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Hook's fixes

LarryHookins

Buccaneer
Staff member
Storm Modder
I'm going to post this here for your amusement.

The screen shot shows the battle interface scaled at 1.2 to be more readable on my 1920x1080 monitor. The game is set to display 1600x1200 windowed, and takes the full screen. The scale can be adjusted by the user, and even make the display smaller if desired. I've also enlarged some text items independently. View this full screen to see what I see when I play the game.

The region you're logged into is displayed, in this case Guadeloupe - Sea, to replace "open sea" which was constant before. If there's no island in the region, it will display Open Sea, capitalized.

I've replaced the compass with one marked in 32 points, and replaced the wind arrow.

I've made the circles round with a one line code change, should work for all resolutions.

There is still some work to be done, and the land interface got similar treatment on the text. I just couldn't read it at the normal size.

NOTE: This is on the stock version of COAS.

Hook
 

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Other fixes include taming the world map. Normally, the ship moves at a constant rate on the map, and the time is set so that you are moving at 1 knot. I've got the time rate set for half your current speed with a minimum of 3 knots. Instead of being 1.5 hours per second of real time, so the least time you could spend on the world map was about an hour, you can now spend as little as 10 minutes. This helps because you have to go to the world map to cross island region boundaries or reset the lighting on the ship and islands between day and night. It also resets the wind.

The game normally gives you wind speeds of 4-15 knots, with lows of 2 and highs of 18 in certain circumstances. Your ship speed rating is based on a max wind of 18.7 knots... if you're sailing directly with a wind of that speed, you'll be going your ship's current speed rating.

Click this link to see the current wind and weather conditions in the Caribbean: Windytv, wind forecast and click on any spot on the map to see the winds there. Click the down arrow next to winds on the menu and display gusts to display the gust speed.

I've changed the wind speed to translate 4-15 knots to 15-29, which increases your ship speed by 4-7 knots depending on your angle to the wind. I limited the ship speed to your max current speed, so the game will act like the wind never gets about 18.7 knots no matter what is displayed. In practice, this means you'll be sailing at a reasonable rate, not too slow or too fast. A typical trip with good winds changes from 5-6 knots to 10-12. And the ship speed rating becomes a useful tool, not just an abstract number that you'll never see in the game.

Hook
 
I've changed the way the crew gains sailing skill. Normally, you get 1% change at midnight. It goes up if you're on the sea, and goes down if you're on the land. It only happens at midnight.

I've cut the change in half for the midnight update, and added a 0.1% increase every hour while sailing. The effect in the game is fairly close to what it was if you do some sailing on your deck.

And suddenly I find that I'm running out of things to adjust for sailing. I don't plan to add direct sail at this time.

I have not changed the way the player gets navigation skill, but I may in the future. Currently you get some navigation skill from a successful quest completion. If I change this, I expect to cut the quest skill gain by some amount and add navigation skill each hour while sailing in first or third person, but not on the world map.

I intend to add the mooring location name if you can moor. I plan to change the size of the sun to match that of the moon, and make the sun show through the sails, similar to the way the night lights do now. You can see the effect if the sun is at the edge of a sail now, where you can see the outline a bit if the center of the sun hasn't gone behind the sail. This is something I loved from PotC.

I plan to improve the gunnery, not to make it more accurate but to make it a bit more realistic, although you may get more hits with my method, which I implemented in PotC's New Horizons. Along with this will be the ability to toggle the battle interface display between full, totally hidden (useful for screen shots), and display the compass and other information but not the aiming reticle. In this last mode you won't have to aim manually, just press the left mouse button, similar to how you fire the guns from third person view now. If the reticle is visible, you can fire an aimed shot.

I've found a couple of places where if you go to your ship from the shore, the ship points in the wrong direction, and I'm looking into fixing that. I've already done it for New Horizons.

On the back burner is improvements to the sail animation... slowing it by half and hopefully making the sails point in the right direction. I've never done this before, and I hope it's possible with the tools we have.

But I gotta say, I'm loving this game. :)

Hook

PS. Happy New Year! :D
 
Oh yeah, I forgot. :)

I added Age of Pirates 2 to my Steam library as a non-Steam game. Now I can chat without alt-tabbing out of the game, take screen shots easily with the Steam default F12 key, and can stream my game for other people to watch. :)

Hook
 
Got the reload locators fixed for Palm Shore in Curacao and Port of Spain in Trinidad so your ship points in the right direction. It worked same as New Horizons. I'll fix more as I find them.

I replaced the wind speed math to simply add 9 knots to the wind speed, so it's 13-24 knots. Still occasionally seeing higher winds than I'd expect for that time of day, but it's pretty good. If the math is right, you'll be going your fastest speed about half the time, as the average of all hourly wind speeds is about 18.6, and 18.7 is the speed where you travel your current ship speed rating if you're sailing directly with the wind. You don't always sail this speed, only when the wind is at your back. I find the higher wind speed to be a good alternative to using time compression.

I liked the schooner, but didn't care for the square sails. First, I removed the sails from the yardarms, then eventually replaced the yardarms with a small object from elsewhere in the game so they're gone now. Ship looks almost as sexy as a real schooner now. :)

Hook
 
I got the sun smaller, but it still changes sizes during the day. Not really a problem and I don't feel like researching it right now. I wasn't able to get it to show through the sails yet, like it does in PotC.

I did a preliminary realistic sailing mod for the schooner, just wanted to see how different it would be. You sail fastest with the wind on your beam, slower with the wind, and slowest of all close to the wind. Oddly enough, it doesn't make that much difference to the way the game plays in normal sailing, although it would help in combat. I can't get it mathematically precise, because somewhere else, probably the game engine, changes the numbers after I'm done with them. If you comment out the function to adjust your speed by the angle of the wind, you still sail fastest with the wind, and you can sail directly into the wind although slower. Pure arcade mode there, but at least the wind still has some effect. :)

One odd thing was that my math changed the ship to sail at the current speed rating when the wind was 21 knots, up from 18.7 previously. This is actually a good thing.

Hook
 
I got the sun smaller, but it still changes sizes during the day. Not really a problem and I don't feel like researching it right now. I wasn't able to get it to show through the sails yet, like it does in PotC.
Maybe you can check with ChezJfrey on that? Could be an engine thing.
 
Thanks @Pieter Boelen. @ChezJfrey has a version of the source, but it had already been modified before he got it. I still need the original if it's possible. Thanks.

I ain'ta gonna wade through the engine source code just to find something rather trivial, like the semi-transparent sails for the sun. :) If I can't find it in the normal files, I'm not going to worry about it. Messing with the engine source code isn't something one should do on a whim. The game code, on the other hand? Knock yourself out!

Hook
 
I have finally found the code to turn the crosshair off (the aiming circle for the cannons). Having the crosshair on the screen all the time was something of an annoyance since the earliest days, and a few times I accidentally fired the cannons when I pressed the left mouse button.

So in a break from Sea Dogs tradition, I have defaulted the crosshair to off, and you can press the C key (for crosshair or cannons) to toggle it on or off again. When the crosshair is off, the guns act just like they do in third person mode, aiming automatically. When the crosshair is on, you can fire an aimed shot. This should be very intuitive, and a new player who doesn't know about this feature can still fire the cannons. The crosshair state is remembered even across saved games.

I wanted to do this with PotC 7 years ago, but never found the code. We ended up having the V key fire an aimed shot.

I had to find a ship to fight to test this, and got my first CTD in almost 200 hours of play when I dismasted him, which I understand is a known problem. Pretty stable program, huh? :)

Hook
 
So in a break from Sea Dogs tradition, I have defaulted the crosshair to off, and you can press the C key (for crosshair or cannons) to toggle it on or off again. When the crosshair is off, the guns act just like they do in third person mode, aiming automatically. When the crosshair is on, you can fire an aimed shot. This should be very intuitive, and a new player who doesn't know about this feature can still fire the cannons. The crosshair state is remembered even across saved games.
Ooh, that's a nice feature! Good job figuring that one out. :woot
 
I haven't looked at the PotC code yet, but I think I could implement it there as well if anyone wanted. The only thing is, you couldn't use automatic aiming unless the crosshair was hidden, and you just know that someone's going to demand auto aim while still keeping the crosshair visible. :) It turns out the actual implementation was quite simple: a small change to three lines of code, a new function to determine if the crosshair should be hidden, a function to toggle it, and the necessary changes to two files to implement the control key to toggle it.

This was originally intended to be part of a declutter function that would hide various parts of the interface, but I realized it was a good design change and implemented it separately. It makes me wonder why it wasn't done this way ever since Sea Dogs 1. You don't need a crosshair unless you want to fire an aimed shot (although I use it sometimes to measure angles), and we could already fire automatically aimed shots in third person. I was already going to third person to fire the guns, and it made a huge difference in that last battle that I could keep my viewpoint in first person on the deck without having to fiddle with exaggerated aiming elevations.

Hook
 
I had to find a ship to fight to test this, and got my first CTD in almost 200 hours of play when I dismasted him, which I understand is a known problem. Pretty stable program, huh? :)

I am so glad you mentioned this, as I had almost forgotten about that problem. Ages ago, I had actually turned that off in my games, due to the dismasting instability causing CTDs, so the phenomenon had pretty much slipped from my memory (turn it off by assigning all damage in SHIP_MAST_TOUCH_BALL case of Ship_MastDamage() function to zero). If you make it a value of 1, anytime a shot hits the mast, it automatically demasts. I set about to debug and set the mast damage to 1 for all cases, then started rocking some action to debug this on the back-end. Got it resolved; no more crashes. The best way to debug was to launch GOF 1.2, find a Dutch merchant convoy protected by a few military ships (for some reason, the Dutch ships in GOF 1.2 are the worst offenders...something to do with the model geometry and in some cases, the lights info is actually what causes the problem). I could crash near instantaneously in every engagement. Not anymore though, so thanks for bringing up this forgotten tidbit :)

Back to your original ideas here...I like some of these features you're working. Especially the toggle option for on-deck manual/auto aiming reticle. The harbor aiming is a nice adjustment in those several ports, as that is such a pain to deal with upon sea launch for no good reason. I will have to take a look at adopting a few of your ideas here.
 
Ok... what's harbor aiming? :)

If you want any of this code I've changed, just ask.

Full change log so far:

------------------

Disabled the intro videos
Replaced the opening menu and tavern music, original sounded scratchy, adjusted volume
Implemented console.c activated by pressing F4
Display crew on deck
Replaced the worldmap background with a file that shows region boundaries
Enlarged the text on battle and land interfaces and added a variable to make interfaces larger
Replaced the compass texture with one with 32 points, replaced the wind arrow
Redid the ship icon in the mini-map to have index marks at the cardinal points.
Made the compass round for windowed mode
Added island name to battle interface to replace "open sea"
Slowed zoom on battle interface minimap
Changed world map time scale to set worldmap speed to half of ship's current speed, minimum 3 knots
With this change it takes only about twice as long to sail on the world map as on your deck
Increased wind speed by 10 knots so that 4-15 knots becomes 14-25 knots, typically 20 knots
This is like sailing at 2 to 2.5x time compression without the funny animation
Changed the wind speed variation so that it varies less and ship speed is more constant
Crews get some sailing experience for just sailing, and less reduction for being on land at midnight
Ship speed limited to current max speed rating, acts like it limits wind speed to 18.7 knots.
Reduced the size of the sun a bit, but it still varies over the day
Changed diplomat dialog to give a discount if you buy more than 30 days of a trade license
Reduced the price of a trade license from 105k to 75k, still twice what TEHO uses
Realistic sailing mode for fore and aft rigged ships, fastest with wind on beam, max speed at ~21 knot wind or higher
Changed the tavern passenger/escort missions to give a greater variety of destinations
Added the C key to toggle the crosshair. Aimed fire possible when crosshair is visible, auto aim otherwise

------------------

I changed the passenger mission to give a random destination after taking 5 passengers to Beliz and having only 4 spawn points in the tavern. I was stuck with a passenger quest I couldn't complete and an unwanted passenger until I researched the code to find out how to remove both of these. And the 5 passengers was after turning down another 10.

A trade license still costs 105k from the diplomat at difficulty level 2, with higher difficulties costing even more. This is still over twice what TEHO charges for a trade license that's good for any country. If there had been any other place to simply buy a trade license in COAS, I would have left the diplomat's price high.

"Realistic" sailing mode for fore and aft ships is still preliminary, but works. I determine fore and aft rigged ships by their against wind speed: fore and aft rigged is 5 or more, square rigged is 3 or less, I change over at 4.

My crews were losing sailing experience when I was doing nothing BUT sailing, so I fixed it. If you spend the night on the sea, you get 1/2% experience (stock is 1% for both gains and losses). If you spend the night on land, you lose 1/2%, but make it up in 5 hours of sailing on deck. For people who use nothing but the world map to travel, the effect should be similar to stock, but at half the rate of change. With the changes to time passage on the world map, the player will have fewer overnights on the sea, but make up for it with any sailing they do on deck. Even with the change I didn't see 100% crew sailing experience for a couple of months.

The wind speed increases make the game more playable and a lot more enjoyable if you sail on deck. It's coincidence that they also make the winds more realistic compared to actual Caribbean winds. The effect is similar to using 2 to 2.5x time compression. I had no complaints about ship combat with the higher winds.

Hook
 
If you want any of this code I've changed, just ask.

Hook

Well although I have numerous shades of AOP2/GOF/Zeeroovers etc plus CT and TEHO I haven't actually played them much in anger as it were - just dabbled. But being cheeky - of your list

Implemented console.c activated by pressing F4
Display crew on deck
Crews get some sailing experience for just sailing, and less reduction for being on land at midnight
Changed the tavern passenger/escort missions to give a greater variety of destinations
Added the C key to toggle the crosshair. Aimed fire possible when crosshair is visible, auto aim otherwise

sound to be of interest to how I might play - before you get immersed in modding TEHO

OH and that
Replaced the worldmap background with a file that shows region boundaries
- sounds like it may help in TEHO with time constrained quest elements
 
I'll put together those changes for you. Just keep in mind they're to the stock game, not one of the mods, so if you're using a mod you'll need to WinMerge them in.

The worldmap with region boundaries originally came from TEHO. Nice that they use the same map, huh? :)

Hook
 
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