My current status update

[Vincent]

Hey, fellow internet peoples! I figured I’d give everyone a peak at what I’m doing currently, and see what’s happening here.

So, to start, fun fact! Did you know that the most expensive porn film made to date was a pirate porno? LOL!

Anyways, just finished ordering copies of The Sea Rovers Practice and The Buccaneer’s Realm from Amazon, both books by Bennerson Little. Don’t know if they’re any good, but they deal with the golden age of piracy – the first talks about pirate tactics and life, and the second describes the life of a pirate and the world of the Caribbean in 1674. Cost me a good $50 to get the both of them, so I really hope they turn out to be good reads – any thoughts about these books on your part, MK1? Did I make a good purchase, or did I just throw good money in the wastebin?

Been playing GOF quite a lot lately as well, managed to get in a good six hours earlier today (and I intend to play some more after posting this), and I’m currently chasing down Edward Lowe on behalf of Henry Morgan – though I will admit how thoroughly ashamed I was that my character (Vincent Svendsen) was so easily duped by Lowe. Perhaps someone (probably me if I can work up the balls) will have to tweak that quest so that you have another option that results in a good chase but is less embarrassing to your reputation… Currently I’m sailing a heavy dutch brigantine that I armed with 12-pdr. Culverins.

Also, I’ve slowly been working on a new ‘wishlist 2.0’ document like the one I put together in my first ever post here (which started the ‘new features’ thread that quickly took off past any of my expectations!), so I’ll have that done – eventually.

A few bugs spotted in the lastest edition (with loyalty patch), BTW; the crewmen don’t show up on the Brigantine Traversee, the heavy dutch brigantine has blue textures on the forecastle hatch grating and the forepeak grating when viewed from high up, and the Excellent Map item is all orange-y whatever in color and impossible to read. Also, the new mod option that constrains heroes to appropriate eras refuses to stay turned on – I have to turn it on every time I start up the game, and it sometimes fails to work properly in the middle of a playthrough.

In other news, I actually have something to contribute to the game! It’s in the final stages of tweaking, but I have developed a custom soundtrack using music pulled from my own music collection. After a comment from MK1 about how accordions are about a century out-of-date for our era, I went through my original setup and completely overhauled it with new tracks that do not feature accordions, and I think I did a pretty decent job of making a soundtrack that feels unique and pirate-y.

I was rather excited to see the recent modding how-to thread, as it gives some details about how to build (or at least get started building) new quest mods for the game. This is something I’m very excited about, since I have several ideas I’d like to implement as quests in our fine game. One of the things I just started coming up with was a kind of ‘main story’ for my reward character, Svendsen – a series of quests that tell the tale of why he’s in the Caribee, and take you through several of his big adventures there before reaching a climactic ending to the whole story as the player sails off to other adventures! I also have two quests in mind that begin like regular quests but can evolve into romance quests if you want to go that route with the females involved. I have a cousin who’s getting into programming (he’s even working on his own sidescroller game he built from scratch), so I’ll see if I can get him to help me out with the programming/coding aspect of making quests – if I can do that, you guys will hopefully be seeing me make a new quest for the game some time in the future (just don’t get your hopes up!).

[Jeffrey]

Yes, I see the problem with the Excellent Map. I just fixed the texture and I’ll release it next update, which is coming maybe tomorrow.

That constrain heroes is a bit untested, but I can say that it will only work with a brand new game and you will have to click it on right from the start. Once you click OK for a new game, if option selected, it will not even create the other NPC heroes outside a window of time from your character’s life and that can be verified by pressing F10 in-game and the list should be less than the 140+ characters.

The default is always OFF, the setting is never remembered, so each new game you will have to click it. It also won’t work once the game is started as there is nothing in the game code, while running, to filter them out; it only works by simply not creating the characters at all for a brand new game.

Brigantine2 is missing sailor points, so that’s why the crew don’t show. Someone will have to create that; I’ve not ever done one, so perhaps MK.

Not yet sure about the other stuff…

[Vincent]

Thanks for the quick response, Jeffrey!

I did actually start a new game when I saw that option, but it doesn’t seem to work still. I turned it on in the default options at the start menu, but the choices I made didn’t carry over to my game for some reason and I had to select them all over again as soon as I hit land after the intro scene.

[Jeffrey]

The “mod options” screen is a bit troubling. There is a default, that gets written to the options file in the main directory, but the way things work, it doesn’t seem to carry over into individual profile directory (where it gets written gain, that is specific to that particular game), and you do have to redo them for each new profile. I intend to look at that some day and rework that…but that has so far stayed as the original and wonky way.

Anyway, I too noticed that the new constrain didn’t work well there, and I have since moved it to the actual starting character screen, where I believe it does work as intended now…do you have that version? If so, and it still doesn’t work, I’ll have to take a look.

Moving on, I also found the blue-from-a-distance problem with that Heavy Dutch Brigantine is due to the file compression, where combined with the level-of-detail interpolation DirectX will do for distance, starts to skew the blue pixels forward too heavily; the compression also removed pixels in its interpolation efforts and the two together, create too much blue. I was able to solve it by simply choosing a slightly lower compression method for the texture. This specific texture will be provided in the next update as well.

This is undoubtedly the same problem with a number of ropes people have mentioned, and I can fix them the same way, but will have to wait for people to tell me which ships again. I will try to search the forum and identify them, but not a major priority at the moment…still trying to get this last update out to people.

[Vincent]

I had the version where the constrain heroes option was in the mod options menu, so I’ll update my files and see if that helps. When I do that, is there a way to keep my current game (which I started with heroes constrained), or will I have to start over? Would be a bit of a bummer to start over considering I’ve finally gotten farther than I have in any previous games…

[Jeffrey]

Should still be OK, and you can load, then check with F10. That option really only serves to restrict the character creation at the very start of the game, and once started, there is nothing in the game that will ever generate those other heroes, so it should be fine.

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