Some questions and observations concerning the Combined Mod v3.2

[blackmane]

I played Coas excessively in 09 and I quit because I got furious when the game crashed every time I actually went to the city and none of the fixes in the forum would work.
But it is a great game and I reinstalled it on my new computer (and cheated to see if I could go to the city ). I am glad to see that there is still mod development going on and I love the combined mod so far, finally I will conquer the whole Caribbean. There are just a few issues.
Firstly I understand that there is a bug with replicating cannons. I had that bug on my blue bird. In the front, there are two culverines that I can't remove, but I would actually like to put cannons there and it puts additional culverines in the cargo hold. Is there a workaround? I only found the bug in the Forum, not how to squash it.
The second thing is, that the pirate shipyard improvements don't work for the newly added cannon calibers. I spend a fortune to update my Arabella from 36lbs cannons to 42lbs (at least I hoped it would be 42lbs) but it stayed the same at 36lbs. Someone could look into this unfortunately my coding knowledge is very small.
The third thing is more gameplay concerned. The crew salary seems to be higher than I remember. I pay 42.633 pieces of eight for a measly crew of 208 men. Was it always that high? I fear, this time I won't be getting the Soley Royal... And yes, I do meet the navigation requirements for my ship. (Perhaps it is because of Admiral difficutly?)
The other things are minor. I don't like the female pirate model you encounter in boarding actions. She is half naked and has giant boobs and looks a bit anime or cartoonish. Was she always there? I need a second install just to check things like that. The katana as a medium weapon (although it doesn't look like a katana...) looks odd and pirates and katanas don't fit together in my opinion. Another thing I would simply like to know, is if there is a Ship that can mount 48lbs cannons (i remember the limit being 42lbs, so are those bigger ones just trade goods?). And what is with the Ship type Shnyava? Is that misspelled? I can't even guess what that should mean. And the sailors walking on deck are kind of glitching out of their ship.
I just need help with the cannon thing...

But there are so many good things! Ships! Jack Sparrow in the Peter Blood quest, pieces of eight and so on. Is there a new release scheduled soon?

 

[Luke159]

First off we're happy you like CMV3.2 and yes we are working on a new mod but as to when that will be released i can't say its still very much in developement. I won't go into detail but we have fixed several very annoying bugs and improived gameplay in some way's.

A question for youy, did you install the manual mod or exe version?

If you installed the manual version then you will need to install both the patch and the update, Fixes 1.0 and Cannon Upgrade Fix 1.0 which you can find HERE

I'll look into the Bluebird but i'm sure the guns was never changed for her so if the cannon bug does happen on her then its happened in vanilla too.

Ok for some reason the Blue Bird's guns was changed, look for Age of Pirates 2\Program\Ships == Ships_init.C and find the following ship (press F3 to open the search box in the file and put the following ship name in and press enter) SHIP_XebekVML now look at the gunns allication in CMV3.2 it is as follows.

	refShip.CannonsQuantity		= 22;
refShip.rcannon 				= 9;
refShip.lcannon 				= 9;
refShip.fcannon 				= 2;
refShip.bcannon 				= 2;

Change this to read as follows.

	refShip.CannonsQuantity		= 22;
refShip.rcannon 				= 8;
refShip.lcannon 				= 8;
refShip.fcannon 				= 4;
refShip.bcannon 				= 2;

Go into options and bottom right corner press reinit, unfortunatelly it doesn't fix your ship but it will fix the Blue Bird but because that ship can't be generated apart from for that quest which you only get offered once your ship isn't updated. To get around this go into Age of Pirates 2\Program == _mod_on_off.H and look for thed following line of code changing it from Off to ON.

#define MOD_BETTATESTMODE			"Off"  // On -DEV version; Test - TST ver; Off - relize

Should look as follows.

#define MOD_BETTATESTMODE			"ON"  // On -DEV version; Test - TST ver; Off - relize

Now start COAS and load your game, use the reinit button again to be on the safe side. Your controls will be messed up so whilest in options hit the reset to default bellow the controls configuration window, this will give you control over everything again. You can set what the controls was but you have to do them manually. Now open the debug window by pressing F11. Bottom right you will see a tab open that and check the tab for beta testing second from the bottom. Go to the shipyard and look at the ships avialable, you should see all the ships in the game listed now. Blue Bird is towards the bottom so scroll down, purchase the Blue Bird selling the messed up one in the process. Turn the beta testing off in the same way you turned it on by pressing F11 and opening the tab in the bottom right etc. Now you have the updated Blue Bird and can do what you want.

Alternativelly if you do not wish to do this you can add a entery into the shiputilities.C file for the Blue Bird to be randomly generated at sea and at shipyards.

 

[Officerpuppy]

The female pirate is a recent addition. She was not present before 3.X. The model was in the game files since the days when the mod was called the JSCM and the CM as we know it now did not exist. It was added in to add a little variety to the same old faces we've seen since JSCM and Vanilla.

The weapon pictures are mixed up in 3.2 I believe so the Katana probably has the wrong picture. Also it's a very rare weapon so you shouldn't see many pirates with it at all. You do bring up an interesting idea, perhaps it should be a light weapon.

 

[blackmane]

Thanks, that did the trick. I have the manual version, I like to see what i do
Indeed, it was the cannons
refShip.CannonsQuantity = 22;
refShip.rcannon = 9;
refShip.lcannon = 9;
refShip.fcannon = 2;
refShip.bcannon = 2;
that were wrong. I have the "CMV3.2 Fixes 1.0.7z" file and in there is also this cannon layout of the Bluebird. I will change it at once.

[img=http://www.abload.de/thumb/katana7oe8.jpg]

That is the katana, looks like a rapier with a flamberge blade

 

[blackmane]

So, I have been playing for quite a while and I have a ton of new complains
I am trying to sort this.

- The ship "Black Angel" (the one looking like the salamander in black) has a lifeboat on its deck, that lifeboat is completely white without texture (I first thought it should be white like the masts of the constitution, but I think someone forgot to apply a texture to the boat)

- The ship "Mermaid Grief" has the cannon problem. It has 19 cannons on each side, but the cannons on the left side can't be removed

- The "Heavy Warship" seems to be really heavy because its first row of cannonports is underwater. (this should be easy to fix, I think it is simply because of the "refship.SubSeaDependWeight" parameter, reducing that would fix it i think)

- Several minor issues with the crew on deck being incredibly buggy on some ships or some ships like the nightmare seemingly don't have lights at night. If someone says he can fix such issues, I would volunteer to invest some time to systematically test all ships ingame and I would make a better list. Some Ships have strange overpowered statistics like a boarding crew of 300 people on a class 5 ship.

- The way ships are generated from worldmap to 3D sailing map is not optimal. Punitive Squadrons always only have the ship "Salamander" in them. I think we have enough fast Class 4 ships to allow a bit more variety here.

- The ships "Battle Manowar" and "Heavy Manowar" don't seem to be generated at all. I am at the moment hunting for class 1 ships by attacking big military squadrons and all I get are light and normal Manowar (I quicksaved right before one of those encounters and reloaded about 40 times. Only light and normal Manowar). Or is this done deliberatly and you only see those in the "Gold Fleet" or in other really big fleets?

- Some ships should be more limited. I think the Black Pearl (and the nightmare for example) should be Pirate Nation only to give the pirates some distinct ships. I don't like seeing the Flying Dutchman in military squadrons (although I got a laugh out of it because I saw it first in a dutch squadron). It should be quest only (and shipyard for those without realistic ship purchase). This should be easy, I already removed the Peter Blood Frigate from shipyards and random encounters

- The FDM sails should be remade, I think they look horrible. (pleeeeaaaase, someone, retexture the whole ship with normal wood texture and perhaps Black Pearl sails, at least the uncursed version)

- I have a problem with the quest officer Danielle Sheppard. She has no picture in the officer selection and none in the fighter pictures on the left side of the screen. If you give her a ship she has the captain picture of the red haired chick (I think it is Arabella Smith) so I suppose something went awry there when the new character was added. Perhaps it is only some mislinking in the files and can be very easy corrected.
(I think in general the quest officers could be reworked to make them a bit more eyecandy, the musketoon guy still looks like the vanilla english soldiers and he should get three more personal perks, he has clever shot whitout the shootist and advanced defence art without basic and perhaps something like multitasking)

- The moneylender gives a ridicolous high interest rate of 6% per month, the moneylender in st. johns already owes me 40 million pieces of eight, in two years that would be around 160 million pieces of eight, the billion would be reached in another three years and some years later he would owe me the spanish kingdom plus the english crown treasure and he would pay it yeah, that is interest and compound interest the pirate way (and a quick exercise to show the problems of the economy ) (to robber: "Curses! Villain! I only have 12.642.743 pieces of eight", I tried to give 5 million to a beggar and he outright refused calling me a drunk madman just wanted to help him out of misery....)

- I miss fighting in the ship during boarding action, but that was potc only as I recall it.

I think there were more minor issues, but that should cover pretty much every one of my finds I hope I don't scare you with long posts and bad grammar.

 

[ReiAyanami]

HAHAHA I enjoyed your post!
Well, I also want to know why some ships are so often encountered, especially old POTC models, unlike the rest.
I have come with a solution, writing this line in ships_init.c that prevents them from spawning altogether.
refship.CanEncounter = false;

After I did that in the 10-12 such "spam ships" the variety has improved geometrically. Don't know why this is, but it seems that it worked for me.

 

[blackmane]

I believe there has to be a more elegant solution, I am just not sure what it is.
Looking in the encounters init I see the line (for the punitive squadron:

makeref(rEnc, EncountersTypes[ENCOUNTER_TYPE_PUNITIVE_SQUADRON]);
rEnc.Type = ENCOUNTER_WAR;
rEnc.MinRank = 10;
rEnc.MaxRank = 1000;
rEnc.worldMapShip = "galleon";
Enc_AddShips(rEnc, "War", 2, 4);
Enc_ExcludeNation(rEnc, PIRATE);

Enc_AddClasses(rEnc, 7, 0, 0, 3, 6);
Enc_AddClasses(rEnc, 1000,0, 0, 3, 6);

The last lines are interesting. It spawns 2 to 4 ships and it will never be nationwise pirate. That works. And then I believe it should add warships from class 3 to class 6.
And somehow it seems to apply only to the ship salamander, those last two lines. If I rule the salamander out, it gives me an error message on the top of the screen and every time I attack a punitive squadron, I am transported to the empty sea in 3D sailing mode. This starts to give me a headache.

On an unrelated sidenote something seems to be wrong with the npc pirate captains, your competitors. No one ever tries to give me a business proposition anymore and I seemingly can't talk any of them into joining me. They only sit around in taverns and do nothing, not even stealing sailors anymore.

Edit: The numbers 7 to 1000 are references to the ship.h file. Still it doesn't make sense why some ships are not spawned and why 7 to 1000 is hellbent on being 78.

 

[inquisiteur]

I was wondering...playing as merchantman I find odd the fact that with a Caravel fully loaded, on the global map, pirates can't catch me up (we all sail at the same speed regardless the load on board right ?)

Might be difficult for computer ships, however for player ship maybe it would be best if the whole convoy has the speed of the slowest ship ?

I have also noticed that there are 2 different computer controlled ship icons, maybe one should be faster than another ? (one for lone ships, and another for convoys) ?

Right now the only way to get caught by pirates or an opponent on the global map is to fast forward, have the wind against you, and just don't notice that a convoy is rushing your way....

In other terms, in an immense majority of case a player can choose to avoid or not a battle from the global map. If you are sailing an emtpy sloop ok, but not a fully loaded pinnace....

Also, there are still too much ships encounters (especially pirates) at see, even set on "few" it should be reduced by half I think.

 

[modernknight1]

I agree with everything you say. All your ideas are very good Mate! Implementing them is the challenge. There are not enough of us on the mod team. The folks we do have, often have work/life/computer issues that make ongoing development slow. Some people just get bored after a while or find something more interesting to work on and move on. We often experience intense periods of fervent activity where tons of work gets done, and more often experience a lull where nothing happens for weeks and sometimes even months.

Bottom line: We need more people. Anyone who has some code or modeling skill and wants to be on the mod team let us know. I'm going to release a short story soon on my blog and use it as a new promotional for our COAS and POTC mods and Pirates Ahoy!, so maybe it'll attract some new talent.

One observation I will give you is that it is a lot harder to outrun those other tactical ships icons in global mode when you play on higher settings like corsair. They catch me all the time.

As it stands now we have no plans to upgrade 3.2 any further. We are spending all our time on the Gentlemen of Fortune mod. The amount of new content is significant. We just have too many significant bugs to allow release yet. SOON we hope!

MK

 

[inquisiteur]

Thanks for the feedback modernknight.

Honestly I always thought about helping in some way.

I have some knowledge in coding C++ with visual c++ 2010. Might be somewhere between beginner and intermediate.

Coded one software using the pdcurses library and right now taking about an hour a day to code something in Allegro 5.

Bottomline I am thinking about trying to help now that I am a bit more comfortable with this whole thing. But so far I have been involved in softwares having 3 or 4 separate headers at most....

Here we thousands of lines of code, I guess there's some kind of coding tutorial somewhere ?

Gonna check the forum see where I can stand.