AC Black Flag Ships

[mgtheog.]

While I know that it would never happen, I have often thought about if Black Flag ships like the Jackdaw, the HMS Prince, or the Queen Anne's Revenge (especially this one since it's one of my favorite pirate ship designs of all time) were added to New Horizons. While none of them are crazy potent in terms of their power compared to some of the other ships in the mod like the Flying Dutchman or POTC Queen Anne's Revenge, I just love those ship designs so much and would love to see New Horizon's already expansive repertoire of different fictional but influential pirate world settings get expanded on even more. I could only imagine what the mod would look like with adding more steampunk pirate themed ships too (shoutout to the OGs that remember games like Crimson Steam Pirates).

 

[Grey Roger]

Jackdaw: looks like a basic brig. You could do this one yourself if you like. You'll need:
TX Convertor: https://piratesahoy.bowengames.com/Cloud/Tools/Modeling+Texturing/TX Convertor.zip: converts the game's .tga.tx files into standard .tga format, and vice versa;
Hex Editor: https://piratesahoy.bowengames.com/Cloud/Tools/Modeling+Texturing/hex-editor.7z: directly edits a file;
GM Viewer: https://piratesahoy.bowengames.com/Cloud/Tools/Modeling+Texturing/GM Viewer.zip: shows a single model file, such as the hull of a ship

Start by using TX Convertor to convert any of "bortoutbrig1.tga.tx", "bortoutbrig2.tga.tx", or "bortoutbrg45.tga.tx", all of which you'll find in "RESOURCE\Textures\Ships". Those are the files used by "Brig1", "Brig2" and "RN_Brig" respectively, all to be found in their own subfolders of "RESOURCE\MODELS\Ships".

Use your choice of Photoshop, GIMP, or any other picture editing program which can work with .tga files, to make the ship look more like Jackdaw. Save the file to a different name which must be the same length as "bortoutbrig1". Use TX Convertor to convert your new file to .tga.tx format.

Depending on which "bortout" file you chose, make a copy of its ship model - for example, if you used "bortoutbrg45.tga.tx", make a copy of the whole "RN_Brig" folder and call it "Jackdaw" or something similar. The names of files in the folder all begin with "RN_Brig" so you'll need to rename the whole lot to match, e.g. "RN_Brig_deck.gm" becomes "Jackdaw_deck.gm". Now use Hex Editor to edit "Jackdaw.gm" and look for the name of the .tga file:

I've highlighted it here - it won't be highlighted on the real Hex Editor screen, but you can see here what you need to find. Change that to match your new file and be careful not to overwrite anything except the file name, otherwise the model file won't work! This is why your new texture file name must be exactly the same length as the original.

Once all that's done, use 7-Zip or something similar to zip up all your files and upload the whole lot here, then I can do the coding work to put the ship into the game.

HMS Prince looks like a very dark man of war. "Manowar_gub" in the game looks relatively similar. It also uses a simple "bortout" file for the texture so you could follow the same instructions as for Jackdaw. The ship seems to have tattered sails and a fog similar to the Black Pearl, which could probably be done by using code similar to that for Black Pearl in the game.

The game already has a Queen Anne's Revenge based on the one from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films, so an AC version is unlikely to go into the game as well.