ship lights

[simking]

I was wondering is it possible to have ship lanterns like in Age of sail 2?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Sorry, but the POTC engine does not support them.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

There was one idea I once had, namely to place the particle effects on ships similarly to the steamship effects.
However, my tests on this have proven well enough for me that it isn't going to work. Problem is that the coordinates have to be compensated for roll, jaw and pitch and that becomes far too complex for me.

The steamship code was difficult enough to figure out and even that now has a really weird line in there to "fix" something that shouldn't even need to be fixed.
Namely, if you'll notice, the faster your steamship goes, the further behind the smoke stack the steam will come out.
Now for the smoke, I managed to fake it so it isn't too obvious. But it'll REALLY stand out when we try to use it for a light particle.

 

[Post Captain]

You can take solace in the fact that many ships wouldn't have left their lanterns on every night. Many later vessels didn't even have lanterns.

 

[Armada]

While we're on this subject, I was digging around some very old threads a while ago to see what had been tried.
One thing that seems to have been missed is the potential to somehow use a modified version of the Incan artifact effect, used at the end of the Sea Hawk quest.
See this thread for details (warning: contains very messed up formatting from 2004!).

I don't think anyone has ever tried messing around with this idea, so maybe it's worth looking into? I've no idea how plausible it is, though.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Now you mention it, that one DOES follow the ship around, doesn't it? If I can find the code responsible for that, perhaps indeed we CAN do something.
Good thinking!

 

[Armada]

The code that spawns it was mentioned in the other thread:

    CreateEntity(&artifact, "artifact");
    LayerAddObject(SEA_REALIZE, &artifact, -1);

I've tried it through the console, and it works straight away without reloading.

It's a very mysterious thing, because it's hard to tell how it works. It always spawns towards the ship's stern, but it doesn't use a locator, and all ships are different...
It probably has to do with 'artifact.dll' in the MODULES folder, which must mean it's no ordinary particle effect.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Indeed. So how can we swap that with a different effect? We may be able to HEX-edit it to use a different effect.
But then how would we define WHERE on the ship it appears???

 

[Armada]

Defining its position is the main issue. The obvious solution would be to use locators, but the question is: how?
It must be possible to create a new locator type for this, because the 'penn' ones were added, though I'm aware there were several DLLs created for them.

Is there any chance we could take a look at the code in CoAS, or even adapt it to work for PotC?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

CoAS code? Probably not; I think that's engine stuff.

Locators would only work if you could make the game read the coordinates AND use them. But it already goes wrong on the "reading" part; I can't figure out how to make the game do it.

 

[Armada]

CoAS code? Probably not; I think that's engine stuff.

Does it not have separate DLL files in a similar way to PotC? I'm saying that, if the lighting stuff is (mostly) contained in a DLL file, we could potentially adapt it for PotC.
Or rather, someone who knows about DLL files could adapt it.

Locators would only work if you could make the game read the coordinates AND use them. But it already goes wrong on the "reading" part; I can't figure out how to make the game do it.

Can we not find out how, for example, the fireplace locators are used on ships, and then figure things out from there?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I already tried looking into those fireplaces before. Unfortunately, they're also DLL affairs, which are definitely beyond me.

 

[Armada]

Hmm. Perhaps we could ask Amplificar to look into it once he's finished with the Intel graphics and heap corruption fixes.
He certainly seems to know how to manipulate DLL files to great effect.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

True, that.