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Baltimore Steam Propulsion Laboratory

This is very cool stuff Pieter, well done mate! :cheers

Now, if someone could just figure out how to get that big paddle wheel steamer design from Sea Dogs in game... :wp
 
At the moment I've got the steamships using the refShip.SpeedRate in ships_init.c to define how fast she'll go under engine power only. The SpeedRate on the steamships is 12.0, so she'll do 12.0 knots under steam propulsion only.
Does anyone think maybe it should be a separate speed for engine power? And if so, how many knots sounds about right for the speed obtained by engine only with one of our steam frigates?

Thagarr said:
Now, if someone could just figure out how to get that big paddle wheel steamer design from Sea Dogs in game... :wp
Click to expand...
What's that like? I never did have Sea Dogs.
 
results from googling on their speed are hazy. i've read a report about a paddlesteamer averaging 10 knots on a transatlantic voyage, but that was probably sails and steam combined. i have however read reports of paddlesteamers going up to 18 knots, and once even 20. the ship averaging 10 knots was a passenger ship though, focusing on cargo space. warships seem to have a service speed of 14 to 16. question is, will we be having coal or somesuch as cargo?

i've not found any info on speeds exclusively on engine power though. a guess could be made based on tonnage and comparison to sailpowered ships similar to the steam frigate.
 
At the moment, the engine consumes nothing whatsoever (FREE POWER!) and cannot be damaged. I could code this in, I suppose, but I wonder if it's worth the trouble.
After all, how much are people REALLY going to be using the steamships? For me, I just like getting them in there because we can. :wp

Anyway, I suppose we should get some testing done with these when Patch 7 is released and then we can see where we take it from there.
For now, at least the basics seem to be working quite reasonably. Apart from the top speed being reached without using sails and using sails doesn't actually seem to help properly.
But anyway, you'll find out when my files are available. :doff
 
the sound effect you're using doesn't sound an awful lot like a steam engine. i'll see how it sounds in game.
 
It works well enough for my purposes. Feel free to do better. It's quite convenient in that it lasts pretty much exactly one second.
I think it was the HMS Titanic's engine sound from Virtual Sailor that I used. Just like the fists sounds I took from Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. :cheeky
 
hm. it's possible that ship engines sound different. they tend to have a much bigger cylinder diameter (as in, multiple times larger, about as wide as they're high). all sound effects i have come from factory and train engines. i'm not sure how many cylinders the titanic had, but i'd imagine the steam frigate would have a V 2.
 
One thing's for sure, the sounds you posted sounded VERY obviously like trains to me. I don't think I've ever heard a real ship's steam engine, but I'd expect them to be a bit different.
I did hear a lot of steam engine sounds from steam ships made for Virtual Sailor by somebody who was a bit of an authority on steam engine sounds, so I suppose those should have given me some idea...
 
This just gets better and better! First sound effects, now wind-independent propulsion... whatever next?! :keith
I like how you may have shed new light on ships' lanterns (excuse the pun)... I'd be most interested to see what happens there.

Pieter Boelen said:
At the moment, the engine consumes nothing whatsoever (FREE POWER!) and cannot be damaged. I could code this in, I suppose, but I wonder if it's worth the trouble.
After all, how much are people REALLY going to be using the steamships? For me, I just like getting them in there because we can. :wp
Click to expand...
Maybe we could add something like coal as a new trade item in the last period, which would be required for steam engines to run.
Once you run out of coal, you simply lose your steam propulsion and must rely on sail power until you stock up again.
Of course, coal could be traded just like other items, so it would serve more than one purpose.

You do have a point about whether it's worth it or not, so we'd need to find if anyone would like this kind of thing.
If not, then at least you've invented free power. :cheeky

Pieter Boelen said:
I think it was the HMS Titanic's engine sound from Virtual Sailor that I used.
Click to expand...
Should be RMS Titanic, not to be picky or anything... :razz
 
Armada said:
This just gets better and better! First sound effects, now wind-independent propulsion... whatever next?! :keith
I like how you may have shed new light on ships' lanterns (excuse the pun)... I'd be most interested to see what happens there.
Click to expand...
Actually, it was the other way around; I got the propulsion done first and then decided to finally give the sound a go too. :cheeky

Armada said:
Should be RMS Titanic, not to be picky or anything... :razz
Click to expand...
That's what I meant! :whipa
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Actually, it was the other way around; I got the propulsion done first and then decided to finally give the sound a go too. :cheeky
Click to expand...
Ah, well I must have read the wrong post first. Still, they're great achievements either way. :doff
 
That they are; I'm really quite happy with it, since we never managed to do it right originally. But then when we were looking into the storm impulse code,
I ended up wondering what would happen if I'd change the impulse.y to impulse.z . Cue wind-independent propulsion, which just happened to be something we'd been trying to do for MONTHS! :woot

There's still some weird effects on how to achieve the maximum speed with the ship, but maybe we can still adjust that somehow.
But for now I'm quite happy with it, so I'll leave it to people to test once Patch 7 is released.

If you hadn't seen yet from the ModDB picture I posted, I added an on-screen display showing the engine power from "Full Astern" to "Full Ahead".
And I added three additional keyboard controls, similar to the controls I'm used to for Virtual Sailor:
Press Numpad [+] to increase engine power and Numpad [-] to decrease engine power. Numpad [*] sets power to zero
 
Darn it, I always used to use the Numpad + and - for zooming in and out of the mini-map.
Never mind, I've got plenty of other keys to choose from. :nk
 
You can probably still use those, since you won't be sailing around with a steamship much, will you?

I'm thinking making we should change our default key assignments quite a bit to maybe even, you know, actually make some sense?
Not entirely sure how best to go about it, but I was thinking regular [ -/_] and[ =/+] for time compression up and time compression down instead of [G] and [R] both being up and down at the same time.
Then maybe using Shift and Alt for "draw sword" and "fire pistol", though not necessarily in that order. And then some other keys reassigned to have some link in character to what they actually do.
I know it's going to be a while until we'd get used to the new controls (I'm already having trouble to my rewritten time compression code and I did THAT myself!), but it should be better in the long run.
 
Good point, some of the default controls really didn't make sense. I recall going through and changing most of them myself when I actually played the game properly.
It's so ironic how we're the ones suggesting making these changes, and yet we barely even play the game ourselves! xD:
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Thagarr said:
Now, if someone could just figure out how to get that big paddle wheel steamer design from Sea Dogs in game... :wp
Click to expand...
What's that like? I never did have Sea Dogs.
Click to expand...

It's been a long time since I saw them, but I believe it was just a fuzzy low resolution image of blueprints of a paddle steamer. I'll see if I can track down a picture. Unfortunately it was never actually intended as anything more than a red hearing by Akella. But on my first play through of the game, it did.give me visions of swinging swashbuckler style off the top of the paddles with a cutlass between my teeth and two loaded flintlocks in my teeth and thick black smoke bellowing fromw two big stacks behind me!

I never said it was practical! xD:
 
before you go with some new setup for keys, keep hand positioning in mind. too much moving around is not practical either.
 
Now that Patch 7 is available, everybody can test the new way the steamships work. Please do and let me know how it holds up!
 
Thumbs up from me! I've just tested a steamship, and I really like the way the engines work! :onya

Of course, all I'm really going to rant about is fine-tuning the sound effects.
To my ears, it sounds slightly weird at full speed (max. volume), and perhaps too quiet at the lowest speed.
I think a lower increase in volume between the speeds would be good, with a higher minimum volume and a lower maximum volume. Does that make sense?

Also, I'd expect the sound effect to play faster with more engine power, but unless you can actually increase/decrease the tempo as you please,
I doubt that's possible using just the one sound effect.
Would it also be possible to get the effect to make more of a transition between the different engine speeds?
So rather than suddenly getting louder, it gradually gets louder (over, say, a few seconds)?
That would just be a way of making things work more smoothly, but everything's fine without it.

Aside from that, the functionality is excellent. I'm not sure how well documented the engine controls are in-game, though.
Perhaps an updated Ship's Log entry upon acquiring a steamship could explain how the engine works...? Just a thought to make things more user-friendly.

Now, about this 'free energy' problem we have... the ship ain't solar powered, that's for sure... :wp
 
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