The Future of Age of Pirates

[rockbox]

Hi folks,i really love the gameplay of this game simply because there are few that accomplish the immersion like this.so i was wondering,would it be possible,with the released source code for modders, to expand on the graphical side of Age of Pirates?there are plenty of fine mods for the gameplay but a welldone graphical update would improve every mod thats in the make and has been released for this game.

imagine:
- open ended islands! with more land to cover and no load times from jungle section to jungle section,or ANY AT ALL!
- more enemies to fight but with less total hit points to add to realism.example,in fights a man could be killed in a single combo of seemless moves but there will be a number of more enemies at once!(imagine the ship boarding!)
- open ships! by this i mean bring back all the levels to taking a ship (like in Pirates of the Carribean ship boarding) but make door animations that allow the player to fight the crew of the enemy ship all throughout the ship,including the captains quarters!
- high resolution textures would be a great adition but new models would be better!
- animation overhaul! ever saw when you tap the forward button the player runs and slowly slows down IN PLACE?! new animations to stop that continous moving in place!!!

i understand that alot of rewriting of the rendering portion of the storm engine would be required but, with the tools and resources available to us... would any of this be possible?or better yet, a realistic idea for modders to take on?

any more ideas please share!

 

[Luke159]

Interesting idea's, i like the no loading screens between the jungle sections like they have done in the sims 3 where the only loading screen is when loading into the town, but once in no screens to wait for at all. However the loading times because of that can be a major drawback i know it is for the sims 3. Not sure how the source coders will work things out and i'm sure they would want to make the game much more flowing and less loading to be done between things like sea mode to world map and back, treking through the jungle etc etc.


I believe the source code is been worked on to be more stable and fix any bugs and make the codding work better, once thats done maybe a topic will be made asking for idea's or they will use one thats already going.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I don't think this game engine would allow for reload-less islands, but reload-less ship deck models might be a possibility.
Many characters should also be a possibility.

Don't count on any real modifications other than fixes being done on the source code any time soon.
We have one person working on it, who doesn't have much time AND whose help we VERY much need to finish the PotC Build Mod.

 

[Grega]

Actually you could use the same trick ESF used.

Have seperate versions of the character models for the islands. And shrink them down. Then simply make the landscape in a smaller version of itself and you can seemingly increase the map size.

In ESF everything was scaled down 4 times, so the maximum map size seemed 4 times bigger. Though that would lead to longer loading and a quality drop, but its possible to make it seem like a 1 load island.

 

[Munty]

Surely the quality of graphics currently in the game means most modern computers should have no problem loading bigger maps? The graphical and textural quality of the game hasn't improved for years but technology has gone leaps and bounds so surely if the quality of graphics and models remained the same it wouldn't be a huge strain on our systems to deal with bigger maps would it?

Don't flame me please, I'm not a programmer lol

 

[Grega]

Surely the quality of graphics currently in the game means most modern computers should have no problem loading bigger maps? The graphical and textural quality of the game hasn't improved for years but technology has gone leaps and bounds so surely if the quality of graphics and models remained the same it wouldn't be a huge strain on our systems to deal with bigger maps would it?

Don't flame me please, I'm not a programmer lol

While you do have a valid point with the system improvements, you are forgetting one very important factor. The game engine. Its not designed to handle bigger maps. Its simply not possible for the game engine to use bigger maps unless you do the scale down trick i mentioned or recode the map system from scratch to support bigger maps.

As an example. Again with Half Life. Its designed to have maps as big as the hammer map editor can make them. But if a map is bigger than hammers positioning grid, then the game will instantly crash when you decide to load such a map. Its similar for all engines. If the engine doesnt support it, then it crashes.

Though trouth be told. I have no clue what map sizes this game does support cause ive seen some quite big areas, in some towns or shores. Even caverns. So im guessing its possible to do bigger maps, since lets face it, but most of the inside island locations are exact copies of what they had in POTC.

Though i do wonder how big the areas can actually get :s

But if id have to take a guess. Id say maps an be as big as the incan city. Its by far the biggest area ive seen in the game itself.

 

[Iron Roger Flint]

Okay, brace yerselfs. This will be quite a novel

I totally agree with rockbox here. No matter how great the gameplay, no matter how many features we add to the game, it will NEVER generate more interest as a more graphically advanced game. First impression is ALWAYS based on the graphics, not on the list of features. And with PotC and CoAS standing where they are now, the prospects are looking really poor . All of you must have heard about ‘Sea Dogs 4’ being in production (currently halted). Well there’s already a huge fan base, even though the game is no way near completion, and all those people would probably preorder the game the minute it could be done (me included). Why? Because that game has every single feature you probably are wishing for in a pirate rpg – open world to explore, stunning graphics, ‘TES4: Oblivion’ like gameplay, the ability to mod (don’t even let me get started on this, just search for ‘tesnexus’ in google).

Once that monster hits the stores, it will be the downfall of the Storm games.


Now thoughts on those features and my own brainstorming:

Open world exploration. This is A must to be implemented :shoot: ​

Thoughts:

Speaking of PotC or CoAS world exploration… Uhm… You get the impression… It might be something the first time you start playing, but later it’s just ‘I have to go there, because there is a person who will help me in my quest’. How many of you have ever stopped just to admire the view? There is only couple places I love to stop by – the Inca (should be Mayan) temple, Amatrice type shores (those with caverns) because they look new... Everything else is just passing by unnoticed.

Brainstorming:

The open world exploration could probably be implemented right now. However that would require to remake (model and texture) all land locations. That is a HELL LOT OF WORK.

Many people think the land locations are divided to sections (areas) because of poly limitations and it might have been… back in 2003, but what I think is really limiting us are those bloody damned walkpatches. Storm engine is capable of handling pretty heavy polycounts. The collision detection is simply being wasted. Changing the collision data generation way could even exclude the need of walkpatches. The on vertice, on edge, on triangle collision detects the models surface and is ‘local’ -perfect for open end world, and I think this is already in the engine so why the walkpatch?

Rendering engine (effects, textures)
​

Thoughts:

Ever wanted realistic real time rendered lights and shadows anyone? Maybe you would like to be able to paint your own ship, and I MEAN paint it, not just choose one of the textures, and after your paint has dried - observe your new paintjob slowly fading away as you progress in the game?

Brainstorming:

Real time rendered shadows and lighting should be comparatively easy to implement. I could probably do it myself .

Adding support for multiple texture types is also quite easy, compared to programming what you want them for. Instead of having to apply a ‘unique’ texture to every single ship, it should be possible to use texture ‘patterns’. Not only it would improve the graphics as it would be automatically adjusted to the ships size, but also it could be reused to texture all the ships of one and same nation or even all the ships alltogether. A pack of such ‘patterns’ could fully do the job instead of huge number of regular textures. Result – much smaller download size of mods due to decreased number of textures. Unless it ends up with 5 different type textures added per model :

A special ‘paint’ texture could be controlled through palette (RGB values) to choose a color for players ship. Ibelieve this code already exists (sea color, sun color). The NPC ships could have a constant color values or randomized with some limitations. And then comes the alpha channel…there are a lot of ways to use alpha. It could be used to ‘fade away’ the base color of a ship as time passes (engine automatically adding faded areas by controlling alpha value). Additionaly adding texture for 'wet' look on ships and characters.

The real issue is the polygon handling – how are they reduced, culled and so on… The size of the map doesn't matter that much if you manage to keep rendered polygons under control say no more than 500k visible at all times (this number is taken out of air. Do not be afraid )
The game is DX8, NOT DX9 which is backwards compatible. Engine is working on DX8 based software renderer and that’s quite lame actually. It means that most of the work is done by cpu, where as gpu is slacking off (if you’re playing on a laptop, you know what I mean). Besides the threading doesn’t really seem to work. I guess it never got fully implemented.

It’s possible to integrate a graphics engine like ‘Irrlicht’ or ‘Ogre’ into Storm. But it’ll need adjustments. A lot of them infact.

I have more recent PC resource hungry games that actually run smoother compared to CoAS. Reason – they use hardware rendering more,they're also DX9 or DX10. You probably already know where this is going… Upgrading to DX9 or even DX10 is A MUST.

Physics engine
​

Thoughts:

Hmm… the clouds seem flat. Why are they flat?
Why is this rope bridge stiff like a rock one?
Why in the … is Blaze (or anyone) so buoyant like a balloon? I want him to drown :c … or at least to be able to dive underwater.
And why are people dead bodies floating in the air on rough grounds?

Brainstorming:

Particle fog and clouds should be very doable even without the need of mean programming skills, but they are resource hungry, just like particle water. But it’s also so much cooler than that sea of triangles or a flat sky :.

Soft body ropes would be nice to implement. Then adding tension forces. Imagine a rope bridge that reacts to the players weight, actually just imagine that you can suspend something on a rope… like hanging one of captured pirate captains :blah:

Ship’s, character’s movements in the water based on buoyancy – a dream. For now.

Support of ragdolls. This is definitely a thing you want. Imagine how the ship battles would look like with lo’men being slaughtered on the left and right by grapeshots and then falling on deck or overboard like a… ragdoll : no more bodies floating in the air on the land too.

Collision detection really needs to be looked into for reasons mentioned above.

And something that already has a practical use – secondary (engine) propulsion force. We do have steamers in PotC, but they are faking the ‘being the steam powered’ part :. A third force could be used to simulate currents.

I have actually helped program a physics engine for my friend. Since it can be very hard to actually build a complex physics engine, we used parts of the free ‘Bullet’ physics library. Could do the same here.

AI (Artificial Intelligence)
​

Thoughts:

Is it me or the NPC opponents are rather dumb? I would like the AI to actually surprise me with some unexpected maneuver while doing a ship battle, and not just run into wind with squared sails, while I’m in mah ‘Bluebird’ xebec. Sometimes it seems that AI captains are blind, running into cliffs. Some officer controlled ships actually have the nerve to deny the commanders orders ‘Run from the enemy.’, ‘Roger. Straight at the enemy.’

Brainstorming:

I’m not sure if anyone has tried, but it would be great if ships could actually be positioned and do a linear battle, use real battle tactics. Right now game sees a squadron of ships as a bunch of individuals and not like a death seeding single force. If tactics could be applied, It would require much more effort from the player: he would have to reevaluate the force he’s dealing with, the risk and change his own tactics in accordance to enemy’s movements.

Also, speaking of 1v1 battle, how about taking into consideration the weather conditions, whereabouts, enemy. Visibility (active range) could be affected by fog for example. If there would be shoals a smaller, maybe flat bottomed ship could pass it, while a heavier, bigger ship would have to go round. I’m only speaking of ship AI, but character AI should be revised too.

AI is probably the most complex part of the game. Requires a lot of programming skills and overall tactical knowledge.

Animations
​

Thoughts:

There is completely no variety in character movements. Developers could have at least added more, like chopping wood, forging swords… and how about domestic animal animations? I’m not even speaking about different variations of the same action (walking for example) which makes perfect sence: a fat man will walk differently than a slim one, or old one and the young one.

Flora except the grass, doesn’t react to anything. It’s solid as a rock.

Ability to swing your sword while moving around would be also nice. Maybe some simple combo move system? :ixi

Brainstorming:

Inversed kinematics, please. Reacts to collision properly, looks more natural.

Now we have forward kinematics, which are so stoneage.

More animated animals.

Models
​

Thoughts:

Models lack detail. Land models are repetitive and bo-o-oring . Someone mentioned body parts earlier. Something about being able to change the appearance of a character. What about ships? Maybe some damageable areas, changeable parts like figurehead, cannons?

Brainstorming:

We have all the tools needed for producing high quality models, and hopefully with advanced poly handling techniques, we could add more detail to character, ship and land models too.

Adding new lowmen models based on nationality would be great.

Instead of modeling the cannons and some ship parts, we could add them in a similar way, how the masts are being added – through locators, just new locator types need to be programmed. In an event when a shot hits these parts, they would fall off ship. And why stop with ships only. Let’s make forts truly destructible. Later a proper progressive damage modification could be added.

Other brainstorming:
​

Something that can hopefully be achieved easily and without the need of the source code (means I’ll probably give it a try):

Anyone ever had a thought why on earth do masts sink when falling off ship? It makes sence if it’s attached to a sinking ship, but else?

Disappearing corpses - not the living-dead skellies . Can’t they remain until loading a new land section at least?



And something more advanced:

When attacking a colony, the town is usually empty except for town guards. Needs to be changed :blah: . I would like to see panic, chaos, blood, death on the streets. Changing the building set to damaged one, adding fire and smoke, dead bodies lying around and living ones running around screaming : , cannon shots bombarding town and fort while you pillage would also build up an appropriate atmosphere

Fort defense mod (fort as a ship). Firing at approaching enemies with fortguns while your allied ships fight in the harbour. Then if some enemy ship makes it to the land, or the fort is destroyed, you have to fight the enemy on your way back to town. When in town during attack you see the same chaos like mentioned above.


There is always a possibility of a multiplayer too which should not be forgotten.






Conclusion:

almost everything that involves the need of the engine’s code is rather difficult to achieve, or we are limited by the lack of knowledgeable and skillful programmers. In fact PA is lacking human resources in every department, be it programming, animation, promotion or any other, except maybe news gathering. That one is pretty good



To answer your question ‘rockbox’ – everything is possible, yet not realistic in this state.



Whoa. Told ye it be a novel :trio

 

[Grega]

Rather than use DX i think its better to go for Open GL. Its way superior regarding accessibility for the coders and backwards compatibility. Im talking DX10 type of GFX on Win XP possibilities. It also leaves you with more freedom as you mess with it.

As for physics, i hear Nvidia has an open physics library you can get. Not sure what its called but its compatible with ATI cards. Maybe its worth a shot to look at if not you can always try to integrate bullet. Its what we did for ESF and it seems to be working nicely.

 

[Bava]

In fact PA is lacking human resources in every department, be it programming, animation, promotion or any other, except maybe news gathering.

This is the most important point, imo. But we won´t get a major influx of new people unless

1. a new Pirate RPG (Sea Dogs 4) is released. And we all know thats at least 2 or 3 years away.
2. PA decides to mod another game engine. I´d guess it´ll take 2 years before we have anything playable
and representable. And there are not that many heavily moddable games out there that could be tailored
to our needs (Oblivion? Mount&Blade? Arma2?).

Real time rendered shadows and lighting should be comparatively easy to implement. I could probably do it myself .

Hell, please do it then Realistic shadows would a major graphical improvement, ships would look soooo much better. And you´d get Bava´s Medal of Merit (™) :

 

[Luke159]

I would like to see a load of things added and/or improved but here's a list of things that does take much of the fun out of gameplay.

1. Sails alway's looks the same no matter what the wind speed is. There like a model ship with its sails as they are normally, acting like they have a good wind pushing them along. I would like to see the sails to be more realistiv, low winds means less movement in the sails. No wind means the sails flap around, that would make a big difference to presentation.

2. Ships sailing away, the AI never take into account the ship type they have. They never sail into the wind with small agile ships, last night in testing i had just captured the Pinnace Of War and given a officer the role of captain aboard my old ship the Fleut Of War. The fleet i had attacked was an English trade fleet of 4 ships, There was 1 Pinnace Of War 24, 22Ibs cannons, 1 Fleut Of War, 20, 16Ibs cannon, 1 Schooner Xebec aka Heavy Schooner with 20, 12Ibs culverines and finally 1 Light Brig 22, 10Ibs culverines. I boarded the Pinnace Of War first captured her and swapped her with my Fleut Of War, giving my old ship to a officer to command. I asked him to sail away and rather than sail away he sailing towards the enemy Fleut Of War which was sailing with the wind. So i went ahead of my companion and after a few broadsides of grapeshots i boarded and sunk the Fleut Of War. The Schooner was able to keep up with my companion which was obvious since she was a Xebec shapped hull and rigging. So I boarded and sunk the Schooner, then the Brig started playing a role (at this point most people would have gone forget this and sailed away, the stupidity of the AI shows through again). The brig continued to head towards my companions who i ordered to load chain shot and attack the Brig, i turned around and also tried loaded chain shots. When i got within range i opened fire ordering my companion to sail away (this is when it got stopid) All this time up till now my companion on orders to sail away sailed into the wind, normal and to be expected. After giving him the order to sail away after been ordered to attack the Brig giving chase decided to sail into the wind and towards the Brig.

3. AI intellegance improvements, this is a must. As you will have seen from reading the above problem you will agree the AI is dumb and if made more intellegant then gameplay would be more realistic, challanging and fun.

I know you get games out there that look incredible with there graphics, but how many people have boarght a game with good graphics only to be let down by poor gameplay. Graphic's in my opininion are secondry, a game that play's well will alway's beat a game with excellent graphics but poor gameplay. Once the gameplay issues are sorted out then yes some graphical improvements could be made, ever woundered why the graphics haven't changed much over the years. Well imagine for example Dead Space (never played it, but heards its good) now that is aimed at a large market, how many people by first person shootem up's, how many people buy building type games? there is a huge difference in the market for them both, now look at POTC, COAS and other pirate games, the market is small and if you give the top end stuff and the game doesn't do well you will be annoyed playing to the market you know will buy the game is better than taking a very risky move like that. Of course improve the graphgics enough to be noticed, (and COAS isn't at the standard it should have been) but don't push it too much that the market your aiming at who most likely have low spec computer's will not be able to play it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I dare say I know a bit more about Corsairs 4 than most do on this forum.
As per my latest update on that one, progress is not just halted; it is not known if it will ever happen.
Seaward.ru, the same people who made Age of Pirates II: City of Abandoned Ships,
were working on it but the monetary support for it was cancelled by Akella.
They have been forced to find another game to work on -I don't know which- just to be able to make some money.

As for what that game is and isn't supposed to be, the ideas behind it sound pretty good, but it's not the pirate game to end them all.
Also, I'm not at all convinced that the new engine is quite as moddable as the Storm engine is.
The Storm engine is really EXCEPTIONALLY moddable in that we are able to change pretty much everything.
Not just adding new locations, characters, items and quests -which seems what modding for Corsairs 4 might be limited to-,
but adding totally new interfaces with new functionality and all sorts of things the game was never intended to be able to do.

Of course I agree with all the above that it would be nice to have all of that in a pirate game.
However, we have to consider what we are actually capable of.
PA! has a great bunch of people, but a complete game development studio we are not.
Could a complete game development studio with our input make the pirate game to end them all? I'm pretty sure that they could!
However, could WE do the same thing with our lack of capable people in all departments?
As sad as it sounds, I believe there's no chance of that.

What we have is a VERY moddable game engine that allows non-professional modders to achieve rather great results.
The graphics are serviceable, but not the best. But gameplay-wise there is an infinity of potential.

 

[Munty]

However, could WE do the same thing with our lack of capable people in all departments?
As sad as it sounds, I believe there's no chance of that.

So who do you need? I have plenty of time right now but I lack most of the skills essential to complete the work you guys are doing here. I can't model or texture and my coding is very simplistic so would be limited to very basic quest 'if's and 'elses'

If you have anything you need a monkey for, concepts or quests or something else that doesn't require much technical ability I'd be more than happy to help

 

[ShadowXx]

Maybe the wrong place to ask but could someone upload there rigging.dll as mines corrupted and wont allow me to start my game.

 

[Luke159]

Here you go bud, the rigging.dll file.

http://www.mediafire.com/?lc6tshec3lkgaae

 

[ShadowXx]

Maybe the wrong place to ask but could someone upload there rigging.dll as mines corrupted and wont allow me to start my game.

ty luke but one main problem does anyone know why i would get a crash on loading the game caused by that dll the only thing i think might of caused it would of been a russian mod i got for new ships that might not have translated correctly. I know iam asking alot and you guys probably have better stuff to do but the only INI it changes is Rigging.ini would this be causing the crash?

 

[Iron Roger Flint]

The file probably refers to a script that doesn't exist in an english version

 

[Luke159]

You downloaded a mod which adds new ships, it could be a few things that course the game not to work. A mistake in any files can course the game to crash, can you post a link to this mod you installed?

 

[Iron Roger Flint]

Could it be 'ShipsPak' ?

 

[ShadowXx]

Could it be 'ShipsPak' ?

Collection Of Ships - A modification is made jointly by members of the forum project Seaward.ru, Blackmark.bz and Seadogs.ru.
This modification replaces the game a lot of textures and models of ships, making the world Corsairs more varied and interesting.
In other words, this collection gathers the best modified and updated textures ships from the forums of the three projects.

Meh i will just reinstall and stay away from the Russian mods Thanks for your help anyway guys.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Serious recommendation: DON'T install anything on top of a modded game version UNLESS it says its compatible.
A Russian ship pack is NOT going to be compatible with the Combined Modpack.

I asked Mr. Zaitsev on the present status of Corsairs 4 and this is what he has to say:

Corsair 4 will resume within a year or two. But we are working without Akella, do not stand on the spot. Soon
will be news about pirated online game. This will be a step to Corsair 4.

Munty, there's all sorts of simple-but-lot-of-work jobs that we have for the PotC Build Mod.
You wouldn't happen to be interested in helping out, would you...?