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Brainstorming for CoAS modders

B

Bismarck

Sailor
I would like to collect ideas for future modding projects. Please post ideas, suggestions, wishes and bugs into this thread.


My ideas:

Why is every idiot out there after me? I am a peaceful trader and military convois should leave me alone instead of following me like a stupid dog to the next friendly fort.
If I am a pirate or corsair, then it is okay to be hunted, but not as a peaceful trader.


When you get a mission from the priest where you have to kill undead in a dungeon/grotto/cave and you succeed, then you can tell him that you have completed the quest as often as you wish and every time you will get your reward.


Culverines need to be fixed. 100m don't justify the long reloading time and the weight.


AI improvements would be nice, because some captains love to crash against islands/harbours.


Street merchants should have a bit more merchandise like in PotC Build mod.


Managing colonies would be great or what about buying estates, plantations, mines and taking care of shipment, wages, people etc?


Why not add campaigns?

Ian Stance, a trader, should get peaceful trading or smuggling missions + political intrigues etc.

Diego Espinoza is an explorer and he should get the CoAS.

Peter Blood should kick English asses until King Jacob is thrown out of England and William III of Orange offers him amnesty. The grand final would be the battle for Port Royal (or Bridgetown).
 
Well I like your general ideas, just one little quible.

Peter Blood NEVER attacked english shipping if he could avoid it, but he terrorized the Spanish non-stop.

Cap'n Drow
 
That explains a lot. Otherwise I don't think any king would be so willing to provide amnesty to him. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheeky" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />
 
Well little refresher for everyone. This is VERY basic, but should give you a good idea of the Captain Blood storyline.

Raised to be a Dr. by his family, blood rebelled in his younger days by joining various European military groups. Among them the Dutch, Swedish and French, IIRC. He speaks fluent Spanish, French and Dutch.

He proved to be an able fighter and a wonderful leader for any combat group he joined.

Somewhere in this time period, he was captured and put into a Spanish prison. Thus his distaste for Spaniards.

When his father passed and his mother got very sick, he returned to Scotland and finished his studies in medicine.

After his mother passed, he moved to a small village and began practicing medicine. He was there for when the Rebels attempted to overthrow the King.

Jeremy Pitt came to him, begging that he come care for one of the Nobles who was a member of the revolutionary army.

While there, the militia arrived and incarcerated everyone on the estate, including Peter as rebels.

The surviving rebels were sent to Jamaica to be indentured slaves on the sugar plantations there.

There the men were put through all kinds of hell, but Peter's gifts as a Dr. is what allowed the majority of the slaves to survive the trip to the Caribbean.

Here is where the bulk of the story happens. Peter's skill as a physician is noticed by the governor of the colony, and he is therefore hire out by the plantation owner to the well to do of the colony.

During this time he fell in love with the Plantation Owners Niece.

Sometime thereafter, the spanish attacked and sacked the colony. During the confusion Blood and a group of slaves he recruited for an escape attempt boarded and stole the Frigate that the spaniards used for the attack.

He then proceeded to terrorize the spanish throughout the spanish main and her other colonies.

Thats just the barest of outlines and doesn't go into things nearly well enough to do the story just.

If you've never read the book, do so. Especially if you've found you truly enjoy sailing sims.

Cap'n Drow
 
<!--quoteo(post=331488:date=Jun 21 2009, 02:34 PM:name=Bismarck)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Bismarck @ Jun 21 2009, 02:34 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=331488"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->My ideas:

Why is every idiot out there after me? I am a peaceful trader and military convois should leave me alone instead of following me like a stupid dog to the next friendly fort.
If I am a pirate or corsair, then it is okay to be hunted, but not as a peaceful trader.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I know how you feel. I used the cheat console to completely turn off sea encounters. Even on the 'rare' encounter setting I couldnt sail from one island to another without being attacked 5 times by huge battlegroups, all ignoring each other and waiting their turns to attack my empty and badly damaged tartane. With encounters off, you still see all of the merchant traffic and quest ships, you just dont see all of the constant attack groups that spawn right on top of you.

I know the smuggler mod tweaks the encounter file to decrease pirate group size, so maybe the answer to frequency is in there too. I'd love to see it set at about 1/20th of what it currently calls 'rare' encounters and also make their behavior much less agressive.
 
Maybe your men are singing 'god save the queen' too loudly, then? Seriously, I see 0 difference between my wanting a mod to make guards less impossibly aware and your complaint of having enemies on the map immediately hone in on you <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />.


Something funny about Peter Blood is that when I met him in game at an ENGLISH port he asked me to join with him on a raid of ENGLISH merchant ships. I was annoyed by his lack of tact so I attacked his ship and killed all the crew with grapeshot, but for some reason it wouldn't let me board his ship ;(.

Some other mods that would be nice:

An attack skills mod that takes out those random different strikes/parries and turns them into new maneuvers when fighting that do more damage or block power/group attacks. I've seen at least 5-6 different strikes so there's plenty of room to turn them into custom attacks.

I'd REALLY like to see a retexture mod, especially for the ground textures. They appear stretched 4-5 times what they should be and their resolution doesn't match surrounding rocks, for instance. I'd be willing to look into this myself if I can find all the ground textures.

In an ideal world, a re-work of the dialog in the game would be nice. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to teenagers in the game because aside from some choice phrases they all speak a rather broken form of modern English.

And finally:

Better retorts/responses for your character. This ties into dialog but about 80% of the time he comes off sounding like either a coward, an idiot, or both. I'd like to have some variety here based on my talent/success/authority skills (like Fallout 2). This is probably a pipe dream, but so many of the conversations involve you just saying yes/no without any explanation or admitting your own ignorance (I especially loved the part where you get thrown in jail for doing Morgan a favor and you completely emasculate yourself in front of him when he agrees to let you out instead of telling him he got you into the mess in the first place).
 
I dare say a fair amount of what you're wishing for should be possible, Nathaniel.
Ground textures are probably in RESOURCE\Textures; you can use the GM Viewer to see what textures the location models use.
For the swordfighting ideas of yours, we've got some general thoughts on that for PotC, but haven't yet worked it in.
 
heck i would be happy if the dialogues worked lol stuck on the totems quest again because i ran into another blank dialogue npc on the quest and just not had time to even try and bother to fix it.

your ai captains definately needs work, just use the darn npc ai because they seem 10x smarter than your captains, lest i do not see them running into each other nearly as often as my guys, nor do they npc ai ships sail right up to a ship that is about ready to sink so it can detonate their powder room and blow them to hell like my guys have the annoying habit of doing. shot choices, you should be able to tell your ships all what ammo you want them loading, it would be 100% better if my manowar was not using broadsides full of round shot into merchants i want to board, and sail shot on bounty hunters i want to kill, or heck to be able to tell him use the bombs i only put 5k of them into your hold.

vendors in general should have more common goods to sell more frequently. weapons, sailcloth, shot types, medicines all should be a tad more common than they are. it is frustrating as all heck to stop at 10 different ports and none of them have basic supplies at all or in such low numbers it is silly, then you hit one town that has like 20k roundshot and powder, but nothing else. the basics are just hard as heck to round up when you need them half the time.
 
About textures:
They consume a lot of memory, hence their size is balanced into a budget of textures loaded into a scene, calculated by the developer. If you take a look around you, you can probably see a lot of details in your surroundings, adding to this sum on behalf of the ground texture.

Replacing one texture will probably not crash your computer with memory overload, but it you only replace the ingame texture from the resources/textures lib, it will change nothing, as it will still be stretched due to the UV-mapping of the scene.

For replacing it with a non-stretched version, you will need to load the scene into an editor to change the UV-mapping of the ground to make it tiled and not stretched. In this case, make sure your texture is made seemless and tile-able. If not, you can see the seems connecting the images which looks rather stupid <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />
 
Absolutely true. Though increasing the resolution of the texture can improve things.
It will take a hit on game performance, but unless you go way overboard, you wouldn't really notice this I think.
 
One of the things I know we need to get fixed is removing basic supplies from the contraband lists. I hate going into a town and finding out that I can't buy any food or powder because the constables in some fit of insanity have chosen to outlaw basic supplies.

We definitely need to get an updated system of import/export/contraband decisions in place.

Cap'n Drow
 
I agree 100% about the contraband. And those stall sellers should offer what would logically be available (food for one thing) in case you arrive at a shop where there's no food like I did with only a few days left on board.
 
Is there any such code in a PROGRAM\ISLANDS\Islands_init.c file?<!--c1--><div class='codetop'>CODE</div><div class='codemain'><!--ec1-->        Islands[n].Trade.Export.id1 = GOOD_SANDAL;
        Islands[n].Trade.Export.id2 = GOOD_RUM;
        Islands[n].Trade.Export.id3 = GOOD_TOBACCO;
        Islands[n].Trade.Export.id4 = GOOD_SILVER;
        Islands[n].Trade.Export.id5 = GOOD_GOLD;
        Islands[n].Trade.Import.id1 = GOOD_SAILCLOTH;
        Islands[n].Trade.Import.id2 = GOOD_CHOCOLATE;
        Islands[n].Trade.Import.id3 = GOOD_SILK;
        Islands[n].Trade.Import.id4 = GOOD_LEATHER;
        Islands[n].Trade.Contraband.id1 = GOOD_EBONY;
        Islands[n].Trade.Contraband.id2 = GOOD_COFFEE;
        Islands[n].Trade.Contraband.id3 = GOOD_PAPRIKA;
        Islands[n].Trade.Contraband.id4 = GOOD_BRICKS;<!--c2--></div><!--ec2-->
If so, contraband goods would be very easily modified.
 
Indeed, there is exactly that type of information in that exact file.

Cap'n Drow
 
I do agree some ports have scarcity in food. bermuda, st.martins and nevis.

also hope someone can reduce the size/height of men on deck. because its hard to believe the ship can have 300 sailors while the sailor body are so big in comparison to the ship. Well, i know ....POTC and AOP are like that too.

2. Companion AI ship should be tweaked. Sail away, boarding and looting, stop firing. In the current game, i ask my companion to sail away but he keep staying there and firing at enemies until himself got sunked. Another companion i asked him to board the ship but he keep firing and sunk that galleon; there goes all the gold to plunder. Adding an option for 'stop firing' will be good. Also can the AI board a ship and loot it? I dont know cos my AI is too dumb to have ever boarded a ship.

3. Personal treasure box to store items on the land? Can make 4 at the port for each of the capital countries and another one at a remote island, cayman maybe? so that everyone who play differently can use it.
 
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