change starting distance?

[IntgrSpin]

Hi all,

Is there any way to change the starting positions of encounters, so that we're not instantly in the middle of battle every time?

 

[HawkerT]

Ahoy there IntgrSpin <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/hi.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":gday" border="0" alt="hi.gif" />

Welcome to the Pirates Ahoy, enjoy your stay with this community! The old timers here are a hard gang of swashbuckling pirates but always quite fair and ready to answer questions!

I am sorry but I do not have an answer to your question ... instead I have more questions in the same realm as yours and so I thought we might as well pack them all into this thread <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />

You see I also find the whole battle start algorithm to be somewhat lacking. What I find to be in need of the odd enhancement is the fact that wind direction and relational position between the opposing forces is 'all over the place' so to speak. When two or more ship 'icons' on the active sea map meet up and engage for battle (i.e. the 'start battle popup' is activated either by the game ai or the player) they have a certain distance from eachother. They also have a relational position and direction of travel to eachother and most importantly also to the wind. These would be very important parameters for any two real world wind driven naval forces engaging in a sea battle and would often determine the outcome. However in AOP it seems that the initial parameters in place when the battle is engaged on the world sea map are 'forgotten' by the AI when creating the same parameters in the 3D battle window. Hence the wind will suddenly be blowing in a completely random way (or so it seems anyway), the distance, positions and direction of travel will also be different.

So ... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="smile.gif" /> ... I would like to expand your question to be one of:

- Can the game be modded so that the mentioned parameters (distance, relational position to the wind and eachother, and wind direction) are carried over from the world sea map to the 3D battle area?

Any takers?

All the best
Frans

 

[Fred Bob]

Many tweaks o' dis nature has been done in de PotC Build Mod, some o' dem "switchable" accordin' tew taste. Might oughta study de Build Mod as an example o' how similar changes might be made in AoP! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/huh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":huh" border="0" alt="huh.gif" />

Also, matey, Fred Bob be seemin' tew remember Gray Angel mentionin' a bugfix either fer Patch 1.42 or mebbe de second patch dat would sync up de wind direction between Map View an' Open Sea! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />

 

[hawkeye]

Another thing annoying (imho) when changing to the sea map: you are standing still while other vessels move at start time. It has happened more than once (and made me reduce the traveling speed on the sea map) that I fled from one encounter and switched to the map just to get a second one with another vessel. Or even worse: I had an encounter with an enemy ship while fleeing a storm, taking damage because of the storm and when changing back to the map had another encounter with the storm (because the first time the encounter was triggered by the other ship and hence the storm wasn't reset on the main map), often wrecking my ship.
It'd be nice, if the map start was paused so one could first analyse the situation, and when unpausing one would immediately start to move.

 

[HawkerT]

Ahoy there Hawkeye <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/hi.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":gday" border="0" alt="hi.gif" />

How d'ya go about changing the speed of travel on the sea map mate? I mean without lowering the sails of course <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />

Mr. Fred Bob <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" />
Sounds promising ... both the POTC build mod thingy and the patch. I seem to recall Sir Drow talking about having a look at said mod for importing stuff into AOP.

All the best
Frans

 

[LordDrow]

Greetings and Salutations to you, Intgrspin.

Good to meet another fellow sailor in these stormy seas.

Well, now that the greetin's be done, here are a few observations I've made thus far.

Pay close attention to your icon in the upper righthand corner of the map. It will actually indicate the option to enter a battle well before you are right on top of the ships on the map. I've actually been able to confirm that generally speaking, the further away from the ships on the map you are, when you join the battle, the further you will be on the sea. So by making sure you aren't right on top of the ships on the map, you can avoid suddenly appearing right in the midst of the fight, and getting your arse whipped because you are being fired upon immediately.

The same observation holds true when you are dealing with encounters with pursuers. If you hit the F3 key while the enemy is far away from you on the map, you can actually go to the sea, and have the option of immediately jumping back out to the map, simply because your pursuer is so far away, that as far as the game is concerned, you aren't actually directly involved in the encounter. At that point you can take your time figuring out what you will do by going to deck view and leisurely perusing the enemy through your spy glass.

By using this, I can generally join a fight with enough distance from all involved, whether it be a sitting battle, or someone pursuing me, to get a chance to figure my bearings and likelihood of successfully defeating the enemies.

So, I hope that helps you and others out a bit. I'm sure others have seen and can confirm this observation, or if they haven't yet noticed it, they can test my theories and confirm one way or the other.

Hope this helps you out, mate!

Safe sailin' and much booty to ye!

Cap'n Drow

 

[IntgrSpin]

I've noticed that I can enter a combat zone at a comfortable distance as Can n Drow says, unless it's joining a battle already in progress. (icon of two ships firing broadsides). In that case, I'm almost always dumped into an awful position on the opposite side of the enemy line from my would-be allies. I'll poke about the files and see if I find anything.

Side question... has anyone ever edited the ship models to allow us to climb up the mast? Seems like it should be possible.

Side side question <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="smile.gif" /> has anyone ever experimented with making the ships say... 2X as large (similar to how they appear in the boarding screen), allowing us to walk down to the gundeck?

Thanks for the warm welcomes. It's much appreciated. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/keith.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="keith.gif" />

 

[LordDrow]

Aye, yer welcome. More 'n happy ter be helpful, Mate!

Cap'n Drow

 

[hawkeye]

<!--quoteo(post=170743:date=Nov 10 2006, 08:43 PM:name=HawkerT)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(HawkerT @ Nov 10 2006, 08:43 PM) [snapback]170743[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Ahoy there Hawkeye <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/hi.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":gday" border="0" alt="hi.gif" />

How d'ya go about changing the speed of travel on the sea map mate? I mean without lowering the sails of course <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />
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You have to mod the worldmap\worldmap_init.c:
change the line
"worldMap.date.hourPerSec = 2.0;"
to adjust the time rate on the world map, and the lines:
"worldMap.shipSpeedOppositeWind = 0.6;" and "worldMap.shipSpeedOverWind = 1.2;"
to adjust the speeds.
So to have all ships travel at half speed, the values would be 0.3 and 0.6, and don't forget to set the hourPerSec to 1.0 as well, otherwise the voyages would take much longer.
Be aware: storms will travel at the same speed as before, so there might be no chance to avoid them if you set the speed too low! But half speeds are fine for me. Only thing is that long voyages take quite some time then... Needs a time increase function on world map as well imho...

 

[IntgrSpin]

<!--quoteo(post=170862:date=Nov 11 2006, 04:35 AM:name=Hawkeye)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hawkeye @ Nov 11 2006, 04:35 AM) [snapback]170862[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
<!--quoteo(post=170743:date=Nov 10 2006, 08:43 PM:name=HawkerT)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(HawkerT @ Nov 10 2006, 08:43 PM) [snapback]170743[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Ahoy there Hawkeye <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/hi.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":gday" border="0" alt="hi.gif" />

How d'ya go about changing the speed of travel on the sea map mate? I mean without lowering the sails of course <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

You have to mod the worldmap\worldmap_init.c:
change the line
"worldMap.date.hourPerSec = 2.0;"
to adjust the time rate on the world map, and the lines:
"worldMap.shipSpeedOppositeWind = 0.6;" and "worldMap.shipSpeedOverWind = 1.2;"
to adjust the speeds.
So to have all ships travel at half speed, the values would be 0.3 and 0.6, and don't forget to set the hourPerSec to 1.0 as well, otherwise the voyages would take much longer.
Be aware: storms will travel at the same speed as before, so there might be no chance to avoid them if you set the speed too low! But half speeds are fine for me. Only thing is that long voyages take quite some time then... Needs a time increase function on world map as well imho...
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That's pretty interesting.

This means the map can be more or less scaled to represent a much larger area. I'm thinking along the lines of a map representing say... the north sea through the med, with various port 'cities' and shore batteries scattered about. I saw that some were successful with adding islands to the map in PotC, though I haven't really had a chance to look into it...

 

[LordDrow]

I'm doing some testing and getting setup now to start making new ships, new islands and new towns, as well as hopefully updating the existing towns to be larger and more complete.

I'm just not sure if I'll be able to do everything I'd like to, as only one of the three available Akella Maya plugins works with 4.5. I'm afraid I'll have to see if I can find an earlier version of Maya, which will be all but impossible to get any of the other plugins working unless Akella releases and updated set of plugins.

But I'll be doing all I can to get new content built up and into the game.

Cap'n Drow

 

[IntgrSpin]

<!--quoteo(post=170966:date=Nov 11 2006, 12:10 PM:name=Cap'n_Drow)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Cap'n_Drow @ Nov 11 2006, 12:10 PM) [snapback]170966[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
I'm doing some testing and getting setup now to start making new ships, new islands and new towns, as well as hopefully updating the existing towns to be larger and more complete.

I'm just not sure if I'll be able to do everything I'd like to, as only one of the three available Akella Maya plugins works with 4.5. I'm afraid I'll have to see if I can find an earlier version of Maya, which will be all but impossible to get any of the other plugins working unless Akella releases and updated set of plugins.

But I'll be doing all I can to get new content built up and into the game.

Cap'n Drow
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In general, how much work is involved in creating a new coastline? I have no concept whatsoever.

It only really has to be something you can sail by, with occaisional shore batteries and standardized towns, right?

Hmmm... on second thought, maybe not. If you sail in 3D from the north side of an island to the south side, do you appear on the 2D map where you should?

 

[LordDrow]

According to information we've got, you do, but you don't. You appear in the right place on the world map, but the world map and the sea don't exchange any more information than that. So if you leave one island, and SHOULD show up at another, it won't happen correctly until you go to the map, THEN come back to the sea.

So it appears the sea engine doesn't update from your map position live.

Cap'n Drow

 

[IntgrSpin]

I wonder if then this makes a long coast impossible. If you have a long coast on the map, and you 'enter near' it, I'm guessing you would eventually (in 3D) sail along it until you reached the 'map end', at which point the coast would turn into sea (the default state).

Alternatively, the entire coast might be able to be a single zone. This would likely severely limit the number of towns and shore batteries (some islands have 2, so multiple is possible) but I wonder how badly, with a fast PC.

Wish I knew how to edit the game map... I'm not really willing to pay much for software to do so. Is there any free software out there that allows you to edit the map?

 

[LordDrow]

Well, the AOP map appears to use 3D models on it. Or at least I'm guessing it does since there is a directory of models for the map. What I'm really interested in is finding how to increase the map size to allow us to add more islands without the map eventually getting too 'crowded. I'd like to see things like the full map of the spanish main made available, as well as totally custom map areas of maybe the mediteranean, the south seas, etc.

But thats a long term goal. I'd be happy just being able to get everything for the current level of things up and running. **grins**

Now as to free programs, for modeling there is Blender, which is free, Milkshape which is a relatively inexpensive modeling tool.

For paint programs you have the free tool called the Gimp, then there is Paintshop Pro, which is again a relatively inexpensive program and last but not least there is the Grandaddy of paint programs, Photoshop.

Hope this helps you out a bit.

Cap'n Drow