Mod Release Open Sea Mod and Realism Settings

[stljeffbb]

You postit, I will play with it. There are a couple of other who are wandering around who should give it a try.

Question: You play in arcade mode and I play in realistic mode. Will that make much difference? What travel times should I be looking for?

I normally bounce between direct sail and world map, and finding ones self far from where you thought you were is normal.

EDIT: I just looked and found your new moon, but did not find your Open Sea Mod V1. Will check back periodically. Oh. New game required?

Hello Hylie Pistoff...actually, I only test in arcade mode (to be able to sail against the wind, to keep morale high, and to avoid pirates lol)...my whole reason for doing this mod was to make it even more of a challenge in realistic mode!

Last night at midnight I decided to try some in realistic mode....I was playing on my older computer that tends to crash every now and then (P4 2.6Ghz, 4 MB ram, Win XP SP3, Radeon X1600, ASUS P5 type motherboard [and I think the motherboard is the culprit....used to overclock..I built it specifically to play Oblivion]) so it took me half an hour to finally play in "Ironman" mode......lots of fun, laden down with a cargo and going about six knots until I lost the gauge....then I had to tack and here comes a lone little pirate xebec....I had sold most of my cannon to keep the crew happy, and sure enough I was sunk about one seventh (estimate as I do not have a sextant, etc.) the distance from Santiago (Jamaica) to Barbados...took me about twelve game hours just to get there.....so, I'm not 100% certain of travel times, but the Havana to Grenada run you mentioned in an earlier post will for sure take at least, at absolute least, a few days by my reckon, and I still stick to my twenty-one days as a real possibility....

....actually this does bring up a good point. Sometimes, realism is not always a good thing for games....even though for sure this method has allowd for more open sailing, I do worry a bit that, especially for those who want a clean, quick, adventure, the times to get from one place to the next will just be too long....then again, they don't call it "ironman" for nothing

Lastly, for the moment, I do not feel that a clean installation is needed, EXCEPT if a mod being used messes with the five files mentioned in the read me which are:

InternalSettings.h
LogInterface.c
worldmap_globals.c
initItems.c
map.c

....Pieter Boelen approved the last one, and while I know he is away, still I'm not certain of the procedure here for approving files.....once a moderator takes a peek at it and approves it, my hunch is it will be right next to the "slightly better moon".....

Regards,

Jeff

EDIT: Oh yeah, I built this right on top of Build 14 2.1, so if no other mods are used that conflict with the above mentioned five files, everything should be fine!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ok, I will drop by daily.

By "new game required" I meant can this be added and one can continue playing the same game after hitting F11, or does one need to start a new game in that install.

 

[stljeffbb]

Ok, I will drop by daily.

By "new game required" I meant can this be added and one can continue playing the same game after hitting F11, or does one need to start a new game in that install.

Yes, I do think you should start a new game.....I don't know, you might try it, but based on my testing, you MIGHT end up in some weird places....lol, or not,,,

Jeff

EDIT: Two (or more) notes to self...I need to change how often floting goodies appear in the water....seems too much now based on long distance sailing. Also, I still think ships appear too often. I was about to get to a demasted ship when I received the "sail ho" message and up popped four huge merchant ships...and of course the demasted one went bye-bye The current setting is 25% chance per hour...

 

[morgan terror]

Here's a thought. If the point of this mod is a realistic sailing time between islands, based on the real life distances, then it might be a good idea to shorter the length of the days, and then modify the spawn rates of anything you can encounter accordingly. the downside is, of course, that previously spawned convoys out of your combat range will dissapear far more quickly. An alternative solution would be the have directsail update only once every two days, instead of the one which we have now, to avoid the spawn dissapearance problem.

yes, i like commas.

I'll realy on your experience with your mod to decide wether this is a good idea, but i'd think that the player would still be on the open ocean for a certain degree of time. Iike the idea, but i'd hate to take even longer to travel between islands. I have a habit of using realistic mode only and it takes long enough as it is. Besides, longer routes means a bigger risk of not making it, and this game will really kick your ass if it gets the chance.

 

[stljeffbb]

Here's a thought. If the point of this mod is a realistic sailing time between islands, based on the real life distances, then it might be a good idea to shorter the length of the days, and then modify the spawn rates of anything you can encounter accordingly. the downside is, of course, that previously spawned convoys out of your combat range will dissapear far more quickly. An alternative solution would be the have directsail update only once every two days, instead of the one which we have now, to avoid the spawn dissapearance problem.

yes, i like commas.

I'll realy on your experience with your mod to decide wether this is a good idea, but i'd think that the player would still be on the open ocean for a certain degree of time. Iike the idea, but i'd hate to take even longer to travel between islands. I have a habit of using realistic mode only and it takes long enough as it is. Besides, longer routes means a bigger risk of not making it, and this game will really kick your ass if it gets the chance.

Hello Morgan Terror.....I like commas, too

Hmm, I have a feeling you might not like this mod then (just a hunch)...this mod will take you quite a long time in both real time and game time to get from island to island. I'm kind of realizing two things....I know what I like, and I also know that the Build 14 team might have different needs, therefore:

Just so everyone knows, I'm willing to create a mod (actually it is a mod of a mod) that will make Directsailing more workable (as opposed to the one day + one hour timescale), however, my own "homebrew" that I use when I play might be different...or I might make a "director's cut" version of the mod with things that I prefer

I really like the wide open sailing, and version 0.2 has already cut down on the amount of floatsam (I forget the command, but it will currently make a call once every three hours [instead of every hour, which also makes sense because the map scale has been increased by three times], and I have reduced the chance of runing into a squadron to 10% every hour....it has happened too often when I come across floatsam and I am against the wind (in realistic mode), I do not have enough time to get to it before a "sail ho" appears...

Basically you say "it takes long enough as it is"...I do not believe I can fix the timescale based on the "vanilla" version of Directscale and Screwface's coordinates method, hence the reason for increasing the map scale...I still have not done enough testing yet, however, initial indications show that, based on "real life" sailing times at fourteen (steady) knots, the times in the Open Sea mod are much closer to reality...of course, as mentioned earlier, realism does not always make for good gaming...

I will answer some more to this point later, but I'm at work now and do not have the time at the moment to post all that I would like to....but what I have to say has to do with game balance...

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I've approved the file now. Annoyingly, it isn't obvious to me when a new file has been posted,
so I can't readily approve it until I see it mentioned somewhere. Good thing it IS mentioned here in this thread.

We generally use the FTP with direct HTTP links for any small mod releases and you don't need to wait for approval for those.
You'd be welcome to do that instead. I generally use the Downloads section for any "official" releases so that they'll always be easy to find.
But then for me it's easy, because my uploads don't have to be approved.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Thanks for listing the changed files. I use a modified internalsettings.h and now I know to fix that first.

 

[stljeffbb]

@ Pieter Boelen...thanks much! OK, I will do about the uploading thing...I'll use the FTP from now on....

@ Hylie Pistoff...No problem!

@ Morgan Terror and the general community....OK, speaking about game balance...yes! I worry about this (as mentioned before)....as Morgan Terror said, "it takes long enough as it is"....understandable, and perhaps the majority of players would not prefer such a long time of sailing....so here are some possible options:

Keeping the scale what it is currently (Map scale = 60, Sea time scale = 15), but making a 45x or 60x time speedup...not sure how this can work, but might be as simple as changing one bit of code...

Map scale = 40, Sea time scale = 30

...one fairly large problem with a larger timescale (which equates to a faster game time clock) is how quickly things like the wind speed and the phases of the day/night change....now, I wonder if we could create a day/night system more like Oblivion which is done (I believe) second by second....of course this would likely add to processing load, and I'm not sure where this is in the code (whether or not it is hard coded...I've done some hex, but I need a hint)...

Map Scale = 20, Sea time scale = 60

....again, it is about how quickly the day passes and the wind changes....however, this would make the scale much like it is currently (in Directsail 1.1)...

Beyond this...I have made the "sail ho" distance to 2000 yards, so when you get a sighting, you do have a fighting chance to get away by using the wind gauge (of course you end up off track, but that is the price one pays to stay alive).....although this does make a potential problem....if an enemy stays close enough, it might avoid a new island trigger, or another "sail ho" trigger...think about it, in real life, 2000 yards is a bit more than one mile, and chances are, especially in good seas, sightings were even farther off....it is my goal to mess with as little as possible, but I will do what I must to make things work....

Regards,

Jeff

EDIT: Oops, when I mentioned I changed the DIRECTENCOUNTERDISTANCE to 2000 yards, this will be done in v 0.2,,,,speaking of that, if you want a "hotfix", here are my current changes to v 0.2:

V 0.2 change log

-Changed InternalSettings.c

Jan 16 2012 Changed COASTRAIDER_CHANCE to 0.01 to prevent "easy pickings" of pirates for local forts
Jan 16 2012 Changed NAVYRAIDER_CHANCE to 2.0 to allow an actual 0.02 percent chance that the coastal ships will be raiders from a foreign nation (and not pirates)

-Changed CCCdirectSail.c

Jan 16 2012 Changed ENCOUNTERBREAK to 3.0 to reduce number of encounters (because sailing now takes MUCH longer, and we need to reduce this or everyone could become rich as a "garbage trawler" picking up random floating stuff!)
Jan 16 2002 Changed DIRECTENCOUNTERDISTANCE to 2000 to make it easier to escape enemy ships if wanted to (but not always successful)

(lol, these are subject to change!)

 

[Hylie Pistof]

After playing for 5 hours I must say that this mod is not playable in realistic mode. The hours are too short so that tacking does not work. By the time one completes a tack the wind shifts and you are once again going backwards. The constant headwinds defeats this mod.

 

[stljeffbb]

After playing for 5 hours I must say that this mod is not playable in realistic mode. The hours are too short so that tacking does not work. By the time one completes a tack the wind shifts and you are once again going backwards. The constant headwinds defeats this mod.

Hello Hylie Pistoff....sorry you did not like the mod....I will say I just had a wonderful experience, in realistic mode nonetheless!

Sailed from Barbados as the "Nathaniel Hawk" character...started at Monday April 18 1690 at 10:02am....had to tack a bit, and did a large SSW loop around the island area...came across a few bits of floatsam along the way (probably still too much)...headed north without a compass...had to use the sun as a guide....the lookouts said Curacao was close, and even when the land ho was called, still could not spot it....fortunately, I was given the hint that it was off the starboard beam....flew my personal colors to avoid engagements, and made it to....umm, I forget the harbor name, but ran through the jungle past a windmill, and then was promptly killed in town by some thugs I bumped to...arrival time at shore, Saturday, April 23 at 8:22pm, so five days, ten hours, twenty minutes from Barbados to Curacao....this took me about two and one half real time hours to accomplish...

So, the wind shifts can certainly be tweaked to your liking in InternalSettings.c, MAX_ANGLECHANGE and MAX_WINDCHANGE, and I do wonder a bit about the abruptness, however, OTOH winds do sometimes shift quickly in different situations...

There are a couple more issues to deal with....1) sometimes, the days out to sea does not register properly...either it will be stuck on one day, or it will jump about thirty days...odd because the calendar does seem to register the days and time correctly....I don't think it will end up being a big problem...in addition, the food and rum does not seem to be affected at all and seemingly gets used up at a normal rate....

I must say I have accomplished (so far anyways) what I set out to do...as mentioned earlier in this thread, I really enjoyed Silent Hunter III, being out all alone in the lonely sea, searching for prey...where I have this mod right now reminds me very much of that experience...I feel quite good about how things are going and I will proceed from here with more testing...

Regards,

Jeff

 

[morgan terror]

would it be a good diea to link this mod to iron man mode? i like the mod's idea, it's just really impractical.

It is actually possible that i simply need to get used to saving on the open ocean. Right now the mentality is that i use the islands as save points as used to be neccesary, but that's no longer the case. Considering the sea to be a world in and of itself is not actually such a bad idea.

of course, there's still the problem of the voyages simply taking too long if you're just after doing a bit of questing.

 

[stljeffbb]

would it be a good diea to link this mod to iron man mode? i like the mod's idea, it's just really impractical.

It is actually possible that i simply need to get used to saving on the open ocean. Right now the mentality is that i use the islands as save points as used to be neccesary, but that's no longer the case. Considering the sea to be a world in and of itself is not actually such a bad idea.

of course, there's still the problem of the voyages simply taking too long if you're just after doing a bit of questing.

Hello Morgan Terror....yes, it might be a very good idea to link this to the "iron man" mode.....personally, when the testing is done, this is the ONLY way I will play...also, it might be good to have this as a stand alone and not necessarily part of the Build mod....ha ha, as the documentation says, "WELCOME TO HELL", but this is like the 9th level, lol...



...however, as you mention about the mentality of saving at sea, this actually makes it into an entirely new game that, if one chooses, could focus more on the open sea and the notion of how long it really takes to get from one place to another, even if it just is a simulation of a simulation of the Caribbean...for those who want to focus on quests, yeah, could be too long....for those who want to simulate what it was like to live in the Caribbean in 1690 (or whenever), then, welcome to your new home....now if I could just get rid of those damn walking skeletons!

I don't know...I might be kind of weird...one of my favorite things to do in a game was to play Mafia (the original from 2002 I believe) and once I had completed the "quest", the entire game map was open for driving your 1930s era car all over the place....of course, most things in the world were not interactive (with a few exceptions), but I really liked driving all around that digital world...I mean, it was a rather large game map (about fifty square kilometers according to one website)...

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Hylie Pistof]

What killed this mod for me was Cuba. Grenada was difficult but doable. I spent real time hours just barely in sight of Cuba trying to get to Santiago and never made it in repeated attempts. The constant headwinds defeated me every time as I simply exceeded the 30 day limit.

This is a product of playing in swashbuckler mode. If it weren't for bad luck I would have no luck at all.

The size of the islands needs to be adjusted in the world map also. You can ram the island, hit direct sail, and find the island out of sight with no idea where it might be.

 

[stljeffbb]

What killed this mod for me was Cuba. Grenada was difficult but doable. I spent real time hours just barely in sight of Cuba trying to get to Santiago and never made it in repeated attempts. The constant headwinds defeated me every time as I simply exceeded the 30 day limit.

This is a product of playing in swashbuckler mode. If it weren't for bad luck I would have no luck at all.

The size of the islands needs to be adjusted in the world map also. You can ram the island, hit direct sail, and find the island out of sight with no idea where it might be.

Hello Hylie Pistoff...OK, when you say "size of the islands" do you feel they should be larger or smaller? Yes, Cuba might be a bit problematic as far as island size...I noticed this when adjusting it on the map...either Havana or Santiago would be correct....I think I went with Havana....must have been very frustrating seeing your goal and not making it actually, that might be somewhat fixable by simply slowing time down (TIMESCALAR_SEA in InternalSettings.c from 15 to say 10)...even though perhaps a bit quick for "reality" (in other words, slowing down the game clock actually makes it faster [in game time] to get places), it might allow just enough extra time to get some lucky winds to Santiago de Cuba...and fall in the thrity day range....

Perhaps a silly question, but does Build 14 use trade winds, is there modelling of the wind around islands (which might explain why one can't....get....there), or is it rather random? I do not know this yet....


With that said...note to self: I think I have figured out there is a relationship between DIRECTENCOUNTERCHANCE and ENCOUNTERBREAK in CCCDirectsail.c in that ENCOUNTERBREAK determines how many hours there are between sightings, and DIRECTENCOUNTERCHANCE determines how often the sighting is either a "squadron" or flotsam....I was fooling around and set DIRECTENCOUNTERCHANCE to 100, ENCOUNTERBREAK to 6.0, and sure enough, (more or less) every six hours, I received a "sail ho" without one bit of flotsam...that is too bad in a sense, but workable...in addition, I'm now considering reducing the amount of possible floatsam just to avoid the "garbage trawling" mentioned earlier....any historical evidence of anyone getting rich off of ordinary flotsam?

.........

Regards, and good luck Hylie Pistoff with your travels,

Jeff

 

[Hylie Pistof]

When you reduced the size of the islands on your direct sail map it created an imbalance with the world map. Now the actual island is far "inside" of the island you see on the world map. This isn't too bad with the small islands but causes problems with the larger ones in that you can sail right up to the port you want to land at, hit

direct sail and be out of sight of the island. So, could you reduce the size of the islands in the world map?

POTC generally uses trade winds but there is a lot of randomness built in too.

 

[stljeffbb]

When you reduced the size of the islands on your direct sail map it created an imbalance with the world map. Now the actual island is far "inside" of the island you see on the world map. This isn't too bad with the small islands but causes problems with the larger ones in that you can sail right up to the port you want to land at, hit

direct sail and be out of sight of the island. So, could you reduce the size of the islands in the world map?

POTC generally uses trade winds but there is a lot of randomness built in too.

Hmmmm....thanks for the info....are you using the "patchwork" map I provided with the mod? It looks much like the picture earlier in this thread (except I fixed Tortuga)....(uh oh, I don't think I documented too well that the map was going to be replaced in the mod with a direct unzip...I did put in the readme to check the compressed folder first to see what files are going to be replaced and to back up all files, but who reads those? )...

So if I hear you right, and you are using the patchwork map, Cuba is still too large? I'll look into it!

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[stljeffbb]

The Open Sea mod is down at the moment.....I added a bit of info text to the mod description (on the website) informing users they should be sure to backup map.tga.tx.....once the text is approved it will be back up again....

Jeff

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes I am using your files and I did check them, only modifying one to keep some personal preferences not related to your mod.

The world map and your "patchwork" map seem to be tied together. The world map now needs to have the islands made smaller. I use the world map to avoid headwinds and now I can't.

 

[stljeffbb]

Yes I am using your files and I did check them, only modifying one to keep some personal preferences not related to your mod.

The world map and your "patchwork" map seem to be tied together. The world map now needs to have the islands made smaller. I use the world map to avoid headwinds and now I can't.

OK now I get it!

I do not know how to change the scale of the WorldMap.....yet!

I suggest that a player use either all Directsail or all Worldmap when using the Open Sea mod (as a matter of fact...there would hardly be a reason that I can think of to use Open Sea if using only the Worldmap for sailing)...still, I will be happy to take a look at the Worldmap scaling and see if I can't "fix" it....one problem is that I used my Mark I eyeball to move the islands manually on the static "patchwork" map to line them up as much as possible....so, I may have to try the same technique once I work with the Worldmap...

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Pieter Boelen]

From what I recall, the wind direction is basically random. Difficulty does not influence it either.

It'd probably be best if we DO end up including this in the modpack, otherwise you'd have to keep it up-to-date as new modpack versions are released.
That's just a royal pain. Iron Man Mode sounds good to me.