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Fix in Progress Repairing Bad Ropes

So.... since I think any "bad ropes" should have not been showing before anyway, I'll add your modified ones in the game.
 
Wow! There is a ton of new information here. :8q Where to start?

I will look at any ships already identified and see how it goes, but it will be a slow process. I seem to have strained meself the last few days and am having a "bad eyes day" where everything is a blur. I am also getting constantly interrupted and have lost the ideas in this thread. So where do you want me to start? :shrug

In general the bad ropes come from the people working on a ship getting confused and starting over. It is not unusual to see 2-3 different rope systems on the same ship with lots of them going no where, especially on the larger ships. The Postillionen with that one misnamed locator is the exception that proves the rule. It was a mistake made by the original modeler that I never caught either. Thanks @pedrwyth

So it is always best to look in ALL gms when looking for bad ropes before deleting any as another common mistake is naming both ends of a rope as ropee or ropeb. That happened on the Polacca. This makes repairing bad ropes a slow tedious process.

Oh, one word of caution when using the console a lot. I have destroyed POTC installs, not games, when using it heavily in the past and now almost never use it.

@Pieter Boelen Those are different ships that I have not looked at. The issue with the other fleuts was that the gunport lids were calling for a texture that is not in POTC. I simply hex edited them to call for a different but similar texture.
 
After scanning this thread again I will start on the Poseidon.

The US First Rate is going to be a bear as there are maybe a dozen different versions of the ship (HMS Victory) in the game. When did I do the rigging on that one? 2010? 2011? All I really remember is that it was a big project that took me 3 months.
 
OK partially Ninja'd :ninja when I come back to this prepared reply after half an hour but I'll post it anyway....

Hylie Pistof said:
Wow! There is a ton of new information here. :8q Where to start?

I will look at any ships already identified and see how it goes, but it will be a slow process. I seem to have strained meself the last few days and am having a "bad eyes day" where everything is a blur. I am also getting constantly interrupted and have lost the ideas in this thread. So where do you want me to start? :shrug
Click to expand...

I think first is a recap to make sure we are on the same page.

I am cycling through each ship backwards down the alphabet looking for bad rope logs. I'll save a text file of the report. The info goes into a bad rope file listing ship, how many errors and noting associated bad textures (if any).
So it is always best to look in ALL gms when looking for bad ropes before deleting any as another common mistake is naming both ends of a rope as ropee or ropeb. That happened on the Polacca. This makes repairing bad ropes a slow tedious process.
Click to expand...
I will then in stages look at the GM files if there are less than 10 bad ropes, find them - I was looking to see if there was another end with wrong b/e - but re-checking to see the log file is now clear does the same job. I will cut the locators out of a temporary GM file copy so the logs can be absent until the model is fully fixed. I will leave a back-up of the GMs with bad ropes for fixing and also the original log listing which ropes are affected.

Finally you can choose any you fancy or come across to properly fix for presumably missing ropes (and any others originally missed or wrongly placed) in the model.



Oh, one word of caution when using the console a lot. I have destroyed POTC installs, not games, when using it heavily in the past and now almost never use it.
Click to expand...
No worries, like you I have multiple installs - plus the stock game and a back-up of virtually every exe installer I have ever used - so if I break one I just start again. I need it for my occassional major blunders anyway.

PS I have seen at least one other example of cross referenced mast locator labels but in that case fixing them did not improve the bad rope count (on the US_Volage)

PPS Poseidon eh? well now I can only find 5 bad ropes? :yes I screwed up somewhere with that one :shock EDIT -yep that what comes of not looking at the ship I put US_Poseidon into the console so it stayd with the ship I had already!! So it is a bigee
 

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Ok, all you really need to remember is that the modelers were burned out by the time they got to the rigging and got really sloppy. I just looked at the Poseidon in GMViewer and see ropes that are supposed to be attached to mast2 that are completely missing it. This is actually pretty common on the larger ships. If you want an example of how a ship is rigged, probably the Centurion is the best built ship in the game. Especially look at the reys to see how the locators are spread out so you can, you know, SEE them.

When giving me a ship to work on all I really need is a save game and then I can get the log files from my install.

I just found a tutorial on how to use the console and did get the Poseidon into an install I don't care about. So now I'm off to see how bad it is. :type1
 
This is actually the FR_Flueron and PO & RN Poseidon and is probably one of the worst. It was ported from POTBS and then built by committee. This is going to take a while. Maybe a long while.
 
You guys may want to tackle the easy ones first. No need to drive yourself nuts. ;)
 
This is one I have been purposely ignoring for years. It will take a while but in the end it will look a whole lot better.

EDIT: The first part is done. First I added ropes as there were ropes that need to be there that only had one end. Then I deleted ropes. There were ropes holding the flags and pennants! That is a nice touch but they can not be seen on a ship this large, so they are now gone. Last I removed lots of ropes that were not needed.

This leaves a bunch of ropes that are ending in air and going through sails and sails going through sails. They will not stay like that.

Oh, the ship now has fireplaces. That was kinda fun. If I guessed right there will be flames pouring out of doors, gunports, stairwells, and windows.
 
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Hylie Pistof said:
This is one I have been purposely ignoring for years. It will take a while but in the end it will look a whole lot better.

EDIT: The first part is done. First I added ropes as there were ropes that need to be there that only had one end. Then I deleted ropes. There were ropes holding the flags and pennants! That is a nice touch but they can not be seen on a ship this large, so they are now gone. Last I removed lots of ropes that were not needed.

This leaves a bunch of ropes that are ending in air and going through sails and sails going through sails. They will not stay like that.

Oh, the ship now has fireplaces. That was kinda fun. If I guessed right there will be flames pouring out of doors, gunports, stairwells, and windows.
Click to expand...

AS I said I thought even I would find this one odd and Yes I did see ropes and sails passing through sails (and these aren't the reported bad ones I presume ?)- the expertise comes in knowing where they should go !! :bow
 
@pedrwyth If you would like to study up on rigging there are some resource threads in the modeling sub forum.

To get an idea of how it is done perhaps you can take a look at the European barques, Barque1 and Barque2. They are small ships with conventional rigging so it is easy to see everything. In fact I have been meaning to reshape the stay sail just behind the main mast. Maybe you would like to reshape it?
 
Just an update. There are no bad ropes and the sails are a little better. For some reason the square sails are billowing out badly and the usual trick are not working.
POTC FX 2015-11-20 11-19-04-07.jpg
 
Another batch of 33 bad rope ships.
HMS_Surprise lives up to her name with 52 bad ropes and 22 missing textures
:pirateraft or :ship


(actually more like the second with a few sails through sails but still plenty of ropes to see) Surprise.jpg
@Hylie Pistof Thanks - I might take a look at sub forum stuff when I have finished the initial list and worked through the ship directories and removed the bad ropes. I might even try and replace some simple missing ropes if there are any obvious candidates but I don't think I'm enough of a purist for fixing the visuals to hold my interest for long once I have worked out how it is done. So maybe its a good thing that barque1 is first in the directory listing - I guess you mean to change it from a parallelogram to triangular?
 

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It doesn't have to be triangular. Four sided is probably best. I just made it too big and it looks out of place.

I can understand your not wanting to get into the rigging business as it can get hellishly complicated right fast.

The Surprise is a mess with missing textures too? How did that happen? :facepalm Some good people worked on that ship.


I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with the Poseidon as all that is left are the bowsprit stuff. Then comes upgrading the 2 other versions and that could take a while.
POTC FX 2015-11-20 14-56-20-41.jpg
 
Why does it take much time to upgrade 2 other versions of the same ship if you've already done one?
I'm probably misunderstanding something there....
 
The changes are so extensive that the only way to do it is to copy the RN_Poseidon, rename the copies, and then rename all the textures in a hex editor. On old ships there were only 1-12 textures to rename, but this is a very complex ship and depending how my eyes hold out it could take hours or days. I really hate this part. I actually reworked the Constitution last July but have not yet gotten around to upgrading all the other versions of that ship for this very reason.

Anyway, the fun part is done. POTC FX 2015-11-21 10-31-41-97.jpg POTC FX 2015-11-21 10-31-54-72.jpg POTC FX 2015-11-21 10-32-16-72.jpg POTC FX 2015-11-21 10-32-29-47.jpg
 
Yep no more interlaced sails good stuff! :)
Hylie Pistof said:
The changes are so extensive that the only way to do it is to copy the RN_Poseidon, rename the copies, and then rename all the textures in a hex editor. On old ships there were only 1-12 textures to rename, but this is a very complex ship and depending how my eyes hold out it could take hours or days.
Click to expand...
OK I can see the various versions of the Poseidon use different textures in the headers.

If what you are describing is keeping those textures as were ie hexediting the new copies of the fixed model to use the same textures as their old counterparts then that is work that I CAN do - all I would need is access to the mended model (and reference to which other ship models are involved) - where it is not blindingly obvious from the name. That would free you to get on with the "fun" part on another model rather than churning out copies.

At any rate I'm prepared to do a few, I'll see how crackers :bird:it sends me :modding before offering to do them all! Hand me that Poseidon.:duel:

I have now completed the list (although I skipped some of the obvious named copies once I was pretty sure they generally have the same ropes in their models.
 

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Thanks! I got lucky with the Poseidon as there are only 3 and the texture changes were only to the hulls and weren't too many. I don't think I missed anything.
Dropbox - Poseidon update.7z

Perhaps you would be interested in doing the Constitution? As near as I can tell there are only 3 versions, the US, RN, and FR versions. The RN and FR are called battlefrigates. All I changed were mast1m mast2, and some locators on the main hull GM.

Here is a link to it. Unfortunately this is the COAS version so all GMs have an extra "1" added to them.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gpalg0tp...GOF2 after patch 1.2/USS_Constitution.7z?dl=0
 
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