New Horizons, 2.8 engine and DirectX 9

[Jeffrey]

First, me posting as messenger with a note from MK:

Ahoy Mates and Matettes,

We at Buccaneer’s Reef have an interesting and very unconventional announcement to make today. We have spent a lot of time thinking about this and what you are about to witness here is definitely not done lightly or without forethought. It is not something we ever thought we would do or even wanted to do. It is also something that will be seen by some as being controversial, ”wrong” and by others as absolutely just and fair – even if not conventionally proper. However, for those of you who have been around for a little while and know who we are, this should really be no surprise at all – especially when you look at my online history for the last decade (and the history of this website) and the inequity and unfairness that was the prime catalyst which gave us life here to begin with. We ARE NOT taking this action for the purpose of sowing seeds of contention, discord, anger or to cause a shit storm. We are ONLY doing this because it is quite simply THE RIGHT THING TO DO – Period.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité!!! BROTHERHOOD AMONG GAMERS! If you looked at the recent drama between Jeffrey and PA! https://buccaneersreef.com/forums/topic/pirates-ahoy-sold-down-the-river/
you will understand the reasons behind this action. I want to state the following up front just so everyone does not misinterpret our actions or does not understand where we are coming from.

A community which regards us as illegitimate and a rogue community from the beginning – and will not acknowledge us or work with us in a civil way does a huge disservice to the GREATER Age of Sail and Age of Piracy gaming community at large by not enabling or offering Jeffrey’s FREE and exceptional engine work to the WHOLE and ENTIRE gaming community when he made a legitimate offer of making it available to them. Pirate Ahoy!’s refusal is purely and in every way selfish, cronyistic, egotistical and just wrong – in blocking this incredible new work and capability from being available to all gamers everywhere.

So we don’t do this lightly and at the risk of bringing the popular title (which many rightly view as our competition) to the forefront and possibly losing some of our own gaming population, popularity and losing players who right now prefer GOF ERAS2 – but may now ”jump ship” over to Pirates Ahoy! and New Horizons because they enjoy their offering better. Unlike others I can name – who see competing games and mods as threats to be ignored, disregarded, belittled or squashed – in a very obvious long running biased favoritism for their premier game/mod, – I view our action of offering this content to everyone – as something that EVERYONE in the community SHOULD HAVE the opportunity to experience – OVER and ABOVE the fact that it has been and IS a competing effort to my own preferred and developing game efforts.

I also must state that the additional mod ”RESOURCE” content we are now offering DOES NOT belong to us and we make absolutely no claims to it. In addition we are not the support website for it and questions on game content or how to play it should not be made here but to Pirates Ahoy! We are also not interested in – nor will we ever – mod or add content to New Horizons – as we are not it’s developer. Let me be clear – we are not modding or supporting modding of New Horizons at all. We are not the experts on it, we didn’t build it and we are not it’s home.

However, for any inquiries about the new Buccaneer’s Reef Maelstrom Engine which New Horizon’s now runs on in DX9, feel free to ask our own expert resident computer scientist extraordinaire Jeffrey.

So if you haven’t figured it out by now, this message is to announce the availability of a special edition (flavor) of Pirates Ahoy’s own New Horizons game mod running native on our own improved source code and engine. For those of you who want to hate on us, go ahead and download us and start playing it in the improved engine with no crashes and far improved graphics. It’s OK – you can play it in secret and hate on us in public. I have become very used to hypocrisy from PA! for years and I’m very used to their aspersions of villainy upon my person. It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt that bad anymore – it’s like thick scar tissue now. If you want to view me as the bad guy – that’s fine – I’ll go put on my ten gallon black cowboy hat now. Lastly, I want to remind everyone that everything here on Buccaneer’s Reef is offered completely free. I make no money from this site or any content we offer and you don’t even see any advertising here. This is strictly a hobby site only and all content is offered IAW USC107.
Our MOTTO on this site should be WE FREELY SHARE or in the Latin – PARTICIPES NOS GRATIS.

As we used to say in the Army, it’s too bad some people can never pull their heads out of their fourth point of contact, but we aren’t gonna make the rest of you suffer for stupidity sake. Hopefully more of you will be happy about this rather than angry. My guess is that most of you will be like you always are – SILENT – but happily clicking the DOWNLOAD toggle on MEGA. OK so I will hand this off to Jeffrey now and just finish my part of the announcement by thanking him for all of the incredible work he has accomplished for all of us. THANKS SO MUCH JEFFREY! YOU ARE THE MAN! OK take it away my friend… MK

• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Jeffrey.

[Jeffrey]

New Horizons, running 2.8 Storm engine in DirectX 9 link:
https://mega.nz/#F!L001VaYZ!hwNV3uh3sQPbKDkOeDvrcg

This is a functional proof of concept, provided for New Horizons modders to finish; most everything I’ve checked looks like it works to me, but then again, I’ve never actually played this game. I can sail, fight, visit tavern, shop, shipyard, buy stuff, etc. Some issues I’m aware of that need tending.

The sky textures in New Horizons are slightly incompatible with the newer engine. New Horizons uses two textures: sky_side and sky_up, yet the newer method uses sky_bk, sky_fr, sky_lf, sky_rt, sky_up (these values are hard-coded in the engine source). I modified the code to accept a sky attribute, useOld, where it will use the sky_side for all 4 of the expected rt,lf,fr,bk textures, plus sky_up, yet I notice in some instances, this doesn’t always display well, with a washed out square sometimes showing top-center. The textures should be changed to fit the expected five.

My flag modifications for the engine work to support the New Horizons ways, but I think could be improved if New Horizons did away with the flag object arrays, and simply combined the one-row textures (maybe one for merchants, one for forts, one for pirate, one for pennants, etc.), into 2 dimensional, multi-row textures, similar to how we did in ERAS. This would simplify things, but works as-is, regardless.

Fight mechanics now match COAS, but I have altered some of the ‘blocking’ scripting that was done as a workaround, as the back-end for 2.8 does blocking detection, so I commented out that workaround.

So New Horizons people, here is that chance that was long hoped for: New Horizons, working as it always has, yet under 2.8 and DirectX 9, with just a few loose ends to tidy up. So tidy it up.

I consider my work, all the heavy lifting to get it functional, done, and it is now up to those that wanted the New Horizons upgraded, to start sifting through final adjustments. This version of the back end enjoys all the benefits of eradicated memory leaks, fixes to battle_interface access violations, sea_ai access violations, and a myriad of other problems. I also have a 64 bit version at the ready, though yet unreleased. I have also already made the move to HLSL shaders, in lieu of asm shaders, in anticipation of a port to DirectX 11, though there is no timeline on that endeavor.

Also, anyone that wants to play it, just because, feel free. Keeping in mind that I am very unfamilar with this particular flavor, if a problem arises that is not particular to quests or special facets of gameplay specific to POTC or New Horizons, I might take a look into something actually broken if it is relevant to a back-end source code problem. Bring it to my attention and I will make a determination.

[Stéphane]

I don’t understand how people can be mad/hostile at you guys, well, anyone using his brain…
Keep the good job and don’t pay attention on trolls

[Jeffrey]

To clarify, this download is complete and requires nothing other than to put everything into a folder for New Horizons, and play from there. You do not need to copy .exe/.dll, or add mod files…the download is a stand-alone, complete set.

[megaprime]

Yep dunno why the drama whey the PA community have to treat you like this but your are truly awesome very helpful and you made wonders with this game (also will I hope)

[Samir]

I will definitely check this out! I suggested a long time ago to the PA! moders to port New Horizons to Storm 2.8, but they wouldn’t listen. Pirates of the Caribbean is an outdated game. Thank you for the hard work! P.S. I have seen that they gave up on Hearts of Oak, and they seem to be making New Horizons Remastered using Unity engine. It will take them years and years to finish the game from scratch.

[Author]

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