Steam Frigates

[Kharbydis]

The guns on the steam frigate (Royal Navy version) do not fire. They make the usual yelling noise when I give the order to attack, but no shot sounds or cannonballs appear, despite guns being installed, a full crew, and a very experienced captain. This was on Jack Aubrey's quest line.

Needless to say, it was rather disappointing that I went through the trouble to find the hidden location to get the boat, and then engaged another frigate only to find that my guns didn't work and I was doomed to go to DJ's Locker.

 

[Black Bart]

Sounds like a bug, well found(although not so good for your game!) and thanks for letting us know

 

[Armada]

What?! That's the first I've heard of it.
Which Build version are you playing?

 

[Kharbydis]

What?! That's the first I've heard of it.
Which Build version are you playing?

14.6
I would go back and check it again, but that whole save got an unbearably bad frame rate and I can't go back to it.
I tried to get a frigate again and test it out again to see if it was just some weird thing, unfortunately I can't find Mr. Vanderdrecken again.

 

[morgan terror]

are you sure you're not just out of ammo or powder? also, sometimes guns just don't fire when your press spacebar for some reason. doing it manually with the V key usually fixes the problem.

 

[Armada]

I've just tested her myself, using the same game version, and all the guns fire as normal.

Can you please try this to see if you get the same results:
Open 'console.c' in the PROGRAM folder, and find this line of code:

// Give ship
// ------------------

Then, directly beneath that, add this line:

GiveShip2Character(pchar,"RN_SteamFrigate2","Test",-1,ENGLAND,true,true);

Now, load any savegame and press F12, and then go to sea.
You should now have exactly the same ship that you bought from Vanderdecken, so you can test the guns.

If they all fire, then that's good and bad. Good because they do fire, bad because that might mean there's a problem with the ship when you buy it from Vanderdecken.
If they don't fire, then you may not have installed the game correctly, or your downloads were corrupted.

 

[morgan terror]

oh yes, i forgot about that. vanderdecken's ships do tend to be a bit dodgy on occasion. i've been unable to pinpoint any details though.

 

[Kharbydis]

Well I made it back to vanderdecken, and tried out the frigate,and the guns do work this time. Not sure what happened. There was ammo and powder before, I checked before I made the op.
However sailing the dauntless/endeavor or the steam frigate seem to seriously lower my frame rate, but that could be a problem of my ancient computer. The save where I used the dauntless had its frame rate lowered so much I had to exit the game by cntrl-alt-delete mid battle, and when I went back to the game the frame rate was still unbearable even at port.

 

[morgan terror]

what's your system specs then? i've been saying that the newer ships could have too many polygons, but noone seems to listen.

anyway, it could have been that random non-firing bug then. so if you run into it again, just fire manually once.

 

[Kharbydis]

what's your system specs then? i've been saying that the newer ships could have too many polygons, but noone seems to listen.

anyway, it could have been that random non-firing bug then. so if you run into it again, just fire manually once.

Well my computers from 2002 about, was cheap then, and has died and been repaired by me several times (And I have no idea what i'm doing when it comes to electronics) so my specs are probably not good.
I tested a bit more, and I believe the low frame rate is not caused by the ships but rather from storms or fighting large groups of enemies, or both at once. Is there any way I could lower the possibility of storms or large enemy groups? My computer can't seem to handle them well.

It probably was that non-firing bug then since now I am happily sinking yankees in the steam frigate HMS Unstoppable.

 

[Armada]

It probably was that non-firing bug then since now I am happily sinking yankees in the steam frigate HMS Unstoppable.

Well that's a relief. At least it's not an install-specific problem.

Considering this game came out in 2003, and needed fairly good specs for that time, it's not surprising that the Build Mod is putting a lot of pressure on your machine.
The only real fix for your framerate issue is to upgrade your machine, I suspect.
There are small things you can do within the game to reduce the lag (like avoiding fleet battles), or maybe setting the game to run in a lower screen resolution/graphics quality, but they won't help hugely.

 

[morgan terror]

you know, now that you mention it, does the reduction of the graphical settings actually work on the newer ship models? i remember it making the stock ships a bit more crude when i tried it ages ago.

i think my previous computer was a frankenstein'd piece of crap from 1998. it ran the game with mods fairly well, but i don't think it could have run the build mod as it is now.

 

[Armada]

you know, now that you mention it, does the reduction of the graphical settings actually work on the newer ship models?

I can't say I've tried. It would certainly dumb down the texture quality, and I know a lot of the new ships use the full 2048x2048 res textures, so that should help somewhat.
What it won't do, however, is reduce the number of polygons, so those ships will still be resource hogs.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes, changing your video settings does make a difference, but not a large difference. This is DX8. It puts a lot of load on the CPU and not so much on the video card. I made a chart and posted it here somewhere a few days ago. It showed that POTC pushed my VC hard enough to get it into 3d mode (some old games won't do that) but wasn't working hard. POTC also was using almost no ram. But all 4 of the CPU cores were working, at times hard. I have 10ghz of total cpu and it is possible that during a large battle POTC could be maxxing out all of them.

DX9 is a whole other animal as it puts most of the load on the video card and uses a lot of ram while not using so much cpu.