Bug Buggy Mess

[Hylie Pistof]

I really don't know what to say. My game almost never crashes during boardings. That's not to say it never crashes because it does about once a day. The last crash was a few minutes ago. I went to Jamaica and ran around the jungle, did some smuggling, then sailed into port and got some swords spiffed up, then loaded the holds with cargo, then did some shopping on the waterfront. Then I went out to the dock to leave and was 2 steps from stopping and saving when it crashed.

Crashes happen. But the boarding crashes were fixed 2 years ago. I have to say you have a hardware problem.

 

[Thagarr]

@Elgin 8 gig of memory is your total system ram? I am assuming it is shared by your video card, try going in to your BIOS and allocating more ram to dedicated video. For this game, 4 gig should be more than sufficient. Also, make sure you have a few programs running in the background as possible. If you have any codec pacs installed, try disabling them, bad codecs can cause issues.

 

[Elgin]

@Hylie Pistof I'm pretty pretty sure that my hardware is functioning properly I remain skeptical about the bug's origin being hardware related because i don't face any crashes except this one and the port fast-travel crash. In fact my game almost never crashes and is running quite smoothly. @Thagarr the 675mx has an additional 4gig for a combined total of 12. That's why I have 64bit OS installed. I'll look into the codec issue.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well, if it isn't a codec problem ( ffdshow is a bad one ) then it could be that you are playing POTC for too long of a session. POTC has memory leaks that add up over time to crash the game. I take a break every hour or so just to restart the game.

This leads to another thing. POTC runs off the hard drive and it can get fragmented pretty quickly and this will make it crash a lot. I use IOBit Advanced system care 8 and it has me running a full scan every 2-3 days. That is also how often I defrag with their Smart Defrag 3.

 

[Elgin]

Don't have ffdshow. Defrag wise al partitions are in pretty good nick. I usually keep my system in fairly good order as well. I did run some tests earlier on. Installed on my brother's machine. Loading the same save crashed first time in the same spot - cargo area. Second run, decreased the res to 1600x900, didn't crash right away but before he made progress to the captain, bang! ctd. I fiddled with the looting options, and by disabling the loot, got me further in the cargo area but definitely crashed before I could press to progress. So it may be the looting bit, my corrupt saves, or faulty areas or bits of anything. I'll try different things and maybe i'll get it sorted.... and one more thing, thank you for your time!

 

[Grey Roger]

Perhaps the upgrades remain in place when you re-purchase her. But I am not sure of that.
Try it and we'll know!

I did. Upgrades do not remain in place, upgraded stats do, you can repeatedly upgrade the ship, it is expensive, but I've got lots of money. Bug Tracker report filed here.

 

[Grey Roger]

First days of gameplay I used the onboard intel GPU alongside the fix provided. Didn't do the trick. Boarding crash almost all the time. Got angry. Fresh install, used only the Nvidia GPU, same crash in same place, the cargo area. I can only speculate... anything could be faulty, including my saves, the various ship types, the looting mechanics, but one thing i'm sure of, at the moment the game is pretty much unplayable, because naval battle and boarding subsequently play such an important part in the overall appeal of the game. Boarding is kind of hard as it is, with them angry pirates rushing towards you, with demigod hitpoints while your own idiotic party members have hit boxes the size of a house, and do a very good job at preventing you from reaching the enemy. Even that is manageable, wasting hours on capturing a ship isn't. Still, I think I pretty much want to continue playing this game and I do wan't to know if there is someone with the heavy ship boarding/capturing combat oriented play style and what setup or configuration works for you.

Which version of the game are you using? Though I'm still getting the same problem of crashing, it's not all the time, and it's less frequent in Beta 3.4 (or, for that matter, Beta 3.3) than it was in Beta 3.1.

In spite of that, I do play a very combat-heavy game with lots of boarding and looting. It's the looting which sometimes causes the problem. It's almost as if the game is determined that a particular battle will end with a crash - I usually save game just before going into a battle for exactly this reason, and if the game crashes, it will probably crash after I reload the saved game. On one occasion I saved before one battle, it didn't crash and I succeeded in looting everything, then I forgot to save before the next battle and it did crash. Reload, fight first battle, no crash, proceed to second battle, it crashed again. When this happens, I reload, fight the battle again, but refrain from looting corpses or chests - annoying, but that's guaranteed to prevent a crash, at least for me. Nevertheless, I'm able to loot often enough that I've never bought any sort of medicine, and all the weapons and armour in the ship's locker are second-hand, so to speak.

Initially the crew are expendable drones whose only function in their brief lives is to keep some of the enemy occupied long enough for you to finish off your first few, then you can take on the rest of the enemy. You really need good Melee skill and preferably half-decent armour, and so do your officers - anyone with Melee skill less than 4 should not be allowed into a boarding action. Later on, when you and your officers have better armour and swords, and you've put a good load of armour and weapons into the ship's locker, your crew can survive battle. And at this point you don't want any officer with Melee less than 6 involved in boarding.

 

[Elgin]

Restarted playing in February, only about two weeks ago, so i'm using the latest version Beta 3.4 so therefore i'm not very accustomed to other previous versions.

As I stated earlier my play style is somewhat similar, most of the time I haul cargo across the Caribbean and prey upon unsuspecting pirate ships and rarely on the Spanish or French ones. Most of the time I hunt specific types of ships: pinnaces and other large cargo merchant ships. I have 3 ships in my fleet, a light fluyt for cargo space , a 3rd rate 64 gun, and my corsair frigate for speed and maneuverability during those close call boardings. So yes, it's a mixture of economy (because trading gold is very lucrative) and a couple of ships captured, per day. As for char skills, I'm doing pretty good, maxed the first 3 a while ago, I have equipped a gilded cuirass, and pretty potent weapons but i'm no match for let's say 3 guys with 250hp, at once. I do not assign boarding duties to my officers as they are not expandable at the moment. Looting on the other hand, is beginning to yield quite the profits, I can loot excellent quality weapons and 300-500 gold/ person for a total of over 20000 gold per ship... if I'm lucky a Horse Pistol found can augment the value of the loot even further.

Just looked over the system.log and found out some interesting stuff. I'll upload and maybe someone can decipher it. A few lines gripped my attention, especially: "Can't load texture resource\textures\SHIPS\DEC2.TGA.tx"

 

[Grey Roger]

Do any of your officers have decent Melee skill? If not, assign them to your party anyway, talk to them, say "About you", then "Why don't you sit out the next boarding". As your skill improves, so does theirs, though more slowly. Buy any golden cuirasses, or even battle armour, that you find, and give it to those officers, along with decent swords. Because having someone competent alongside you in a boarding action really makes a difference. Some officer types have good Melee to start with, but I've trained several of my others that way.

I have one permanent ship in my fleet. That way, when I capture an enemy ship, I can put an officer aboard, take it to the next friendly port, sell its cargo and then sell the ship. The sale price is nowhere near the price to buy the same ship back, but it's still a good profit considering I didn't pay for it in the first place, and as I only have one ship of my own, that means I can take up to three prizes before returning to port.

If you're fighting multiple enemies, keep your block up. Wait until they all hit you at about the same time, then hit back. You're most vulnerable when you've just hit, and so are they, plus it takes them a little time to recover from their own swings so if they've only just swiped at you then you have a window of opportunity before they can hit you again.

 

[Elgin]

Well, thanks for the melee tips, changed the weapon (polish cavalry sabre) and started to block some more it definitely helps as it does softening their ships with grapeshot. The big improvement is that over 3 days worth of game play, surprisingly, had no crashes, not during boarding, none at all really and the issues disappeared or so it seems. Not even one crash per day and guess I can the game to its fullest. Enlarged my cargo space, and started delivering goods back and forth, for fees as high 1/2 a million. One thing about salaries though, I kinda know how much I'll pay, per month, but the officers salaries are all over the place, and its seems they readjust each time I hire a new one or swap them as captains on my other ships : ))) I thing this issue will have to be addressed in the forthcoming patch. Not that much of a bother, but accuracy is needed early in the game when the budget is tight and you try to save every penny.

And one more thing, a question concerning the other ships in your fleet. The basic idea is that I usually empty them of cannonballs because 1. I need to protect my sails and I cannot risk misfires and 2. I have a 3rd rate in my fleet and I try to prevent the ship I'm trying to board being blown to bits before I can capture it. In this regard I expect them to thin out the enemy crew with grapeshot upon issuing the orders but it looks like they're just standing still and do basically nothing although they seem to be in range. Am I doing something wrong, are there any special orders I should issue. What would be the right way to make them engage as they should. Any tips?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If I recall, the [Enter] menu at sea contains an option to tell your companion ships to switch shot types.

 

[Elgin]

Well, I can access that menu and I know that my ship reloads what kind of ammo I select it to, but I don't know about the other 2 ships. Even if they load the same type of ammo they don't seem to know how to use it, they don't fire and just randomly wander when ordered to attack. The give order submenu doesn't allow me to assign specific ammunition to each of the ships. If given cannonball they seem to use it accordingly, but I try to avoid using that type, because I tend to capture not sink ships. I do operate them with minimum crew required. Could this shortage" impede their proper functioning?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Perhaps you need this setting in PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h then:

#define DEFAULT_CHARGE         2       // INT - MUST NOT BE 5 IF USE_REAL_CANNONS is 1!!!! Balls = 2, Grape = 3, Chain/Knippels = 4, Bombs = 5 // KK

 

[Elgin]

Found this line. So I should set it to 1 or to a preferred value corespondent to the ammunition I would like to use?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Balls = 2, Grape = 3, Chain/Knippels = 4
Set it to whichever one that you want.

 

[Elgin]

Thank you. Would be very nice but difficult to implement I guess, to introduce different gun cal. especially on those multi-deck ships-of-the-line. Besides that, more importantly it would be more realistic if you could transfer the guns between ships and the cal. wouldn't downgrade to the lowest figure, if the ship type allows it. Other than that, great job

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Difficult indeed! To the point of being basically impossible.
One of the things we are keeping in mind for Hearts of Oak though.

Besides that, more importantly it would be more realistic if you could transfer the guns between ships and the cal. wouldn't downgrade to the lowest figure, if the ship type allows it.

Only other option would be upgrade to the highest figure, which would be a cheat.