Captain's Blogbook

[morgan terror]

a long time ago, i made an extensive log on my experiences with the game, and now is the time i will start it all over again. i don't neccessarily mind if you post comments here, but don't drift to far off topic. instead, if the bugs i've met provoke discussion, make a new topic. no really, comment all you like. the old log was hell to load with 152 screenshots on one page.

i started my adventure with jack sparrow, and you wouldn't believe the sh*tload of notes i've got here. it's been a while since i've explored any new content, so this was an excellent place to start. of course, i didn't know then that this meant that all the sidequests had demised, but i didn't want to quit so early. you can count on the fact that i won't stop for some time either, unless i hit some sort of game-breaker. don't expect them to appear in a hurry though. here we go.

the first thing i noticed were the all the new loading screens. they really are quite nice. i'll bet a lot of you are going to think that those have been there for ages already, but yeah. anyway, i won't be spoiling much of the main quest for you, cos what's the fun in that? i'll only be telling you what i did besides that, which, of course, consisted of stealing anything that wasn't nailed down. or alive. the first target happened to be a shovel, which i later saw in the posession of soldiers as standard gear for some reason. yes, i do intend to poke every break from reality. anyway, after the rather wordy and impressive plot exposure, teague thought it would be fun to ruin to moment by running slap-bang into my face. nevermind that, i'm used to it.

during my little stroll around the town i ended up in the tavern, where i met up with thomas, which i REALLY hadn't seen coming. even less expected was his depiction as a total dandy. 'red looks good on you captain!'. why yes it does! : exiting the tavern, i discovered that the sliiiiiiiiide( : ) goes WAY faster than walking, so i treated the populace with the sight of a pirate on an invisible skateboard zooming through the town. repeatedly. doing this i practically stumbled over a dueling rapier, the stats pretty much pointless due to my starting sword. this doesn't really matter, of course, since it'll be different in other main quests. but hey, loot.

accidentally, i ended up right in the jungle, reeling over a cluster of banditry, killing the bunch with an enthousiastic flailing of my arms. after a failed attempt of trying to grasp what just happened, i just went back in town. i did get advanced defence by now though, which should be a top priority for any player, giving that everything in this game is trying to kill you. interestingly, i found a pirate pistol on one of the bandits, which happens to be one of the best firearms in the whole game. i'd think someone attempted to make guns more realistic, but forgot to balance all the excisting ones with the added guns. not my problem. i tried practicing my new toys on the crew, but that seemed to be broken. would have been a nice feature.

in any case, i went to sea, heading south. at least, that's what the logbook said i had to do. i honestly didn't have a clue since i hadn't realised i actually had a map in the inventory now instead of having a map menu. would have been quite entertaining to sail without charts, but it was not to be. knowing that officers are dumbf**ks, i ordered thomas to stop before he sailed his dumb head into something. like me. (using his name makes it a lot funnier really) as for myself, i was not really going anywhere that quickly due to a near lack of wind, but i did notice a few things:
firstly, there's bells. it's just a small thing which does quite a lot for the sailing experience. secondly, the moon was shining partially through the ocean. it wasn't actually behind the horizon, just overlapping it. (sky was nice though) now, that wasn't a problem. the problem was that i was very low on gunpowder in comparison to my amount of shot. now, i know that jack's improvised that before, but i doubt he'd sacrifice the rum without a kraken breathing down his neck.

i managed to actually go south at 00:35, which sent me off past some luggers at over 8 knots, a speed which i soon recognised as average in this game. i made a rather important post on that in the WBT topic earlier.

it was around 1:00 that i recieved an extra point in sailing, which was nice. i guess that could be compared to jack being able to tell port from starboard, cos MAN that steering was slow. i also, supposedly, noticed cargo bobbing about. supposedly. the only thing i could find was a shark, and i wasn't about to haul that on board. anyone else think that lookout's a jerk? thought you did.

"do you see anything?"
"yup."
....
"what?"
"some thingy in some place, i dunno"

it's like 'i spy' without guidelines. he might have seen a big wave for all i know.

there wasn't really any interesting stuff happening up to the point where i approached aruba. which wouldn't have been nearly as interesting if it would have been curacao. since that's where i was going. yeah, i still hadn't found the map by now.

i didn't have much time to think about it though, since i met up with some pirates just about then. naturally, they consisted of ships way bigger than me, a trend which seemed to consist all the way through the game. so what, i have a frig over there? as much as i'd like to watch thomas sailing to his splintery demise and film it, i had a suspicion i was going to need that sailing piece of plot. i just let him make a run for it and thought i'd employ some tactics here. basically, i had the fortune of always encountering square riggers. i had a cutter. just sail away with the wind on the beam and give em the finger. i did manage to get 3 accuracy by taking a few potshots at them though. where i got that first point is beyond me. their frig did get a lot scarier once it actually hit me, i'd have to say, since it knocked a pretty big dent in the arse. i escaped shortly after that, and sailed off to god-knows-where, since i couldn't see a blooming thing and didn't have any fast travel options.

i bumped into the island at around 3:43, which seemed suspiciously narrow. to give you an idea of how lost i really was, i was thinking i was looking at one end of ex-QC, which turned out to be on the very other end of the archipelago. according to that logic, i was supposed to sail to either one side of the thing and was bound to run into a port sooner or later.

i tried the coast along the way for a place to land, but no such luck. i did, however, run into a schooner, and it turns out it's bloody hard to see a flag in the dark, and my spyglass wasn't helping. yeah, it didn't display anything.

it was at around 5:00 that i began to suspect i was on the wrong side. half an hour later i managed to land at a beach, which turned out to be rocky shore. i immediately recognised it as the old conceciao beach, which meant there was a secret cave nearby. i was right. this cave, however, turned out to be lacking a texture. no big deal, you'd say, but i ran into another bugger:
due to the old keys being completely hardwired into my brain, i was having one hell of a time with the new walking keys. as a result, i'd unwittingly press the 'sheathe' button right in the middle of a swordfight. after three rounds of that, i gave up and blamed it on the game.

but that's not all. of course. i'll be continuing my log soon enough. we've only had 1.5 sheets of paper, after all.

bugs:

-training with your crew is broken, no matter which amount.
-no data on spyglass
-dungeon on rocky shore lacking texture

gameplay tweaks:

-guns need balancing.
-jack might need a bit more gunpowder to begin with in his cutter's hold.
-moon overlaps horizon.
-camera on cutter is annoyingly low

 

[Captain Maggee]

Nice first entry Morgan

The no data on spyglass is actually because of realistic mode not a bug though

 

[Pieter Boelen]

of course, i didn't know then that this meant that all the sidequests had demised, but i didn't want to quit so early

Actually, the Jack Sparrow storyline is one of the few that DOES have several sidequests, courtesy of Thomas the Terror and Captain Maggee.
You'll recognize some of the events in the sidequests from the stock game, but they've been updated and Sparrified.

the first thing i noticed were the all the new loading screens. they really are quite nice. i'll bet a lot of you are going to think that those have been there for ages already, but yeah

Thanks for the compliment. 't Is a lot of work to do a lot of those, I can tell you.
In fact, still not all location-specific loading screens have been replaced. Maybe on my next holiday...

the first target happened to be a shovel, which i later saw in the posession of soldiers as standard gear for some reason[/CODE]AGREEEED! That's indeed one of the main things still on my Build 14 wishlist!

during my little stroll around the town i ended up in the tavern, where i met up with thomas, which i REALLY hadn't seen coming. even less expected was his depiction as a total dandy. 'red looks good on you captain!'. why yes it does!

interestingly, i found a pirate pistol on one of the bandits, which happens to be one of the best firearms in the whole game. i'd think someone attempted to make guns more realistic, but forgot to balance all the excisting ones with the added guns

Agreed again. The item assignments are messed up at the moment and the balancing isn't the best either.
This is on my wishlist joined together with the other weapon-related issue as mentioned above.

would have been quite entertaining to sail without charts, but it was not to be

We could actually make some storylines start without one.
Bartolomeu does, but you get one before going to sea anyway.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

"do you see anything?"
"yup."
....
"what?"
"some thingy in some place, i dunno"

I WANT THAT LOOKOUT ON MY SHIP!

naturally, they consisted of ships way bigger than me, a trend which seemed to consist all the way through the game

Snow White Sorrow tried to make big ships rarer in the game as part of WBT...

it turns out it's bloody hard to see a flag in the dark, and my spyglass wasn't helping. yeah, it didn't display anything.

Deliberate! That's realism for ya!
I recommend you have a quick look at the Arcade/Realism part that I wrote in the latest attachment in the Features of the Build Mod thread.

-camera on cutter is annoyingly low

Again, agreed. Noticed that myself. Not entirely sure how to fix, but it must be possible.

-dungeon on rocky shore lacking texture

Error logging please? I want to see the system.log entry for that one.

due to the old keys being completely hardwired into my brain, i was having one hell of a time with the new walking keys. as a result, i'd unwittingly press the 'sheathe' button right in the middle of a swordfight

We only moved the Forward/Backward buttons to W and S; the rest is the same as it always was.
I think it makes more sense to have WASD as movement controls than to have to use the mouse buttons.
But of course controls can be changed!

 

[morgan terror]

oh, i agree with you on the controls. i got the hang of it by now. as for the error logging, it seems to be busted in my game. i checked, and i did have it turned on, but i'm not getting anything.

i was suspecting the thing with the spyglass. it's impractical though, since the two things i really need are enemy speed and crew, and those are a pain to make an estimate on.

i HAVE actually noticed a modified side quest. however, the main quest is currently broken, it seems. i met up with shaypen in spreightstown after finishing the business with the brin daughters, but i had a CTD just when the dialogue ended. no big deal, but she didn't reappear after i reloaded the game and went back to try again, and hasn't done so ever since. it's like the game considers the quest trigger to have passed already. in that vein, i want to try and see if she ended up on jamaica like the dialogue suggested. how a bug could persist like that when you didn't even get the chance to save your game is beyond me though. just to be sure, i kept the savegame from before the dialogue.

 

[morgan terror]

allright. forget the cave. i'll have fun later. instead, i thought i'd go into the jungle and see where i'd end up, which later turned out to be an indian settlement. now, these indians are not your normal natives. they seem to have descended from an ancient dutch hippie organisation, who specialise in advising random people on schooners and live in a pirate fort. yeah.

backing away slowly from the place, i bumped into bandits, who killed me when i sheathed my sword by accident. again. allright, screw you guys, i'm out of here. oceans are MUCH safer. well, for me, anyway. anything smaller than me runs the risk of getting squished with extreme prejudice.

true to my word, i thought i'd rob the crew of their stuff, which they never seemed to mind, really. must be some kind of commy pirates who think all belongs to the 'state'. or it was because most of them were sleeping. ish. talking to one resulted in casual dialogue about him being in extreme agony and all kinds of nasty things, which i really should have expected, given the model used. (some of the positions they 'sleep' in really do look quite hilarious. in hindsight, i am rather surprised about not hearing any dying noises when i entered, a sloppy bug which used to be present in a cave on hispaniola) i just told him to sleep it off and tried setting sail.

it was around here, once i was going eastward around the island, that i more or less figured out where i was. i was going to go south-east once i had restocked at the the town, which i later discovered to be a bad idea, as there's nothing there on the map. i discovered this after i had stocked myself up on a set of maps at the shop while i was there, and came up with the luminous idea that there might actually be a seperate inventory section for those now. the only real snag i hit here in town was that there was no rum. except for the one bottle in the gov's house. so i nicked it.

at 11:08, i went south again, but not in a hurry. in fact, i was going so damn slow that i could hardly even steer. the blue ocean's nice though, real postcardy. however, i later found out that it's a bit erratic in it's location. i planned on using it to locate beaches, but it's more often than not off the mark by a few hundred yards.

the wind was not making me very happy for quite a while, but it was slowly shifting towards the east, a better place for my rig. along the way i discovered that i'd recieved 2 luck from somewhere, and my repair increased to 3. i was pleased to see that the islands fade away in a much nicer way by obscuring them, since that was something that kinda bugged me before. i reached bonaire at 14:15, where i got greeted by my old friends, the pirates.

not just pirates, but exactly the same. in my efforts to escape, i somehow ended up back at aruba. i did return to bonaire, but my little booch did get rid of the minor annoyance off to my side. at around 15:37 a pirate galleon appeared, but i didn't really bother. i know from experience that they're floating potato bags.

16:00 - sails 3 and repair 4. for some reason, the galleon was running away. i could have actually boarded it right there, but i left it. two hours later, and i moored at port kralendijk, where i had this rather comically looking conversation:

yeah, just ignore the boom nearly smacking you all the time.

at the stalls, i got myself a powder flask and discovered rum is seen as medication. well, can't argue with that. i did have a go at the dungeon here, where i discovered that those small pistol braces hurt. a lot. it did gain me a good smallsword and 4 melee though, as well as several issues i noticed, listed below.

after all that, i thought i'd have a snooze. guess what? first officer i meet is a female surgeon. imagine that on a ship. anyway, i thought i'd sell my loot, which resulted in a total of 19K in the pocket. for some reason, the dutch are always low on rum (it's a smuggling good, but i'm sure you can come up with more entertaining reasons that that), which led me to believe i had found the origins of one of jack's more renowned chatchphrases.

after this conclusion, i thought i'd go find the next island.

gameplay tweaks:

-foes always taunt twice at the same time. the taunting itself i nice though, but it needs a bit more variation.
-the 100 and 250 gold that you can pick up lacks an icon.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

i was suspecting the thing with the spyglass. it's impractical though, since the two things i really need are enemy speed and crew, and those are a pain to make an estimate on.

Very true. I haven't played much yet since I turned Realistic Game Mode on,
but I do recall one time chasing a ship and for the longest of time not being able to tell if I was gaining on her or not.
But that's something I suppose real life sailors of the time had to live with too.

The one thing that you CAN try to do is to observe the relative bearing of the target.
That's what we still do in modern shipping today to see if a ship is passing ahead of us, astern of us or is going to hit us.
You need to keep your player camera at a fixed point for that to work, though.

i thought i'd go into the jungle and see where i'd end up, which later turned out to be an indian settlement. now, these indians are not your normal natives. they seem to have descended from an ancient dutch hippie organisation, who specialise in advising random people on schooners and live in a pirate fort. yeah.

i was pleased to see that the islands fade away in a much nicer way by obscuring them, since that was something that kinda bugged me before.

We've got Hook to thank for that one, back when he fixed and finished Maturin's Weather Mod.

yeah, just ignore the boom nearly smacking you all the time.

Well, the game never WAS made to have ships moored alongside the jetties, was it?

rum is seen as medication

HUH? What do you mean???

for some reason, the dutch are always low on rum (it's a smuggling good, but i'm sure you can come up with more entertaining reasons that that), which led me to believe i had found the origins of one of jack's more renowned chatchphrases.

That's intentional. Really.
(Ok, so it isn't. Maybe we SHOULD do that though. So that as Jack Sparrow, you're always forced to be low on your rum supply! )

-foes always taunt twice at the same time. the taunting itself i nice though, but it needs a bit more variation.

What do you mean with this one?

-the 100 and 250 gold that you can pick up lacks an icon.

What icon are we talking about here? :?

 

[morgan terror]

the 'bottle o rum' is listed under medications in the inventory. which makes sense, but it's rather comical.

i can imagine the player going on a rum-hunt throughout the game. i'm sure i'd see the humor of it, for one.

what i do to determine ship speeds is to check my radar if the pixels shift once i a while. gotta keep the ship steady though. which reminds me: all compasses display everything, making the differing qualities obsolete.

the taunting issue is this:
whenever en enemy sees you, he says something, but i think he's playing two audio tracks at once. that might have been the fault of enemies coming in clusters though. maybe the limitation of only one enemy taunt being able to play at once is in order.

once in a while, you find an item on the ground. nowadays a little screen pops up which shows you what you found, with the option to take it or leave it. the icons for the bags of gold are nothing but the blue background with border.

 

[carmenara]

That's what we still do in modern shipping today to see if a ship is passing ahead of us, astern of us or is going to hit us.
You need to keep your player camera at a fixed point for that to work, though.

Target motion analysis. Fun!

 

[morgan terror]

a new entry can be expected tomorrow. no time today. pretty busy week, but i think i'll manage.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

the 'bottle o rum' is listed under medications in the inventory. which makes sense, but it's rather comical.

AH! That's been in the game longer than I have been on the forum.
It is my firm belief that it was intended as a joke in the first place. Rum actually DOES increase your health!

what i do to determine ship speeds is to check my radar if the pixels shift once i a while.

FAKER! Just for fun, try my method for a bit.
Though of course my way works better for crossing ships and not so much in overtaking situations.

which reminds me: all compasses display everything, making the differing qualities obsolete.

That is NOT good. Please post that one on the Bug Tracker!

the taunting issue is this:
whenever en enemy sees you, he says something, but i think he's playing two audio tracks at once. that might have been the fault of enemies coming in clusters though. maybe the limitation of only one enemy taunt being able to play at once is in order.

I think I know what you mean. You get multiple insults at the same time.
In fact, I think you get taunts all the time during any fight, which seems a bit overkill to me too.

once in a while, you find an item on the ground. nowadays a little screen pops up which shows you what you found, with the option to take it or leave it. the icons for the bags of gold are nothing but the blue background with border.

You're absolutely right. And I think I know what's wrong too.
I even have an attempted fix. In PROGRAM\ITEMS\initItems.c find:

int InitPickUpItem( ref ItemIndex, string id, string model, float rare, int gold, float numrand )
{
ref	itm;
int	itmIndex = ItemIndex;
makeref(itm,Items[itmIndex]);

itm.id 			= id;
itm.name 		= "itmname_" + id;
itm.model 		= model;

itm.skiptrade 	= true;
itm.skiprand 	= false;
itm.skipequip 	= true;
itm.numrand 	= numrand;
itm.groupID = OBJECT_ITEM_TYPE; // KK


//	itm.shown 		= false;
itm.minlevel 	= 0;
itm.rare 		= rare;
itm.gold 		= gold;

itmIndex++;
return itmIndex;
}

Replace it with:

int InitPickUpItem( ref ItemIndex, string id, string model, float rare, int gold, float numrand )
{
ref	itm;
int	itmIndex = ItemIndex;
makeref(itm,Items[itmIndex]);

itm.id 			= id;
itm.name 		= "itmname_" + id;
itm.model 		= model;

itm.skiptrade 	= true;
itm.skiprand 	= false;
itm.skipequip 	= true;
itm.numrand 	= numrand;
itm.groupID = OBJECT_ITEM_TYPE; // KK


//	itm.shown 		= false;
itm.minlevel 	= 0;
itm.rare 		= rare;
itm.gold 		= gold;

// PB: Add picture -->
itm.picIndex 	= 2;
itm.picTexture 	= "ITEMS_4";
// PB: Add picture <--

itmIndex++;
return itmIndex;
}

Reinit (F11) should be enough for the change to take effect, but if it then still doesn't show, please try a new game.
I don't have the time to test this, but I'm hoping it might work...

 

[morgan terror]

i pasted it in. i'll wait and see if it works. as for the rum, i think it's a slight joke on the Snakebite brew.

 

[morgan terror]

rightey, here we go again. like i said, i was now going ESE towards my next destination. i briefly managed to pique the 12 knots with my little cutter, but i was forced to sail at 9.2 most of the way afterwards, where i managed to pick up 18 planks. now, that's a good thing, since i frequently and embarrasingly kept dinging up my ship by oversteering. still getting the hang of that. turns out you run quite a risk with the rudder flat to starboard. heh.

i approached curacao around 14:00, three hours later. took only two islands to get there. meanwhile, i had noticed something was giving me an unexplainable 1 point penalty in sail, which was rather odd. i never discovered why. i also recieved my fifth point in repair, which is good. amusingly, i never actually saw the island once i got there. i just kept going on until i bumped into it. what was rather nice was watching this guy:

he started all the way at the right, and i never caught up with him. he was just sailing along with me for some reason and passed me from one side to the other, going to the island.

naturally, i still had no idea where i was going. the little map i bought earlier was telling me i was going in the right direction, but my mapreading is not the most sparkling thing around, as the readers of my previous log might remember. ) i had somehow managed to completely miss the berthing the first time round, even though i was right there. this is a bit of a downside of not being able to use sail to, since it's easy to miss a beach, and this one wasn't visible in the least. i found it the second time though, plus a big dent. this was at 17:45.

why's the rum always gone?
or the quests, for that matter? i went for a bit of jungling where i killed some schmucks and then went back to port. there was nothing interesting around here anyway.

i did meet up with a little pirate sloop on my way out though. i mostly ignored it, but the frig trailing along with me (hear that? cutter's escorting a frig...) had a bit of fun with it. damn that thing's loud. stereo sound really does wonders with that cannonfire, you know. i took some potshots at it for the sake of skill points and somehow managed to knock the mast over. it wasn't much trouble after that. either way, i was now sailing south again to barbados, where i was supposed to go in the first place. why yes we DO have a quest going on around here somewhere!

the sloop sank a short while after the screenie, but i was having some difficulties with the wind. tacking works pretty well, so i was coming about every 15 minutes or so. while doing so, i ran into a few dutch ships, and i thought i'd annoy them a bit.

it's funny to see how they always scatter around in a panic. i never quite understood how, being the arse that i am, i always had my ship in better shape than any other goof i met. you need your sails to move, people! not as basketball hoops!

barbados arrived on the port side at 20:50, and i thought i'd stop at bridgetown, thinking it would be pretty close. i could, in fact, see the lighthouse, so i roughly knew where i was, which meant i could head for spreightstown instead by going south. the lighthouse should be visible under here.

rather frustratingly, the crew asked for their pay at nightfall, but i ran short of about 300 gold out of almost 20K. it wasn't much of a problem though, since their morale dropped to only just under 50. the wind was also stubbornly staying in it's place and even lessening, so i was pretty stuck where i was until it scooted over to SW. still, i was only going 2.4 knots at 23:30.

as i got round the bend, i started skirting the coast at around 5 or 6 knots, with the wind having picked up quite a bit. this allowed me to dock at 00:47.

a rather boring entry, but the next episode happens to be one of the funniest sections so far.

 

[morgan terror]

by the way, i'd really like to see this once answered. it;s bad.:

i HAVE actually noticed a modified side quest. however, the main quest is currently broken, it seems. i met up with shaypen in spreightstown after finishing the business with the brin daughters, but i had a CTD just when the dialogue ended. no big deal, but she didn't reappear after i reloaded the game and went back to try again, and hasn't done so ever since. it's like the game considers the quest trigger to have passed already. in that vein, i want to try and see if she ended up on jamaica like the dialogue suggested. how a bug could persist like that when you didn't even get the chance to save your game is beyond me though. just to be sure, i kept the savegame from before the dialogue.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

meanwhile, i had noticed something was giving me an unexplainable 1 point penalty in sail, which was rather odd. i never discovered why.

I think I have also observed mystery skill-substractions. On officers as well. NO idea where they come from.
Actually, go ahead and put that on the bug tracker!

frig trailing along with me (hear that? cutter's escorting a frig...)

Are you talking about Thomas' ship again? Or is this Beckett's now?
Indeed I don't understand that Beckett part of the story either. He has a merchantman. You have a cutter.
He wants you to escort him to ensure his safety while he doesn't even know you. :wacko:

i ran into a few dutch ships, and i thought i'd annoy them a bit.

Is that the Dutch ships in that screenshot below? If so, GO RIGHT AHEAD! They're French!

the main quest is currently broken, it seems. i met up with shaypen in spreightstown after finishing the business with the brin daughters, but i had a CTD just when the dialogue ended. no big deal, but she didn't reappear after i reloaded the game and went back to try again, and hasn't done so ever since. it's like the game considers the quest trigger to have passed already. in that vein, i want to try and see if she ended up on jamaica like the dialogue suggested. how a bug could persist like that when you didn't even get the chance to save your game is beyond me though. just to be sure, i kept the savegame from before the dialogue.That doesn't sound good. And really weird too.

I thought all MAJOR storyline bugs were fixed now.
Captain Maggee should take a look at this one!

 

[Captain Maggee]

Hmmm, if it is the part Im thinking of you just left after killing Brock and meeting Brin and on leaving the Building Shaypen talks to you? :?

If this is the case she is finished in the storyline and it is time to go to the tavern

The CTD is rather unplesant news and I did think all the MAJOR bugs were fixed, maybe post it on the BUG tracker and see if anyone will confirm it

 

[morgan terror]

no, it's not that moment. i had already gotten the brin sisters from nevis and had gone back to spreightstown (i think. i've got it written down somewhere). i was basically finishing my 'cooperation' with shaypen. in any case, she said she was going to go to jamaica. the business on rocky shore had long passed. she talked to me on the spreightstown docks. however, i recently discovered a lead towards beckett, so i think i might be able to continue the main quest anyway. the log you see here on PA isn't nearly that far though. still haven't ditched thomas.

if the spyglass info is turned off, there really should be a way to find out which flag belongs to which nation.... since i really don't have a clue.

your fix for the bags of gold worked, by the way.

 

[Captain Maggee]

Ah well if she said that on Spielghtown jetty then that part of the quest is OVER and she is not to be seen again

The Beckett part is indeed how to continue on

NOTE: thanks for confirming the gold

 

[morgan terror]

allright, now for the next entry. this was, like i said, a rather funny one, and fully in-character i would say. the fun began with thomas' goodbye gift. it was an entirely expected..... new outfit! at least, i think it was. i only noticed the proper jack look in my inventory until then. it also netted me 2 leadership, 3 luck and the matey repute. though that might have been due to the town citizens, i dunno. i did, purely by chance, meet some kind of navy grouch on the docks who didn't seem to have any direct plot significance. kudo's on getting that guy noticable. it was obvious plot dialogue. i continued into the whPOTATO-MONK!

i don't quite remember why, but i have a phobia for those guys. probably because they can't DIE. god knows why i attacked him in the first place. it has something to do with some fluke in a cross-country brawl where he chased me through whole friggin' oxbay. scary bastard.

anyway, i FINALLY managed to stock back up on rum, and went to outside, right into a thunderstorm. well, straight on into the tavern, finishing pofessional fencing along the way. Billy was a surprise, i'll tell you that, but i think my reaction to him was kinda skewered due to my knowledge of the game. still, i had a bit of a laugh when i thought 'who's mister fatroll?' and discovered.... it was mings. : another oddity was that i met one of the Hornblower family in there.

anyway, time to save the plot-induced damsel in distress. bit of a chuckle with the gems... i wonder what happens if you arrange an accident? i can imagine it stopping the plot quite easily, so i'm not exactly tempted to try. in that philosophy, i decided to take her to the other side by sea.

ayup. nothing to worry about. oh, and ignore that pirate ship right in front of your face. (well, it wasn't MUCH of a problem... since it got buried beneath a gigantic pile of cannonballs almost instantly : )

now, i can either go north or west. since the wind was going NE, i picked the northern route. this took a turn for the hilarious (well, for SOMEONE on board...) when the wind shifted onto the beam, sending miss brinkley through all corners of the cabin. in fact, just about everyone must have had trouble not flying into the ocean. lovely image.

i assumed the bay around the bend was the port. it wasn't. instead, it happened to be gray rock bay. well okay, moving on. things got even more confusing not much later, when i saw a... oh. i was reading the map upside-down.

what? it's foggy, okay?

well, i knew bridgetown was somewhere over there now. emphasis on somewhere. 7:27 was the time that i ran into a pier, assuming it was the right place. as a refreshing change of pace, it was. apparently, miss brinkley had messed herself up pretty bad, and changed her dress while i wasn't looking. no, really. i've got it listed below.

not long thereafter, i met miss shaypen. now, that's definately one of those character-models-to-run-away-from-very-fast, so i didn't quite trust the idea to go to gray rock bay. still, i did, later on. i DID actually try to sell the diamonds at this point, but i couldn't due to some plot-induced block. puh. i was satisfied by continuing my looting-rampage through the town anyway. for some reason, the apothecary had one of the required ingredients right there in his shop. that made things easier. i also found a dual-barrel pistol not much later in a mansion, along withWHY ARE THERE THREE ARMED MEN IN THE BEDROOM?

jeesh. did find the second ingredient there though. after that looting spree, i thought i'd go to that beach. it involved many 30-ish winds, so i got there pretty fast. even touched the 16 knots for a sec.

sail with you? heck no, scary bitch, i'm out of here. oh. now i've got a tartane. you're on my list, maggee. still, i was amused by how jack managed to weasle his way out of jail. stupid guy that i am, i thought i'd save the diamonds and try going to nevis in that very tartane. i actually managed. but that's a story for next time.

bugs:

-the loading screen often breaks. i haven't qutie figured out why or what exactly happens, but the load button sometimes fails to work. the presence of said button is a mystery to me though. you selected the screen to load a game in the first place, so why have a SECOND button to load a game?
-brinkley changes her skin as she enters bridgetown. this bug presists from that point.

 

[morgan terror]

ah, okay. so what was the gift she gave me?