Ship Pack Details and Updates

[Pieter Boelen]

Armada, do you think it'd be possible to have some sort of release in a few days?
I'm thinking I should release Patch 6 before Friday, because I'll probably be away playing LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean for a li'l while after that.
No need for you to compile everything nicely if it's going straight into Patch 6, so that should be able to save you some work.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I still like the way the ai ships sail now. They turn into the wind properly and are able to stay in the battle better. In fact opposing ships have a knack for getting me to get stuck facing into the wind and unable to maneuver. :slap Tricky devils.....

The downside is that they are more likely to ram anything close by, so there are more ships with no bowsprit. And boarding can be more difficult as they will try to turn away from you now. :2guns

 

[Armada]

Armada, do you think it'd be possible to have some sort of release in a few days?

Erm, that might be difficult. I have three exams this week and three more next week. After that, I'm in France for a week, too.
I'll see what I can do, but it might have to wait until this weekend at the earliest.

I still like the way the ai ships sail now. They turn into the wind properly and are able to stay in the battle better. In fact opposing ships have a knack for getting me to get stuck facing into the wind and unable to maneuver. :slap Tricky devils.....

I prefer it too, since they make you think a bit harder about your battle tactics.
I'd much rather they were clever but recklessly ram other ships, than being unable to tack and tending to ram cliff sides. :

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Erm, that might be difficult. I have three exams this week and three more next week. After that, I'm in France for a week, too.
I'll see what I can do, but it might have to wait until this weekend at the earliest.

Fair enough. We'll release Patch 6 as soon as we can manage afterwards then.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

We will take what we can get. First things first. :beer

I also like that I am meeting ships that i have not seen before, or maybe only once or twice in the last year. The ship I am currently sailing, the class 2 pinnace of war is a perfect example. There are others.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Pretty much finished the rigging on that ship. What a mess. It no longer has fals, but there are ropes going places that makes no sense to me. Methinks it would be faster to just start over from scratch. :j1

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Armada, you aren't going to like this. I've been getting rare ctds when trying to enter my ship from port. It looks like the Constitution's walk file might be to blame. Here are the logs.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Looks like some errors occurred AFTER those Constitution walk ones, so that might not be the cause of the CTD itself. But apparently something's wrong...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Do you think we need some code to switch between the Ship Interface Screenshots to be turned on or off? I did that before, but accidentally lost it.
I wanted to tie it into the Dynamic interface toggle, but that didn't seem to work, so I made it into an InternalSettings.h switch.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I've gone as far as I can with the rigging on the heavylineship1, or the class2 pinnace of war. Not sure what to do with the lateen. Forward or backward? I reversed it too, but that is easily changed. k I also added a vant to mast 4. I can't recall seeing a ship with only one vant on a mast before. Anyway, here it is.




Pieter: Are to talking about that one person who had stuttering in the shipyard? It might help some people with Intel graphics.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Pieter: Are to talking about that one person who had stuttering in the shipyard? It might help some people with Intel graphics.

That's indeed why I originally did it.

 

[Armada]

Armada, you aren't going to like this. I've been getting rare ctds when trying to enter my ship from port. It looks like the Constitution's walk file might be to blame.

You damn well bet I don't like the sound of that. Seems poor old Constitution's crew are a favourite among possible CTD causes.
I'm almost 99% sure that walk files should NOT cause CTD's, so going by the error log you generated, I think something else is the root cause here.
Normally, if a walk file has a real problem, you can easily see it in-game... as we know all too well.

Do you think we need some code to switch between the Ship Interface Screenshots to be turned on or off? I did that before, but accidentally lost it.

If you know how to do it without any adverse effects, then I'd say go ahead.
Hard luck for losing the original work, though.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Shouldn't have any adverse effects, no. Wasn't so difficult either.

 

[Armada]

Update on finishing the pack:
I'm hoping to get everything sorted tomorrow or Saturday, so the release can be as soon as possible.
There might be some issues that I can't properly fix this time around, such as some walk files going nuts (I REALLY don't understand that!).
However, unless there are any further problems reported, everything should be fine. I'll download Hylie's rigging for the HeavyLineship, too.

What I still can't believe is that no-one has actually noticed what's changed on the deck.tga cannon texture! Is it really that subtle?
Judging by this, I take it there are no complaints about it, either?
Still, next time you're on a stock ship, take a good look at the guns, and let me know what you think.
They're supposed to be more similar to the high-poly guns used on pgargon's ships, so there's some degree of consistency.
It hopefully disguises the gun's lack of polys a bit better, too.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

You did your work on the wheels?

 

[Armada]

Yes, the wheels seem to stand out a bit more now (that wasn't even intentional, but somehow they look even more improved than I expected :huh ).

Anyway, I'm going to look back through all the reported issues tonight, and aim to get everything sorted for tomorrow.
I don't think there's much left to fix or change, so it shouldn't take long.


In other news, I've started a blog on my ModDB profile, which covers ship pack updates.
For the most part, I've given the details of the ships to be included in Patch 6.
I'll be posting regular updates there so that the ModDB community can see what we're doing as we're doing it.
I decided this was easier than trying to do the same thing in a news article form, as it's more convenient for me to update.

 

[Legendary_Spider]

Patch 6 should excite everyone.

I wish I coulda done more.

Sadly, I'm only halfway through my SFX re-mastering project for the game. Then I have to test it out and make sure it works. I guess we could release it as an optional stand alone for people that want the new SFX as opposed to people who prefer the stock sounds. Perhaps down the line, if it's successful enough, it could be included in Patch 7.

And yes, I'm still working hard on figuring out all the modelling stuff.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I never even see, much less sail the new ships so I have nothing to compare the new cannons to. ops2 To me bad cannons are the wooden cannons on the Sirius1.


Don't take too long with your ship pack. I've been adding ropes to the Indiaman, and last night methinks I figured out how to lower the mainsails on the Pinnace. I'll be done in a week or two. )

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Sounds good, Armada! Will you be including Pgargon's latest ship releases as well?

 

[Armada]

Perhaps down the line, if it's successful enough, it could be included in Patch 7.

I think we're going straight from Patch 6 to Beta 2, if I remember correctly what Pieter said about it a while ago.
That would be your opportunity to have it included. We might need to figure out a toggle for your new sound effects, but we'll figure that out nearer the time.

To me bad cannons are the wooden cannons on the Sirius1.

That sounds like a simple HEX-editor fix, because of a deck/desk.tga mix up.
Interestingly, I tried to load the file in GM Viewer, but it caused extreme lag, damn nearly crashed my PC, and failed to load. In that order.

Don't take too long with your ship pack. I've been adding ropes to the Indiaman, and last night methinks I figured out how to lower the mainsails on the Pinnace. I'll be done in a week or two. )

Don't worry, I'm aiming to have it done tomorrow. But you've certainly been paying attention to detail, lately!

Will you be including Pgargon's latest ship releases as well?

Not this time, sorry. I really haven't had time to port them recently, as I'm sure you realise.
I'll get round to it soon, but I can't say when.