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Engine Limitation List of Known Bugs that Cannot be Fixed

Pieter Boelen

Pieter Boelen

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Everything in this thread is a known problem that either:
- Has been a problem since the orginal game and all attempts to fix this have failed
- Has recently been becoming more prominent for unknown reasons, but can be traced back to the original game
- Even if it could be fixed, would be a massively complicated undertaking to even try with no guarantee of success

The reason for this list is so that repeated reports of the same issue can be forwarded to the archived original reports.
We should keep this up-to-date if more reports are marked as "Engine Limitation".

Graphical Anomalies: Engine Limitation - Graphical Anomalies | PiratesAhoy!
Wrong Flags in Mast: Engine Limitation - Different Flags Mod: Flags Shown on Mast of Wrong Ship | PiratesAhoy!
Bad Saves: Engine Limitation - Bad Saves | PiratesAhoy!
Cant load savegames from profile: Engine Limitation - Cant load savegames from profile | PiratesAhoy!
Sea Relations - When commander of group surrenders the whole group surrenders: Engine Limitation - Sea Relations: When commander of group surrenders the whole group surrenders | PiratesAhoy!
Stock Game Save Error Logs (apparently harmless): Engine Limitation - Stock Game Save Error Logs (Apparently Harmless) | PiratesAhoy!
Floating Crewmembers during Sea Battles: Engine Limitation - 3D Sailing Mode: Crew in Air | PiratesAhoy!
Ships with "High Camera" Bug: Engine Limitation - Ships with "High Camera" Bug | PiratesAhoy! (CAN be fixed, but requires a modeler to re-import/export through Maya)
Inaccuracies with Save At Sea: Engine Limitation - Save At Sea: Sail State and Cannon Reload Status not replicated after Loading | PiratesAhoy!
Possible to Board Same Ship Twice: Engine Limitation - Ships Still Boardable After Abordage | PiratesAhoy!
Tabs Stop Working: Engine Limitation - Tabs Stop Working (includes workaround!) | PiratesAhoy!
ENB Incompatibility: Confirmed Bug - Windows "Compatibility Mode" disables ENB

Any comments in general on how to deal with Engine Limitations can be posted here.
The specific threads remain open though, so if the is any news to report on them, you can use the links above to find the appropriate places to mention these.
 
Last edited:
Found this thread, and decided to fix another (after fixing the "High Camera" bug in Need Help - Bug with camera for ship model) -- namely, the sail state sea load.


Graphical Anomalies: Engine Limitation - Graphical Anomalies | PiratesAhoy!
This is not an engine limitation, per se, as PA! hex-edited a bunch of different rigging.dll files and hacked together a system for their flag concept and it's somewhat broken. Sure, the vanilla engine was limited in number of flags that could be in a single texture, but hardly the fault of the engine that it can't reliably use those hacked rigging.dll files. In any case, I "fixed" this by devising a system where a single flag texture can be used in two dimension, so that 50 or so flags can be used from a single texture AND one can simply create multiple flag entities without the need for those hacked rigging.dll files.

Wrong Flags in Mast: Engine Limitation - Different Flags Mod: Flags Shown on Mast of Wrong Ship | PiratesAhoy!
See above...not an engine limitation, but unreliable hex-edit hack.

Bad Saves: Engine Limitation - Bad Saves | PiratesAhoy!
Fixed in my version

Cant load savegames from profile: Engine Limitation - Cant load savegames from profile | PiratesAhoy!
The engine isn't the problem, but rather how the profile system in the script was devised for New Horizons

Sea Relations - When commander of group surrenders the whole group surrenders: Engine Limitation - Sea Relations: When commander of group surrenders the whole group surrenders | PiratesAhoy!
Not an engine problem. The engine has no concept of surrender and that is all handled by the scripts, so if the result is undesirable, the culprit is the script code.

Stock Game Save Error Logs (apparently harmless): Engine Limitation - Stock Game Save Error Logs (Apparently Harmless) | PiratesAhoy!
This is actually due to the .attribute feature of the game, which is a nice, flexible idea, but the design is somewhat flawed. They store those "reference" variables by memory pointer, but if that same memory pointer is nulled in a script (by deletion) block, within a call stack, but as the stack unwinds, and another, different variable just happens to have pointed at that same reference, within the engine, that memory pointer itself was saved as its "reference" field, and will try to dereference what it thinks is a non-null pointer, but to a now actually pointing to an invalid memory address, because a delete does not find all other "children" of every other reference variable; this also causes some of the save crashes. I did not redesign the feature, as that's a huge job, but I did isolate and fix that particular problem.

Floating Crewmembers during Sea Battles: Engine Limitation - 3D Sailing Mode: Crew in Air | PiratesAhoy!
No idea...never seen it.

Ships with "High Camera" Bug: Engine Limitation - Ships with "High Camera" Bug | PiratesAhoy! (CAN be fixed, but requires a modeler to re-import/export through Maya)
Fixed today.

Inaccuracies with Save At Sea: Engine Limitation - Save At Sea: Sail State and Cannon Reload Status not replicated after Loading | PiratesAhoy!
Fixed today.

Possible to Board Same Ship Twice: Engine Limitation - Ships Still Boardable After Abordage | PiratesAhoy!
Interesting...never tried it.

Tabs Stop Working: Engine Limitation - Tabs Stop Working (includes workaround!) | PiratesAhoy!
Never seen this.
 
Thanks for checking this, @ChezJfrey!
It is quite a relief to hear our assumptions are wrong. :doff

In some cases, I admit we were already aware these technically weren't real game engine limitations.
I tried to explain that with the following bit from the opening post:
Pieter Boelen said:
Everything in this thread is a known problem that either:
- Has been a problem since the orginal game and all attempts to fix this have failed
- Has recently been becoming more prominent for unknown reasons, but can be traced back to the original game
- Even if it could be fixed, would be a massively complicated undertaking to even try with no guarantee of success
Click to expand...
In other words, the category "Engine Limitation" is technically more like "Engine and/or Developer and/or Community Limitation".
But that is a bit of a mouthful, isn't it? :rofl

The actual wording effectively made little difference anyway.
One way or another, it meant that these issues were unlikely to be fixed any time soon; if ever.
Or so it seemed at the time. :doff
 
Try reinstalling PoTC:NH without adding in the Update Archive. A couple of folks have reported performance issues only after they added the updates, one of them reporting exactly this issue. At the moment my suspicion is the newer version of "engine.ini".
 
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