 level in beaufort's scale. I can only imagine professional sailors that sailed their whole lives on ships that depended on wind to move were much better than me in this, but I could always code it with a random +-1 level for realism's sake.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I've never played it. I must check it out. Wouldn't it be better to start porting as fast as possible then? At least bugs would be avoidable.

By chance, pretty much the same question was asked here as well today: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/16800-question-from-russia/page__view__findpost__p__382127
As I said there, we discussed this at length in this thread over a year ago: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/13287-porting-the-build-mod-to-coas/
Feel free to join either discussion. In fact, I'll probably merge them soon.

I'm somewhat cautious of porting unfinished content to CoAS though, fearing that if we do so, we'd introduce more bugs than need be.

You can judge the wind direction from the direction in which flags wave.

Absolutely. In real life, though, we take down the flag on the bow after departure, so then we lose our indication.
No idea why we do that, but we do. :wacko:

 

[FlayedOne]

By chance, pretty much the same question was asked here as well today: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/16800-question-from-russia/page__view__findpost__p__382127
As I said there, we discussed this at length in this thread over a year ago: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/13287-porting-the-build-mod-to-coas/
Feel free to join either discussion. In fact, I'll probably merge them soon.

I'm somewhat cautious of porting unfinished content to CoAS though, fearing that if we do so, we'd introduce more bugs than need be.

I see. But still, it won't be easily portable anyway, since most of the build is made by workarounds as far as I can see. It will require an almost complete rewrite in order not to make a complete mess out of the code.

But anyway, what is left to finish in Build 14? With what could I help?

Absolutely. In real life, though, we take down the flag on the bow after departure, so then we lose our indication.
No idea why we do that, but we do. :wacko:

Wait, doesn't maritime law require you to have a flag of the country in which the ship is registered up all the time? Then again, the flag on the bow is the flag of the owners country, right? Then you should have another one somewhere...

In real life you can't use waves though, and it's another thing I'm gonna see if I can change ingame

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I see. But still, it won't be easily portable anyway, since most of the build is made by workarounds as far as I can see. It will require an almost complete rewrite in order not to make a complete mess out of the code.

Very, very true.

But anyway, what is left to finish in Build 14? With what could I help?

There's still all sorts to be done, such as making the Customize Character interface for New Game and fixing the Capture Colonies mod.
Those two are originally Pirate_KK's work and he does want to finish it, but he's just got so much to do that it's going to be a while before it's done.
You could see if you can help him with that, but it'd also be very valuable if you'd just play through the game and change/fix anything that is or feels wrong.
We've also got a Bug Tracker with all sorts of issues, ranging from not too bad to stuff we haven't the foggiest how to fix, truth be told.

There's also one very bizarre CTD that seems to crop up randomly and then doesn't go away.
This seems to happen when the player or an officer is included in a quest ship group.
I tried to fix this, but it didn't work and I don't really have an idea why this happens in the first place.

Then there's also some features that are sort-of in the works, but haven't been completed yet, such as:
. Hail Ship mod, eg. talk with captains of other ships at sea: Erwin Lindemann made some code that I've got for testing,
but it's unfinished and he seems to have disappeared again, so I don't know if and when this might be done unless somebody does it.
. Improved Ransack interfaces for after capturing ships by Aconcagua: He did a lot of work and it was working fairly well,
but there were some bad bugs left preventing you from actually taking ships, so we had to exclude this code from the Build temporarily.
We should still have it somewhere though.
. Item code improvements and Period Weapons Mod: This would fix unique weapons showing up randomly, soldiers walking around with shovels
and also make different weapons available in different time periods. Fudge Dragon started some work on this, but you might be able to help him too.

There's also some projects that don't require too much fancy coding, but are a fair amount of work and do need to be completed, such as:
. Compiling the texture files and adjusting the code for the Interface Screenshots for Ships: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/16787-interface-screenshots-for-ships/
. Finishing the Location-Specific Loading Screens project: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/11464-new-location-specific-loading-screens/
. Making the Town Capture Boarding Locators for the Capture Colonies Mod: http://forum.piratesahoy.net/topic/13281-making-capture-town-boarding-locators/

In any case, there's plenty to do, but of course we won't ever ask you to do anything you don't want to.
But anything you're willing to help with, would be most appreciated.

Wait, doesn't maritime law require you to have a flag of the country in which the ship is registered up all the time? Then again, the flag on the bow is the flag of the owners country, right? Then you should have another one somewhere...

We've got another flag at the stern and one in the radar mast. Some of the flags we've got only in port, but we take all down during night time.
So when we don't have a wind indicator, it's night and we can't make out the direction of the waves, we won't have a flag to help us either.
At least generally when the wind speed indication doesn't work, the relative direction still does display.

 

[morgan terror]

there's also a lot of empty space in the game. most of the newer colonies have no content whatsoever, and eleuthera hasn't even got dialogue assigned for most of the NPC's. i'm assuming that nathaniel's plotline will be the only one with a mass of sidequests though. otherwise any sidequests in the other plotlines would be nigh unfindable at first. heck, they're pretty hard to find in nathaniel's plot sometimes. i wonder how many people know that you can recruit Rys Bloom in port royale.

speaking of eleuthera, the island's texture is really bizarre. like someone laid a stripey carpet over it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

True on the colony citizen dialogs; the stock game towns have them and none of the others do.
That's not complicated to do, just something that requires a bit of effort. Anyone could do it, basically.

As for sidequests, the Standard storyline has the most, but the Jack Sparrow one has a lot of pirate lord ones as well.
The Bartolomeu storyline has a little bit as well, but nothing much.
It'd be nice if we could make some sidequests available in ALL storylines instead of just a few;
that'd require moving the applicable code out of the Standard storyline quest code into the common quest code.

I'm not sure what you mean about the Eleuthera island texture...

 

[morgan terror]

one thing i'd be willing to do is fix that dialogue in bartolomue's main quest. the grammar's nothing short of cringe-worthy.

copying the side-quests would be good. of course, that also means any bugs would be copied as well, even hough they're pretty rare nowadays.

i made a screenshot of it, but for some reason it's completely black. anyway, the texture is basically half finished, with the bottom half being another texture of some island repeated over and over. wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't included a section of beach in it, creating stripes.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes, Eleuthera is bugged. I will reluctantly accept a trade mission to Governor's Harbor, but will refuse to go to Alice Town. There really is no reason to go there because of all the bugs.

 

[morgan terror]

it no longer crashes though, so that's good. also, i noticed the compasses now work as they're supposed to.

 

[FlayedOne]

I'll try and play through the game now and look for changeable stuff that would fit now.
I'll try and look into some of the crashes mentioned on the bug tracker as well.

I'm much more of the algorithm person than a content one, so dialogs are not my kind of thing.

What about mutinies? I see that they aren't working correctly right now, maybe I could try and fix them? Is anyone working on that right now?
Also, does anybody else get crashes when zooming out with their spyglasses from time to time, or is it just me?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

one thing i'd be willing to do is fix that dialogue in bartolomue's main quest. the grammar's nothing short of cringe-worthy.

I recall someone already did some work on that, but you'd be more than welcome to improve it further.

copying the side-quests would be good. of course, that also means any bugs would be copied as well, even hough they're pretty rare nowadays.

My idea is moving the code rather than copying it, so we'll keep the same amount of bugged code and when we fix it, we'd only need to do it once.

 

[morgan terror]

if you're into algorithms, you might want to look at my suggestion for engine sounds on the steamships, since pieter seems to be lacking the time. i made a rough draft, but it needs to be turned into actual code. the sound effects are included in the topic.

where would i go for the fixing of the dialogue? i tried looking for it a while ago but couldn't find the file.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'll try and play through the game now and look for changeable stuff that would fit now.
I'll try and look into some of the crashes mentioned on the bug tracker as well.

Thanks very much, mate!

I'm much more of the algorithm person than a content one, so dialogs are not my kind of thing.

Fair enough, mate. Dialogs can easily be done by people with no so much coding knowledge anyway.

What about mutinies? I see that they aren't working correctly right now, maybe I could try and fix them? Is anyone working on that right now?

I didn't know they didn't work right. What's wrong with them?

Also, does anybody else get crashes when zooming out with their spyglasses from time to time, or is it just me?

That's the first I ever heard of that...

 

[FlayedOne]

I didn't know they didn't work right. What's wrong with them?

Well, the few times I got them(all were on Lugger), I was standing in the water beside the ship. All the crewmen stacked into one were close, but in the water as well.

That's the first I ever heard of that...

This happens to me constantly, roughly 1 in 4-5 times. It happens also on unmodified version of build 14(I backed up all files), so it doesn't seem like something I messed up when changing zoom/battle interface stuff. I just noticed it right now, since I made my game so that spyglasses get much more usage.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes, the mutiny is bugged. I end up under the ship in chest deep water with the crew. They can't strike me and I can't strike them.


I don't recall ever having a problem with the spyglass causing a ctd.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I distinctly remember accidentally running into quite a few mutinies not too long ago and they were still working then,
"Not too long ago" is several months at least though, since that's the last time I played.
But still that might mean that if it is confirmed bugged now, then it's a bug that might've been introduced in a recent update.

 

[Armada]

Well consider yourself lucky; ever since I've had the Build Mod installed, I've never encountered an un-bugged mutiny.
It looks pretty strange and seems to me like a locator problem.