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Flag Locators Repair Project

Light frigates part 2 is on the FTP. It consists of the Crimson Blood and the French, Portagee, and English corvettes. Only the cursed corvette is left and I will post it later by itself, since it is only getting more ropes.
 
That camera height change was mentioned in the changelog! :whipa
Build 14 Beta 1 Patch 6:
- Code Updates:
. Camera height at sea on ship deck increased by Baste
Click to expand...

The PO_FastNavy is a ship Bartolomeu made for his quest.

Do you have a general overview of the locator-work that has been done recently?
The Lugger and Frigate/Corvette models have mostly been fixed for flag locators, right?
And then I think there's also some ships that have had their spankers fixed... :?
 
The 1st post has not been updated for a while.

I will provisionally call the Luggers and Corvettes good. I tested them to destruction. I guess it would be a good idea to just go through this thread and see what has been done. I did some work in another thread also. The English and European Barks were worked over except for yacht 1 & 2. Those two are a mess.

Spankers: The Heavy Brigs, Barks, Corvettes.
 
Ah yes, I should be updating the first post as we go along. I'll try to make a better job of that. :eek:ops
 
Pieter Boelen said:
That camera height change was mentioned in the changelog! :whipa
Click to expand...
Yes, I know, and I totally forgot about it. :modding
I think that, unfortunately, that change has been more of a hindrance to most ships than it has helped the minority which had camera issues in the first place.
What we do about it, I'm not sure. But I'd imagine that fixing the now-incorrect cameras will be a fair amount of work.

About the spankers, I'm going to be annoying and say "What if I can invert them with Maya?".
That's what we originally told modellers to do from now on, so that we don't have to use two models to make them behave properly.
I don't want to just replace Hylie's work on converting ships to use two models, seeing as he's done so many now.
However, if I can do this successfully, then it should save having to do the conversion for all the other ships. That's a big IF, mind you.
 
Just do it. :whipa Don't worry about me. Do some others first and then come back to the ones that are already done.


I have my own agenda that does not include spankers. The xebecs are common and have problems too. But, as stated pages ago, all that we do needs to be documented. I can't keep up with what I've done, much less anybody else. :j1

Speaking of which, has anyone tried the new corvettes? If they are indeed cured of the GA, then that means that the fix is pretty easy. Basically, there were too many cooks and they ruined the stew. It's like every ship has a different flag system.

About the camera, I have to sail every ship I work on and it would be really nice to be able to adjust the camera then. :nerbz
 
I you say so. :onya I'll try to start on the spankers once I've finished toying around with the Constitution for Legendary_Spider.

I haven't tried the corvettes yet, but I'll get them tomorrow. I can't say I'll have enough time to give each one a thorough test, so after the first two or three I'll assume the others are good. ;)
 
The corvettes all have exactly the same masts, sails, and rigging. The only difference between them is the deck and the paint job except for the Crimson Blood and the Fragata Latina. So, if one is good, then they all should be good.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
That camera height change was mentioned in the changelog! :whipa
Build 14 Beta 1 Patch 6:
- Code Updates:
. Camera height at sea on ship deck increased by Baste
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Do you know where in the code Baste changed this, that way the ship modellers could set it back to default and tune each ship they work on?(or if it is just txt file editing, i can add it to my to-do list)
 
I just found where Baste changed it. I don't know what the previous settings were yet, but I would like to be able to change it on a ship by ship basis because some are too low and some are too high.

http://forum.pirates...post__p__390452



17 minutes later: I changed Baste's settings from 1.8 thingies to 1.0 thingies. Then using GMViewer to see what I was doing and TOOL to change the values I moved the camera for the corvette I'm sailing from 4.5 to 4.3. Then went sailing. I like this setting and will change all of the corvettes and their variants to this unless someone wants a different setting. But you have to let me know what you think. Those screenies show one crewman walking from one side of the ship to the other.
 
We can undo the camera height change or put it a bit higher than before but lower than it is now.
 
It looks like Baste raised the minimum height to almost as high as the maximum height. Not knowing what the old setting was I lowered it a bunch and then adjusted it in TOOL. It's funny what a small change can do. Before the main sails seemed to be too low. Now they are quite high off the deck. Since it only takes 10 minutes to adjust now I vote we lower the minimum and do it ship by ship. If anyone runs across a ship that is wrong, complain! The squeaky wheel gets greased.

I've just been sailing around all day and it has been nearly impossible to get a mast knocked off in combat. I got broadsided and sunk by a class 1 manowar and never lost a mast.
 
Hylie Pistoff said:
It looks like Baste raised the minimum height to almost as high as the maximum height. Not knowing what the old setting was I lowered it a bunch and then adjusted it in TOOL. It's funny what a small change can do. Before the main sails seemed to be too low. Now they are quite high off the deck. Since it only takes 10 minutes to adjust now I vote we lower the minimum and do it ship by ship. If anyone runs across a ship that is wrong, complain! The squeaky wheel gets greased.
Click to expand...

yeah i think the experiment with the global setting ended up being a bit hit and miss. Looking at the code i would have guessed at the default probably being 1.0 as well(rather than curent 1.8 ). And as you are going through a bunch of ships for GA issues, it will be best to do it as you say. It might take a while, but we could always have a thread for reporting odd/difficult camera heights, so players can post those ships details there and then we have a to-do list for that? Anyway i like the screen shot of your corvette, you can look your crew in the eye again! ;)
 
Yes, it looks like I will be starting over again to make sure all of the cameras are ok. I'm wondering how many of the ships I posted on the FTP will become obsolete? :8q The light frigates need to be updated at least. I raised the camera on the Carrack last night.


On re considering, I have decided to break this down into small parts. First I am going to do all of the flags on all ships, making them all use the same system. That should change things from which ships don't have the GA to which few still do, making it easier to sort things out. I have found at least three different flag naming systems, and the ships will be changed to one simple system that seems to work. The work that has already been done is making a difference.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Try putting this line in the console:
Code: 
LogIt("Played ship type = " + pchar.ship.type);
Pressing F12 should then tell you the ID of the ship you're currently sailing.

Just in case there's still any confusion, here's a short summary of how the mod is supposed to work:

ALL sets of flag locators MUST have an accompanying set of penn locators in the same model file.
The penn locators do not need to be in the exact same coordinates as the flag ones,
so you can resize both sets according to their type seperately.

In ships_init.c, the number of refShip.Flags lines must correspond with the number of flags to display on the model.
In other words, this should be half of the number of flag and penn locators combined.
The number of flag and penn locators in the models should be equal.
You can decide in what order you want the flags/pennants by setting FLAG_ENSIGN or FLAG_PENNANT accordingly.
Note that this can require some trial-and-error because the masts in ships_init.c do not always correspond with the model files.
Personally I like to have an ensign on the main mast and stern and have pennants on all other masts.

If, for whatever reason, the penn locators cannot be added, none of the ship's model files must have penn locators.
The ship will then need this line in ships_init.c: refShip.Flags.NoPennants = true;
All refShip.Flags lines must then be of the FLAG_ENSIGN type.
Click to expand...




The Black Pearl, all versions, has only flag locators. There are no penns. How do they work? :wacko:
 
Here's the original values of the camera settings in SEA_AI\AICameras.c:
Code: 
	SeaDeckCamera.h_max = 2.0;
SeaDeckCamera.h_min = 0.5;
SeaDeckCamera.h_step = 0.1;
SeaDeckCamera.h_def = 1.6;
I could only open the Black Pearl mast3.gm file, but that one DOES have penn locators. :shock
 
I'm doing them alphabetically and just finished the French ships and about to get into the Frigates. All I am doing on this pass is getting all of the ships using the same system. It looks like the earliest and the latest ships are pretty darn good. It's the ones created in ohh 2005-7 that are all over the place. But it is the imported ships that are the worst. They do not have penns.

Ah. About the Black Pearl. I have Black Pearl, Black Pearl1 and Black Pearl 2 that I have looked at so far. BP does have penns on mast3, but BP2&3 did not. I added them just copying the flag dimensions. That is what I am doing to all ships without penns. I have also been stopping and playing POTC periodically with no problems so far.

Thank you for those camera settings. I have done nothing so far but look at them occasionally. Some ships are good, some are high, and some are low. I will make another pass and fix the worst offenders later. One step at a time. :hmm

Hehe. My thinking has been evolving and the stuff I posted on what, the 1st page are obsolete. It is much simpler now with no numbers used and seems to work well. During playtesting today my fleet was leaving Guadaloupe and both a fluyt of war 34g and a Spiegelretourschip crashed into the cliffs and demasted themselves at the same time. Lotsa GA! The fluyt was one of mine, so later I checked it out and it did not cause any GA. It already had the good system installed too, so I'm betting that the SPschip is the one needing work.

None of this is hard, but it is very tedious and time consuming. It's a good thing I'm retired and have the time or this would never get done.:whipa
 
:bow

You, sir, are doing some awesome work that is much valued. Yours and Armada's efforts here are making a huge difference to one of the biggest most obvious bugs in the game :onya

Actually your remark earlier about not seeing many falling masts or GA issues now, got me thinking. Since i put the patch 7 wip in the game, i've seen NO graphical anomolies during the battles!! I could have been lucky in relation to the ships involved maybe, but even the GA effect that would happen in the third person perspective and centre on the Luggers central(iirc) mast seems conspicuous by it's abscence? So whatever you guys are doing on this score is making a difference already :D

In terms of the camera heights on deck, a jump from the now known 0.5 min(cheers Pieter) to the current 1.8 min is quite a jump! i'm using 1.0 and on the starting Lugger it does still seem high compared to the crew and even the views over the side of the ship. I'll set it back to 0.5 and see how that looks. This is the global setting, to make it clear from the individual settings we may need set on a number of ships where that default created some problems in terms of players view etc.
 
Were the fixed Luggers part of P7 WIP? No. My P7 WIP file is dated 7-7-2011 while my Luggers 3 flags zip is dated 7-10-2011. Have you installed that zap file that Captain Havoc found? That makes a very large difference. Even a ship that I know delivers bad GA like the NL_Batavia1 does fairly well now. Until it sinks. Then the GA gets bad until it finally goes away.

I left off at "I" last night, so will probably get to the luggers this afternoon or evening. If it needs lowering more, then so be it. It might be a matter of adjusting the height in TOOL. It's really easy. I look at the hull in GMViewer and find the "camera" locator and note how it sits in relation to the hand rail. Then go to TOOL and change the "Y" numbers a tenth at a time. There is one huge ship that has the camera set at the waterline!

The luggerVML does look high.
 
I spoke too soon. I did get some GA stuff today, but i also did see a couple of ships lose their masts(although the GA stuff didn't appear related this time). I was sailing out of Port Royale in direct sail mode and a couple of spanish ships had been unlucky to get spawned inside the harbour area next to the fort. One(a lugger) was sunk(no GA), the other a bark had three masts(well two masts and it's bowsprit) shot off and eventually was sunk(no GA). As soon as i raised sails on my starting lugger, as the ships were not a danger to me and i needed to leave harbour, i got some good old GA, centered around my central mast, about two thirds the height up the mast and spreading out over the screen. At some point i halued in my sails and the GA stopped, but i did this a few times so am not sure if that is a trigger on the Luggers or not?

The bump.zap(iirc) file i have installed, but that was only last night and i've been noticing a lack of GA for the last few days gaming :shrug

But whatever, it feels like progress is being made on the GA front. Oh i did arrive at an island, go into direct sail(from map navigation mode(i was chasing storms!)) and get a single beep from my computer(as opposed to it's speakers). I've seen that mentioned before, in relation to some ship i think, so that ship still does the beep thing.
 
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