Open Program folder, yes, but there are a lot of things that are closed.
There are? I never did look very much into it and never ever will either.
Even if we had someone capable at the time to really dig in to the source code, I reckon we would have been able to do quite a great many things, and that certainly would have made transferring things if not easier, at least more practical. After spending all that time though, there is still the engine limitations and DRM to contend with. Hearts of Oak is the best solution.
Very true. But that never happened. Kicking out the DRM should have been doable.
But definitely Hearts of Oak is the best way to truly go forward. By far!
I am well aware of the challenges both faced mate. POTC also had a LOT of help from the original developers when we first started, and of course those mod tools have been invaluable! We did not have that kind of cooperation with CoAS, even though we did eventually get the source code.
I wasn't around for that true start of PotC modding, so don't know how much the developers helped out.
But definitely Edward Zaitsev from seaward.ru did do what he could to help us with CoAS; that much I do remember.
He answered a lot of our questions on modeling/exporting and sent us a bunch of files that have proven quite useful.
Though they did admittedly see their biggest use on PotC in the end.
POTC also had a lot of original tutorials to fall back on, some of them just didn't help a lot for CoAS.
What tutorials were those? The PotC ones were written by the modders here, no?
So any CoAS modder could have done the same.
One of the things POTC didn't have to deal with, at least not til many years into development, was having a directly competing Mod being developed on the same forum and splitting resources.
Was there not such a situation between the Sea Dogs and PotC mods?
Anyway, there was quite a bit of cooperation between PotC and CoAS modding at the start, because everybody had hoped to eventually make the port. Especially once we got that source code!
But when CoAS modding withered away, eventually it became clear that was never going to happen.
Also, as you point out, there was always at least one constant throughout almost all of POTC's development.
I think having one person always trying to move things ahead and keeping things centralized probably played a very big role.
But you could hardly have expected me to do that for
two games at the same time. I had always hoped somebody else would step in there for CoAS.
Which almost happened many times. But not quite....