• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


    Visit our website www.piratehorizons.com to quickly find download links for the newest versions of our New Horizons mods Beyond New Horizons and Maelstrom New Horizons!

Awaiting Info Strange Collision Detection Between Ships at Sea

Hylie Pistof

Hylie Pistof

Curmudgeon
QA Tester
Storm Modder
Pirate Legend
The collision detection of ships has always been bad for large ships when boarding.
For small ships it ranges from no problem to only being a problem when trying to get away clean after a boarding.
For large ships it can make boardings very difficult to nearly impossible while in a battle while you circle around trying to catch that spinning ship while being shot at by other ships.
For really large ships like HMS Victory it gets crazy. One time I was sailing the Victory into Martinique. She was as far to the right of the channel as I could get her as there was a brig and a yacht leaving port. For a wonder they stayed on the other side of the channel but it did them no good as they both got hit, turned 90 degrees and took damage.
The large Spanish galleons are like that too and can clean out a harbor with ships spinning until they sink. For that reason I stopped sailing them years ago.

I don't know if this problem is getting worse or I am just noticing it more, but sea battles are no longer fun.
 
You sometimes get error messages about them in system.log if I recall.
Search the PROGRAM folder for "boxsize", most notably its use in AIShip.c .

But I think the "boxsize" is somehow set by the game engine itself.
 
Yeah it seems to be a ship property but I guess it's take from the model info. Altough we might be able to overwrite the data after reload based on which ship it is? If the engine doesn't overwrite it again? It would be a fix then :).
 
Not sure if that'll work, but you can always try. :shrug

I seem to remember once before writing to an engine-generated variable, but that had very little effect.
Probably all important stuff for those is handled in the engine before it gets as far as our PROGRAM folder.
 
the game does read from those variables to determine the bounding box in some cases. the ship2ship collission is done in the engine it self as far as I can see. but maybe it uses these variables also to determine it and writing to them might help. I dont know for sure either but we can try :).
 
This may be of some relevance:

In TOOL, I opened HMS_Victory and selected View > Details. In that window, I expanded the 'Model' tab and noticed another tab named 'Bounding Sphere'.
This lists the sphere's centre as (0, 4.19, -1.05) (to 2 decimal places) and its radius as 35.98.
I suspect larger ships are a problem because their bounding sphere radius is proportional to their length.

I should add that the collision data is generated when exporting from Maya, and I'm willing to bet that at least some of the problem ships have bad collision from an export error.
Victory doesn't appear to be corrupted in any way though, so it may just be its size that causes problems.
With that same logic, the Manowar models should be even worse, since they're longer than the Victory. Do they pose the same collision problems in the game?
 
The only time I have anything to do with those ships is at Cozumel and by the time I get there my grappling skills are maxed and I have all the distant boarding perks, and we still grind some.
 
I also noticed that the collision radius for the Pinnace(s) are quite bad.. I remember that it wasn't that extreme in e.g. 2.5

For the performance, I can neither see an improvement nor a decrease .. :shrug
 
Yes, it seems to me that the collision detection has gotten worse over the years. Dunno why.
 
Which storyline are you playing now @Hylie Pistof? That unknown nation and missing namesake character are definite errors that must be fixed.

For the collision detection, models have not been changed lately, have they?
What version did you say was still Ok?
I can upload the old model files from there so you can see if those make a difference.
 
I am playing the Jean le Croix storyline, Tales of a Chevalier.

The pinnaces have not been changed in years and in fact some of them can not be changed because of errors made in the hulls years ago. Some of those errors might be from Akella.
 
Dunno, but those are the only ships where I noticed this collision bug :shrug I think it was one time a normal standard pinnace, and one time one of the new merchant pinnaces .. Strange thing is, that it bugs only when I have a certain ship.. e.g. with my Aurora Frigate I had no problems, while with my 5Th Rate Warship, I sometimes collide with invisible ship parts 10meters from the actual ship away:rumgone
 
I don't know what versions were ok. I would guess that the ones giving problems now are the ones where the main GM "cannot be read" in TOOL. That would be pinnace2 and both lineships for starters.
 
I just went through all the ships in POTC in TOOL and these are the ones with corrupted main GMs. We already know that some of them have collision problems. If they can not be repaired we should consider dropping them entirely.

Battleship1
Battleship3
Boat
BrigRoyal
CursedDutchman
FlyingDutchman
Galeon2
Galeon50
HMS_Interceptor
Ketch
Lineship1
Lineship47
ManoWar_gub
Manowar2
pinnace2
PO_Warship
RN_Battleship
RN_Warship
sloop1
sloop2
SloopBermuda
SP_Battleship
SP_Manowar
SP_Pinnace50
SP_Warship
 
Is there any set of two ships that you know have collision problems now that didn't before?
That would give us a test case to work with, so we could return those models to the earliest state I can find and see if that makes a difference.
 
The pinnaces and galeons? You would have to go back at least 2 years.

EDIT: The oldest version of POTC I have is build 14 beta 1 patch 5 from 2011.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top