Alternate Loading Screens Concept

[carmenara]

Hello,

I wouldn't like to infringe upon Pieter's Location Specific Loading Screens effort but I thought we could use a bit more flair than just showing off raw screenshots from the game.

How about a style that focuses on suggestion of atmosphere, purpose? We are allowed to use some creative liberties, non? And just like fashion, showing everyone... everything doesn't do well if you want to entice (more complex) feelings from the audience...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Some nice pictures, that's for sure! Nice angles, especially.

The port one doesn't look quite recognizable as Willemstad port though,
though the other ones do look recognizable.
It's hard to show AND the actual model AND make it look like a port,
because the town is on one side and the port on the other.
I still want to try a good angle of a screen taken FROM the deck of a ship.

The Port Royale one looks a bit surreal to me; night with dark colours.

We have decided to not put the town/island names on the loading screens at all and just mention "Port/Town/Jungle".
The reason is because the town and island names are different in different periods and you can even
re-enable the stock game town and island names if you're really confused.
In that case, the texts on the loading screens would be wrong.
Pirate_KK did some experiments on having the shown names be changed through code instead,
but that experiment unfortunately failed. So we went with the easy route and just not mention possibly inaccurate names.

 

[carmenara]

It'll be a bit hard to display the ports with my sort of perspective, which prefers close-up detail. Willemstad is not exactly a very cinematic locale, just sheer rock faces, and the fort is the only thing resembling a tourist attraction. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on showing players the whole port though - at most the screen will just be up for a few seconds before switching to the actual 3D view again.

So I use it as a reminder of how claustrophobic life is in the age of sail (hence the deliberately limited perspectives).

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If you can't recognize the location in any way, we don't need the screens to be location-specific.
That's not a bad way to go about it, actually, since it'd save a lot of space and a lot of files.

Generic screens for all locations is what they did in Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales.
Instead of screenshots, they used paintings/concept art for the location screens as well.
But personally I found that quite dull,
since you'll get to see the same picture over-and-over again, wherever you go.

I do think the close-up detail is a good way; it could make a good addition to my "general overview" ones.
It's good to have more variety in the screens. As long as the style/quality is the same,
the angles and lighting and ships and characters in the scene can be completely varied between screens.
So we could have, for example, a general overview one for Willemstad port and one of your close-up ones for the town.

 

[carmenara]

It's hard to show AND the actual model AND make it look like a port,
because the town is on one side and the port on the other.
I still want to try a good angle of a screen taken FROM the deck of a ship.

 

[carmenara]

.

 

[zorglub]

Nice pictures for sure!

Pieter, theses screenshots remind me that we were not done with location lighting & weather... Big plain blue sky whith early sunrise lighting? Urg...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Hook fixed and finished the weather system and Screwface fixed the storms.
Not sure about the lighting though. At least the sun still rises and sets in the wrong direction.
SOMETHING has been done with lighting though, because a lot less COL files are used now.

 

[zorglub]

If I remember well, some .col files not being used anymore is part of Dr. Maturin original code simplification. It's nothing like actually playing with the ligthing console and setting new values, or making sure the current lighting values fit with sky textures or sun position.

I'm still convinced that the best option would be somehow to tell that lazy engine not to load heavy .col files and make the lighting by itself. But in order to do that, as far than I know, we need the source code...
That way, we would be able to enter a big number of lighting sets in the .ini file for different weather or moment of the day, while reducing the Build mod weight. I'm not sure whether it will increase the loading time soo much or not.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That would be cool, yes, and we KNOW the game engine CAN generate the lighting itself,
since it can generate COL files for its own.
Indeed it would be nice if we could try that once we've got our hands on that source code.

In the meantime, I suppose we could keep things as it is now,
though I'd like some COL files be made for a couple of locations that still have messed up lighting.
Though I wouldn't say no to that WIP mod of yours to make the sun go in the right direction.

 

[zorglub]

Pieter, you mean my sunrise/sunset mod? Current progress status is halted...
I honestly don't know when I'll work on this again ; it looks like I'm going to have a lot more of real-world work to do the following months.

So the sun position is wrong again? I don't remember what happen, I thought Dr Maturin had easily corrected this problem? Did Hook had to revert the changes, and if so, for what reasons?

... For what I remember, with our current lighting system we are not allowed to change sun position at land, that because of the .col and ground shadow files that won't match with the new sun position. Unless you want to remake all of them (obviously not). Morever, changing sun position at land would be hard to acheive because each place is oriented differently... For example, just pass the Redmond door between the harbor and the place where Henry the beggar is, looking carefully at the sun orientation.
You'll be suprised.

I'm not aware of Dr.Maturin change causing any trouble at sea - the problem was that he hadn't checked land locations (maybe his real identity was Davy Jones!?).

We could do some extra testing, making sure that all models in Sea mode do react to the sun we want to move and not to something else, and then editing the weather code to switch back the sun 180° at Sea only?


By the way - Snow White Sorrow, sorry for spamming your threat on alternative screen loadings -

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Maturin DID do something on sun direction? I thought that was still a problem.
But when I paid attention to it a week ago, it did look like it should.
So maybe this indeed IS a non-issue now.

As for the land locations, I don't much care about the lighting there anyway, as long as it looks acceptable.
Indeed the orientation of the locations changes all the time and locations are linked in completely impossible ways.
But you don't do any compass-point navigation ashore anyway, so it doesn't matter so much.