Change the character models of navy crewmembers

[Homo eructus]

I was wondering if it is possible to change the character models of crewmembers for the navy characters. Right now they all have uniformed soldier models and I'd like them to be mostly sailor types, maybe a couple of soldiers in boardings if that was possible, but mostly sailors. It would be more realistic and uniformed officers would stand out more. Is this a change that I can make myself editing files or something?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

At the moment I cannot think of a simple "quick fix" for this.
Annoyingly, there are several completely independent spots where player crewmembers are changed.
And a lot of the related code is rather messy and could do with a rewrite.

One major added complexity I can think of is when to distinguish between soldiers or sailors?
There are basically five types of models that would be appropriate on a navy ship:
- Captain
- Sailors
- Navy Officers
- Soldiers
- Soldier Officer

Ideally the captain should look like a navy officer of the correct rank. At the moment I think he does get a navy outfit, but not necessarily the right rank.
For those other four, where should they be used? Just randomly, or with some sort of logic applied behind it?

We have had High Priority - Updating the Character Model Groups | PiratesAhoy! on our To-Do Wishlist for quite a long time now though.
There is a lot of "boarding crew model" code that needs some SERIOUS cleaning up.
I think our best bet is to take your suggestion into account for when we get to doing that.

 

[Homo eructus]

Good to know. I was just wondering because there seems to be such a wide range of easy tweaking that users can make to this game, but I'm glad you have plans for it. I was thinking of it from the perspective of my own crew so I didn't think about adding officer uniforms to the AI crews as I can give my officers uniforms myself. That certainly complicates the matter, as AI crews don't have officers other than the captain, but maybe it is unnecessary detail adding officers to tha AI (it would be cool though). I for one would be happy if the navy crews were just sailors with a few soldiers thrown in, maybe soldiers would be available only if you have muskets in the weaponslocker or something (a more far-fetched idea would be to link soldiers to a new type of officer only available to navy players above a certain rank, a "marine officer" or something. Just daydreaming).

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I was just wondering because there seems to be such a wide range of easy tweaking that users can make to this game

It isn't impossible; it depends a bit on how fancy you want to make it.

If you want to play around with something, have a look in PROGRAM\NK.c for the JoinNavy function.

Your boarding models are set as a "group" so it is either "Soldiers" OR "Sailors".

But your deck crew can be a mix of both:

  for (i = 1; i <= 5; i++)
  {
  ch = CharacterFromID("Crewmember_0" + i);
  model = GetRandomModelForTypeExSubCheck(true, "Soldiers", "man", iNation);
  SetModelfromArray(ch, GetModelIndex(model));
  }
  for (i = 1; i <= 10; i++)
  {
  ch = CharacterFromID("Treas_Crewmember_" + i);
  model = GetRandomModelForTypeExSubCheck(true, "Soldiers", "man", iNation);
  SetModelfromArray(ch, GetModelIndex(model));
  }