• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


    Visit our website www.piratehorizons.com to quickly find download links for the newest versions of our New Horizons mods Beyond New Horizons and Maelstrom New Horizons!

The Kraken??

M

Morthon

Powder Monkey
Hi,

I was wondering. Could it be possible to add the Kraken to the game?? I am a modeler myself and I'm currently working on a model of the Kraken, I only miss proper textures and I'm still practicing realistic tentacle animation. But...are there animation posibilities for this. Like it just sits there while it's tentacles slither around the ship, and that ship is just slowly taking damage over time and "dragged into the depths"...eventually. I just wanna know if there's a possibility of doing this. I was thinking about making a invisible invincible ship or so and have the animated kraken model move along with the invisible ship and the "ship" itself move to zero range automatically and then just sits there at zero range while the kraken model would be moving it's tentacles around or pretending it attacks the ship and the enemy ship would be forced to stop("Gibbs: Must have run afoul on the reef!") and slowly takes damage...bad idea?? I have the modeling skills to create a kraken model so if anyone could tell me if this is possible...

I love the Kraken as much as I love my girlfriend...but in a different way, of course <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="icon_wink.gif" /> ...so I'd love to have it hunt down ships in the open ocean under the command of the rarely-seen Davy Jones of course, or even better, hunt me down! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/w00t.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":woot" border="0" alt="w00t.gif" />
 
well, if you can do it, it's great! the thing is, you might want to take the new blak pearl as a base for the animations, if you can make animations at all, as noone else has been able to do that yet. that way we could use it in the new main quest. the problem is that the tentacles would be misaligned with all the other ships. right?

how are you supposed to shake it off?
 
I understand that..but it doesn't have to exactly touch the ship. Having the tentacles "dancing" around the ship would do fine for me.
 
having them 'stab' the ship would be pretty cool too, as long as they stab low. slamming might work too, as it could still seem logical when they go through a ship, and if the end of the tentacle bends down, it wouldn't seem like slamming on small ships, but like picking off crewmembers.
 
You're getting the picture, alright <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="icon_wink.gif" /> It's actually the only thing I really miss in the game...
 
THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!!! but..... like morgan said, if it hunts you down, catches you......... how do you get rid of it? Or do you just.............end up in Davy Jones Locker?
 
Yeah, good point...there should be some kind of way to fix that...like a percent of chance you could survive as the only one of your ship or something...washed up on a beach...or in a longboat like with the pearl. Or you should be able to attack it's tentacles with your cannons orso. But, in my vision it would seem the kraken hunting you down would be hard-to-achieve, but if you pull it off it would be a certain death IF you got caught. I would recommend avoiding the open sea :p

And should it be a entire model, like tail-included, so you could see the HUGE thing under water, perhaps swimming by...can you imagine the creepy sight?? :p

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Or do you just.............end up in Davy Jones Locker?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->One thing I know about the kraken is that it never fails... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

EDIT: If only I had proper textures :'(
 
textures wouldn't be that hard. the model, there's the rub.

the best thing would be to give the kraken hp, but lots of it, so you could only defeat it with a really powerful ship, and then only have about 15 to 20% hp left. you would just have to keep shooting the tentacles clutching you ship until it gives up. (note: gives up! maybe you just need to scare it off, but have the chance of meeting it again later) when the thing stabs the ship, you would of course loose some cannons. otherwise you just loose hp.
 
Yeah...I can already imagine the thrill of trying to survive. The kraken should also be SUPER anti-crew to my opinion. Yeah, like you CAN somewhat easily defeat it with your cannons, but it's slaughtering your crew extremely fast, so if your too slow, you would't be able to fire your cannons anymore.

I have made a few tentacle-only animations(I don't have the tail yet), but I made them with splines...do splines work in the PotC engine?? I have no other clue how to animate them but with splines :s
 
i sure hope it works. that would mean you have a whole lot more work to do, as you're the only one on this forum who can actually do animations.

i don't really know if you can make the damage really specific, such as mainly crew or mainly cannons. ship defence and defence skill should play a reasonably big part in this as well. i think it's possible, but i'm no modder, so i don't know for sure. i think certain attacks, such as a swipe, should do the damage of grapeshot, slamming the damage of round shot, and stabbing the damage of roundshot, but with an increased chance of destroying cannons,
 
Would it be able to choose random attacks itself then or will it just use one attack pattern?? Cause...now I'm making one looping animation with different tentacle attacks included into one. I'll try to show you somehow.

EDIT: If you would play it in Media Player, you would notice it loops perfectly as the start and the end of the animation are completly similar to each other. With the exception of what's underwater. You would laugh if you saw what's under the blue plane :p all those mixed up tentacles xD
<a href="http://s39.photobucket.com/albums/e172/morthon/?action=view&current=_scene.flv" target="_blank">http://s39.photobucket.com/albums/e172/mor...rent=_scene.flv</a>
 
don't forget that you can see through the water in-game. a body would certainly be nessesary. most ships are also higher than that.

i must say that it does look really good. unfortunatly, i'm better and naming problems that seeing the good things. some other things i saw where:

the tentacles, although they certainly look good i must say, could be thicker. unless it's a big ship of course, then they're fine. slamming looks good, but the tentacle dissapears straigth after, which looks a bit odd. swiping is perfect, nothing to say about that. the stabbing is in my opinion the least success. it looks more like it's poking the ship than really piercing the hull. with the animation for plucking off sailors, it looked more like it was attempting to rip off the mast. could be a good idea.

here's another idea: why not make several animations, like the ones you have, and make them indeed random, but for a single tentacle. you could then copy the tentacle as many times as you like, so wouldn't have to make animations for each seperate tentacle. this way, if you managed to give the tentacle a locator, you could place the tentacle-locator on each ship in several places, so every ship would have the correct kraken animation, and you wouldn't have the wierd results you can get when you have one single animation like you have now. if you place them close enough to the hull, a kraken-body could be inessesary. two problems with the locator-idea is that you have to make the tentacles appear all together at the same time, and not make them be there all the time. especially the latter would be a problem.
 
Animations are always a tricky things. Some people have managed to mess around with character animations and that worked eventually, but all these people are gone now. Result: Nobody knows anything of animations in the game. I am not sure if it is at all possible to apply animations to ships. What certainly WOULD be possible though: Make a ship that looks like the Kraken and make it really strong with lots of cannons or something like that. Would be far from being perfect, but unfortunately we are limited by the game's engine, as well as by the knowledge of the modders.
 
well, i'm suggesting to make the kraken part of the ship, by adding tentacles with locators. but as i said, the problem is that the tentacles should be premanently visible.
 
Part of the ship being attacked? Then you'd have to do that for all ship models and switch ship models in mid-scene. Sounds like a lot of work. If it is possible at all. I doubt animation will be possible; I am not aware of any animated parts on the ships, except for the sails and flags, but these are handled by the game's engine. Easiest way to do it: Ship looking like the Kraken without animation. That would be possible. All other options would require heavy testing first and might prove to be impossible. If you have the time and the will to do it though: Go right ahead and try to make the first animated ship object in PotC ever! But if you don't have too much time, I would request you try to make just the model so that we do at least have a Kraken, even if it's not animated. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" />
 
that's not what i meant either.just make one animated tentacle, and one mirrored version of it, and give them a locator. place the locators (thus several tentacles, about 6 or eight) on each ship, and when the kraken appears, start the animation. tentacles appear, and start doing their destructive work.
 
That´s sort of what I was thinking of myself. Some sort of path each tentacle follows with every ship having custom pathing for each tentacle. However, I don´t wish to make a motionless kraken. It is a haunting sight for me and it would break my heart.
 
It would be cool if you could only see kraken swimming next to your ship. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/w00t.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":woot" border="0" alt="w00t.gif" />
Now, if you sail at open seas you can see sharks or whale.

If the kraken catches you it would be also cool if there some tentacles strangle your ship and her hp is quickly damaged and it sinks.


And sorry for my bad English <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dunno.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":shrug" border="0" alt="dunno.gif" />
 
isn't that what we're talking about here? by the way, i took a second look at your animation and it seems like only the first stab looked like a poke, the others where fine.
 
I know animation works for animals, but they can't interact with their surroundings. Ships aren't animated. I don't know if they can be animated at all. So the first thing to find out is if ship objects can be animated.

One other option: Floating goods. It is possible to make floating goods appear at random and have events happen when you sail your ship through them. Imagine a "floating good Kraken". It suddenly appears out of nowhere and if you hit it, you take major damage. Alternatively, you could make each tentacle into a seperate floating good. I think this might actually give a pretty good result, even if animating floating goods turns out to be impossible: You'd have tentacle goods being generated all around you and when you hit them, you take damage. The bigger the attack, the more tentacles are generated. By having more tentacles being generated during the attack, there would be some sense of the Kraken actually attacking.

To get this to work, all we need is a couple of tentacle good models and some code to have them generated. This could be incorporated into the DirectSail mod. At random (or based on a quest), the Kraken event might be triggered. In this case, tentacle goods will start to be generated around your ship and if you hit them, you take damage. The way to survive is to sail away from the area of the attack.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top