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WIP New Ship Manual

Captain Rick

Captain Rick

Sailor Apprentice
Ok this project has two parts.
1. I'm going to write a new manual so what do YOU want to see in it.
2. Ask anything in this thread you want to know about ships and I will FIND you an answer.
 
This is the loose plan and a way to reserve this space for a more organized plan *grins*

Ok guys when I was in the Navy if you bitched about something they gave you a job! Since I'm bitching about ships right now I figure its my job to give you as complete a report as possible. I also read a new ship recognition guide is needed. I'm no artist or historian and I know enough about sailing to be dangerous. So here's what I can do for the team.
1. Report weather the RP deck of the ship is appropriate to the model, examples are the Tartane RP deck is entirely too big for the model. One of the decks I think it was on the "suprise" was trashed like there had been a boarding.
2. Report if the textures look bad, most the smaller ships the textures are stretched too thin and look bad ect.
3. Report if the sails rotate right.
4. Report if the rigging is inside out lol
5. Hack the wind speed and direction (assuming this can be done I managed to do it in CAOS) and report speed at each point of sail.
6. Report time it takes the ship to do a 180 turn, why 180? so my lousy skill at tacking doesn't corrupt the data
7. Report if the number and size of guns seems right, for instance I noticed the gunboat is mounting 12 lb guns all around that seems a little big for such a small ship.
8. Photograph each ship when I test it
9. Report anything else you guys want a up to date report on.
10. Compose a manual on sailing documenting all the features, fire drills ect
11. If this manual turns out expand my manual to include rest of game
12 bitch about anything I don't like *grins*
Please take the time to read this over and shoot holes in the plan or add criteria, If I'm gona look at 166 (or whatever the number is) ships I want to do it once and with a plan! Please don't worry about being "diplomatic" if information is useless to you or the plan doesn't sit right with you just say "that sucks , we want it this way" or we would RATHER you work on this over here.
 
Just re-iterating what I said elsewhere:

As per Armada's idea, putting the information on the Wiki is probably best. Then it can be viewed and edited at any time. :yes

If you can round up any modelers to redo the decks, that would be great of course.
Though I suppose such modeling efforts would be more worthwhile on Hearts of Oak (http://www.moddb.com/games/hearts-of-oak) instead.

This code in PROGRAM\console.c is quite useful for cycling through all the ships in the game:
Code: 
      if(!Checkattribute(pchar,"cheatship")) Pchar.cheatship = 0;
       int con = sti(Pchar.cheatship);
       if(con<SHIP_TYPES_QUANTITY)
       {
         GiveShip2Character(pchar,ShipsTypes[con].id,"Test Ship",-1,ENGLAND,true,true);
         Pchar.cheatship = con +1;
       }
       TraceAndLog("*************************** Ship : " + ShipsTypes[con].id + " , Index : " + con + " ");
Note that some stats depends on the national design of the ship
For example, English ships are somewhat faster than their Spanish equivalent.

You can certainly make comments on bad textures, but we don't have (m)any people here anymore who do texturing work on the Build Mod ships.
Petros has been doing some again lately, but he tends to mainly work on his own ships.

The number of ships is 235, though some of those are repaints with the same stats.

The gunboat is a tricky one. Unfortunately the game engine doesn't allow multiple cannon calibres being used on a single ship.
Though I wonder if anything could be done to fix the bow cannon at a different calibre from the swivel guns.
Might be possible, but would require some figuring out, which I don't really have the time for anymore. Not for a good while anyway.

I do wonder how many people would actually make use of such a list.
You should perhaps add a poll to this thread to figure out how much interest there is.
No point in you doing lots of work for nothing. :facepalm
 
Ill put it up on the wiki for sure and provide the team the PDF with edit rights too.

That code will help a LOT in testing all the ships.

Please do add a pole I dont see it among my thread tools. I agree no use in doing lots of work for nothing.

When Heart's of Oak is far enough along for me to write quests and Docs for Ill be glad to help there and I'll so who I can abduct and what we can sqease out of them YAR!

I've been digging though the WBT stuff and its acually very well documented in the current ship recognition manual so maybe all thats needed is a manual on how to understand the manual LOL

Can anyone tell me why the following rigging types were remed out?
// KK refShip.RigType = sDet;
// refShip.RigType = "Fsc";
// refShip.RigType = "Shn";
// refShip.rigtype = "Bri";
 
AGH! Apparently I can't add a poll either. Annoying. :facepalm

Captain Rick said:
When Heart's of Oak is far enough along for me to write quests and Docs for Ill be glad to help there and I'll so who I can abduct and what we can sqease out of them YAR!
Click to expand...
They are starting on writing the first storyline already. Luke McReady is setting up a team. Would you like to join?

Captain Rick said:
Can anyone tell me why the following rigging types were remed out?
// KK refShip.RigType = sDet;
// refShip.RigType = "Fsc";
// refShip.RigType = "Shn";
// refShip.rigtype = "Bri";
Click to expand...
I'm not even sure what all those rig types do. Or if that even works properly.
It seems to be used in the RS_GetRigTypeDivisor function in PROGRAM\SEA_AI\AIShip.c . But that's about all I can figure out on that at the moment. o_O
 
No problem Pieter I'll figure all that out and report back just didn't want to do all that work if it was common knowledge why they got remed. I'd be glad to join that team and while I'm at it is Maya what hearts of oak is using too so I know who to kidnap?
 
Captain Rick said:
I'd be glad to join that team
Click to expand...
Done. :doff

Captain Rick said:
while I'm at it is Maya what hearts of oak is using too so I know who to kidnap?
Click to expand...
I know some modelers are using Maya for it, but I think 3DS MAX is being used too. As long as we can figure out a working conversion process, the program doesn't matter so much.
We don't know the final engine anyway, so don't know what file format is going to be used in the end.
 
I'm not sure, but I suspect that those rigging types are posted in some other file and are used to define ships globally.
 
Rig type is only used in one other place in addition to that file I already mentioned, namely to make cannons firing knipples aim lower on Xebec-rigged ships.
 
Captain Rick said:
This is the loose plan and a way to reserve this space for a more organized plan *grins*

Ok guys when I was in the Navy if you bitched about something they gave you a job! Since I'm bitching about ships right now I figure its my job to give you as complete a report as possible. I also read a new ship recognition guide is needed. I'm no artist or historian and I know enough about sailing to be dangerous. So here's what I can do for the team.
1. Report weather the RP deck of the ship is appropriate to the model, examples are the Tartane RP deck is entirely too big for the model. One of the decks I think it was on the "suprise" was trashed like there had been a boarding.
2. Report if the textures look bad, most the smaller ships the textures are stretched too thin and look bad ect.
3. Report if the sails rotate right.
4. Report if the rigging is inside out lol
5. Hack the wind speed and direction (assuming this can be done I managed to do it in CAOS) and report speed at each point of sail.
6. Report time it takes the ship to do a 180 turn, why 180? so my lousy skill at tacking doesn't corrupt the data
7. Report if the number and size of guns seems right, for instance I noticed the gunboat is mounting 12 lb guns all around that seems a little big for such a small ship.
8. Photograph each ship when I test it
9. Report anything else you guys want a up to date report on.
10. Compose a manual on sailing documenting all the features, fire drills ect
11. If this manual turns out expand my manual to include rest of game
12 bitch about anything I don't like *grins*
Please take the time to read this over and shoot holes in the plan or add criteria, If I'm gona look at 166 (or whatever the number is) ships I want to do it once and with a plan! Please don't worry about being "diplomatic" if information is useless to you or the plan doesn't sit right with you just say "that sucks , we want it this way" or we would RATHER you work on this over here.
Click to expand...

What exactly do you know about sailing? Square-rig/multiple masts, or just fore-and-aft sloops?
 
What I know about sailing is patchwork from various sources, simulators, games, internet, classes, knowledge of how wings work in airplanes. What I lack is any practical experience. It's easy enough to look at what WBT trials and POTC docs claim the ships should do and report on if they do it. Then people smarter then me can take the data and go hey a clipper shouldn't do THAT!
 
Ok it may seem I'm all over the place with my posts only because I got an idea for a new manual that show cases all the behind the scenes work that's been done without blowing sunshine up peoples arses.

So here goes Post Captain I've seen enough in your thread to see your a subject matter expert on rigging. I noticed the Dinghy is square rigged and yet WBT assigned it Tartane point of sail and closest point. I am assuming this was just an oops because its named Tartane50 and that it should have square sailing behavior. Can you confirm this and suggest what you think its point of sail value and closest point value should be?

As I read the WBT notes other then this small (what I think is an error) they really seem to of done their homework. Can you also confirm this is as close to real as current program can support or can we do better? I want to learn all I can about real sailing so if we can do better I don't mind doing the legwork because it furthers my education. What I'm not going to do is take something someone who obviously knew more then me about and just randomly tweak it.

Penates! It SEEMS someone put a lot of work into these and Id like to document that as well. For instance I was aboard a Spanish trader ship and the flag background was blue with white criss cross, but the warship trailing me. Had white background with a red criss cross. Is this indeed some sort of period correct thing that my ship was identifying itself as a civilian ship or have modelers randomly picked flags? So if someone has put a lot of work into the flags who do I talk too about putting this kinda hard work into the manual so people appreciate it?
 
Indeed merchant ships and warships have different flags and this is confusing until one gets the hang of the system. This is useful knowledge because there are some ships that have both merchant and warship versions.
 
That's awesome then I see all this undocumented work and since I want to understand it I figure Ill make a manual that showcases it so people know it was done LOL
 
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