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Some Suggestions for a better Build

C

Capitan

Landlubber
Well, i've been thinking <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/poet.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":hmm" border="0" alt="poet.gif" /> and pondering <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/modding.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":modding" border="0" alt="modding.gif" /> and reading up <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/bookish.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":mm" border="0" alt="bookish.gif" /> and I think i've got some good suggestions for the next Build.

-Navy: Not Letter of Marque, an actual ability to land in a fort, talk to the the Fort Commander and join the Navy of a Nation. British, French, Portugese, Spanish, whatever. You'd get a new outfit befitting for your rank(Lieutenant, Post Captain, Warrant Officer, Midshipman, Commodore, ect) and HMS or the equivalent would be added in front of you ship's name.

-Muskets: I know we already have muskets in the Build but they need some tweaking. First of all, a Musket should be a primary weapon which acts as both sword and pistol. You also need to make a musket animation so that it doesn't look weird like it does in game at this time. When you attack normally, you stab with bayonet or bash with butt and when you hit the 'Fire Pistol' key you fire your musket. That's how a musket should work

-Regiments: Similar to the Navy system, there should be an army barracks in every town where you can purchase commmands for soldier regiments, arm them with swords, muskets, grenades ect, name them and give them commanders. It could work on a system similar to the ship system, I think, with you being able to preside over four regiments of infantry. With regiments and ships you could be able to launch a coordinated land-sea assault on a enemy fort.

-Fort Command: When you capture an enemy fort, you should really capture it. Claim it for your nation and then become Governor of it. Being able to add buildings, fortifications, ect to your colony. Being able to assign a garrison, like say, If I capture Douwesen for the British, I could assign two regiments of infantry, 1 battleship and two frigates to guard my colony whilst i'm out on my errands

And that's all... for now.
 
I think that the head model of nathiel must be put on the uniforms. So you have a English commander suit with nathiel head on it, or natiels head with french uniform, so you can slip oxbay in that way, other wise they dont believe you.
 
-Expanded Land Areas: A requisite for the regiments. To accomodate the size of your regiments, the size of land areas in town and in the jungles will have to be dramatically expanded.

-Orders: You'll need to be able to give your regiments orders. 'Hold Position', 'Dig In', 'Set up defenses', 'Bring up artillery', 'Advance in Line', 'Advance in Column', 'Bayonet Charge', 'Volley Fire' things like that.

-Bayonets: An addon to muskets. When you have a musket, you should be able to buy a bayonet to put on your musket. This changes the normal musket melee attack(bash) to a stab.

-Land Sieges: When you have acquired enough regiments, you should have to ability to lead an overland assault on the enemy fort. You'll land your ships at some point on the island, lead your army to the fort and attack. First you must bombard the enemy town to bring the walls down. This is when the bring up artillery order will be used, you can use 6lb, 12lb or mortars to bombard a wall. When the wall is down you get to lead your soldiers into the breach and engage enemy soldiers in fierce hand-to-hand combat throughout the town. When you reach the townhall, you have claimed to the town for your nation's glory and become it's governor.
 
Goodness gracious me! You really want to turn this into a complete navy strategy game don't you? I do reckon it'd be nice to add these kind of features, but somebody needs to code it. And there aren't too many people around still coding for PotC, so I don't know if this would ever happen. Also: The PotC engine has some limitations. For example, getting muskets to work properly will be virtually impossible. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad.gif" />
 
Not a contemporary strategy game like Age of Empires or Rome: Total War. More like a squad strategy/action game. Your regiments are like squads like you see in SOCOM and such(even though I hate SOCOM, I can see the merit in a squad system) with you being able to give your regiments some very basic orders to fufill your objectives. I think it'd make PotC a much better game. As for muskets, they just stupid the way they work now. So either have them working correctly or get rid of them altogether. That's my philosophy.
 
You can easily get rid of them if you like: Just remove their entries from initItems.c and then reinitialize your game (I button). I personally don't like removing features from th game, though, so I won't remove it from the modpack. You can do it for yourself though.
 
-Beat to Quarters: You should have the ability, during the first few minutes of a battle to beat to quarters. This should generally improve everything about your ship. Turning is faster, controls are more responsive, cannons reload faster and are more accurate. For a short time of course.

-Marines: Similar to the land regiments idea, you should be able to recruit Marines for your ship. These men, armed with muskets(if you can get them to work properly), bayonets and swords replace your normal boarding crew and are far stronger and more powerful than normal boarders. To balance this out, you should lose marines overtime and have to recruit more. With Marine contingents being very expensive.

-Larger Ships: I don't know why, but the ships just seem to small in PoTC. The only ship that feels big enough is the Man-O-War and that is of course a massive ship. So all sea locations and the ships should be increased in size a bit.

-More detailed ships: You guys need to add all the ropes and junk you'd see on a real ship of that time. The decks that we have now just look empty.

-More crew: When you're out at sea, you should see more crew on you ship. Atleast three men per cannon on the top deck. Doesn't look nearly enough as it is.

-Livelier crew: When you look at the little sprites of your crew, they should actually look like they're doing something. When an enemy ship rakes you deck with grapeshot, you should see the little guys falling down, guys pulling their buddies to safety, officers giving orders, if you have marines you should see the marines standing in lines or firing muskets at the enemy, ect, ect.

-Sharpshooters: Similar to Marines, you should be able to recruit sharpshooters which are little guys that sit in the Crow's Nest and snipe upon enemy crewmembers. You should see a little animation of this when you're in battle.

Yeah, I just watched Master and Commander so i've got alot of ideas.
 
To Capitan:

Your ideas are nice, but I'm not sure if they're possible to make. Once I've tried to change small people onboard the Black Pearl to skeletons and I think it was impossible. Larger decks will kill performance and thegame will sloooooowwwwwww dooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn (did you tried to fight from MoW's deck?).

pirate_kk
 
I don't want every ship to be atleast the size of the MoW, just a little bit bigger, to give you that sense of scale.
 
more like the size of the battleship will work great.

Lord Nelson was killed by a Sharpshooter um yeah that would be a great mod. but it would never work on my pc.
 
hey, im still alive and kicking, thank you very much! hehehe.
love the ideas, but as everyone else said: more people on the deck will probably really slow the game down to the point that its nigh unplayable, new musket animations are virtually impossible [otherwise i would have a nice group of musketeers following me where ever i go], bigger decks wont work because of the work on models that would have to be done [besides, this is a pirate game, not a naval stratagy, your supposed to have small ships, thats what pirates used], and i think you've already seen the amount of response and praise Inzane has been getting being the first person to actually get a scratch made model into the game, and even that took about a year if not more!
as for Thomas The Terror's idea of nathaniel's head on military skins, if it actually does make it into the game, people are gonna start asking for different heads for all the ones with Nathaniel's head, to suit their liking. if whoever makes them is capable of handling all that, then sure, id love to see a specialized set of skins for a single character head.
 
Thought I'd jump in here because I love griping about things that should be. The musket thing (while cool) would require reworking on a major scale I think. I do like the bit about marines and land fortifications though.

My wants are silly little things really, just for color:

1) Color! You should be able to have your ship painted how you like. Have each ship have two or three sections that could be done indapendantly. Customization is fun!

2) Name plates! Put the ship's name on the back, it would be nifty.

3) Have a few bow statues (can't think of propper name) that you caould buy. Mermaids, devils, fish, etc.

4) Bulk weapons purchace (for boarding parties) that go directly into the ship's locker. The inventory system is week for the number of items available as is.

5) SOMETHING to make the inventory easier to use, like a subcatagory where you can dump all the goofy stuff that give bonuses but aren't used directly. Also being able to re-arrange items would be sweet.

A head selector at the start that uses it no matter what outfit you wear. Skin tones and gender would need to be delt with somehow as well then I guess but couldn't be too hard.

6) MISSIONS, MISSIONS, MISSIONS.
 
For a lot of your ideas, we need to add 3D model parts to ships/characters. I do theoretically know how to do that (add a model on top of a locator), but I don't know how to actually do it, because the code that puts the blade and gun on a locator is hardcoded, which means we can't access that particular code.

Bulk weapon purchase is a pretty good idea. Maybe we'll be able to figure out something for that... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":rolleyes:" border="0" alt="rolleyes.gif" />

Better inventory would be nice as well, but isn't easy. I don't think it's impossible though.

A head selector would require all heads to be added to all models. Not impossible, but a lot of work that I don't think anyone will want to do... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" />

New quests would be good. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheeky" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />
 
Missions is the prime thing to get the game to another level I think, above and beyond all else. What would be sick is if anyone knows enough (and possesses the time) to make a seperate mission generator that can be made to just add them and dump them in. There was an old Mac shareware program called Escape Volosity that had a plug-in system and a few such programs that allowed people to make missions (and other things like items, etc) and then stick it in a special folder. I made one called Full-Fledged Bastards (space pirates, baby!) and added hundreds which was well recieved.

Something that would allow you to select character models and items and put them in locations (or add missions to established settings like shops, yards, governers, etc) and add the nessessary dialog texts with there possibile response strings. You could even make them simple do or don't missions but with progressive dialog exchanges along the way, perhaps with "yes" and "no" strings at certain points.

This way people could (with no special knowledge at all) add the things by the hundreds and they could all be posted here and reviewed by others, etc. This would add unlimmited gameplay to what is a very cool engine. If anyone knows how to add missions without screwing the mod and can explain in in VERY simple terms to me I'd be willing to add them by the score! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheers" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" />
 
<!--quoteo(post=145847:date=Apr 18 2006, 02:20 AM:name=Jason Maffettone)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jason Maffettone @ Apr 18 2006, 02:20 AM) [snapback]145847[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Thought I'd jump in here because I love griping about things that should be. The musket thing (while cool) would require reworking on a major scale I think. I do like the bit about marines and land fortifications though.

My wants are silly little things really, just for color:

1) Color! You should be able to have your ship painted how you like. Have each ship have two or three sections that could be done indapendantly. Customization is fun!

2) Name plates! Put the ship's name on the back, it would be nifty.

3) Have a few bow statues (can't think of propper name) that you caould buy. Mermaids, devils, fish, etc.

4) Bulk weapons purchace (for boarding parties) that go directly into the ship's locker. The inventory system is week for the number of items available as is.

5) SOMETHING to make the inventory easier to use, like a subcatagory where you can dump all the goofy stuff that give bonuses but aren't used directly. Also being able to re-arrange items would be sweet.

A head selector at the start that uses it no matter what outfit you wear. Skin tones and gender would need to be delt with somehow as well then I guess but couldn't be too hard.

6) MISSIONS, MISSIONS, MISSIONS.
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1.) Most likley not going to happen, alot of the engine is hardcoded and the textures sort of to say is hardcoded into the models.

2.) Also most likley not going to happen, would be nice yes.

3.) Might be possible, for things like that we would need models to be attached to locators, i already hatched the idea a while ago that if this is found to be possible to create a cannon mod beyond beleif of realism.

The rest are kind of pluasible, choosing skin tones and gender and all that IS possible but it would eat data like mad, one could make one model with all variations and then one could work out a system to select models depending on the options, but as i said, it would probally not be liked because of the amount of data consumed of multiple models and textures, and again textures are hardcoded into the models.
 
<!--quoteo(post=141536:date=Mar 9 2006, 07:24 AM:name=Pieter Boelen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pieter Boelen @ Mar 9 2006, 07:24 AM) [snapback]141536[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
You can easily get rid of them if you like: Just remove their entries from initItems.c and then reinitialize your game (I button).
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You could also just set the rarity of Muskets, Musketoons, and BLunderbusses VERY high, and set them so they can't be bought.


<!--quoteo(post=145847:date=Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM:name=Jason Maffettone)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jason Maffettone @ Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM) [snapback]145847[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
3) Have a few bow statues (can't think of propper name) that you caould buy. Mermaids, devils, fish, etc.
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They are called Figureheads.
<!--quoteo(post=145847:date=Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM:name=Jason Maffettone)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jason Maffettone @ Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM) [snapback]145847[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
A head selector at the start that uses it no matter what outfit you wear. Skin tones and gender would need to be delt with somehow as well then I guess but couldn't be too hard.
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(Not that I agree with or encourage, or, for that matter, like this lifestyle) That would be wierd to the utmost degree to have cross-dressers.
 
<!--quoteo(post=145847:date=Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM:name=Jason Maffettone)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jason Maffettone @ Apr 17 2006, 08:20 PM) [snapback]145847[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
A head selector at the start that uses it no matter what outfit you wear. Skin tones and gender would need to be delt with somehow as well then I guess but couldn't be too hard.
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I'm afraid that <i>would</i> be hard. Hard to the point of being impossible. You can't generate these character skins ingame, so you'd have to make all variations manually and put it into the modpack. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/piratesing.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":shock" border="0" alt="piratesing.gif" />
 
Moralistic issue aside, the last royal governor of New York was a cross-dresser. In Tamminy Hall has his official portrate (in an elegant gown) hanging to this day. History is fun! (and disturbing...)
 
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