• 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!

Buccaneers! Screenshots and Videos

It's tough being the captain of a warship, so sometimes you just need time to take a break and unwind in your cabin...

[VR footage]
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=249685466320155

We've added a few items to the cabin just for fun and made the ship model interactable, which brings the scene to life a bit.
You'll get different items depending on which faction you join (the guitar would be a Spanish item, for instance) so there's some variety between playthroughs.

Which items would you like to see added? :checklist
 
Armada said:
We've added a few items to the cabin just for fun and made the ship model interactable, which brings the scene to life a bit.
Click to expand...
That was really funny! You had me laughing out loud there. :rofl

Armada said:
Which items would you like to see added? :checklist
Click to expand...
I assume you already have a spyglass.
How about a sextant?
A checker/chess-board?
A bunch of books you can pick up and look in?
 
Pieter Boelen said:
I assume you already have a spyglass.
How about a sextant?
A checker/chess-board?
A bunch of books you can pick up and look in?
Click to expand...
Yep, there's a spyglass. Currently you can't use it in the cabin, though. A sextant could be good too.
A chess board would be an interesting challenge for VR tracking systems, which may struggle with picking up the right piece if they're too small. I'd love to give it a try, though!

Books are a good idea. Maybe we should have a few joke ones like the infamous "Boelen Algebra" in New Horizons? :razz

Martes said:
Can you actually write something at a table, or it moves you to some interface?
Click to expand...
Not yet, though I'd love to put in something that lets you write or scribble in your own logbook. People seemed to enjoy a similar feature in Half-Life: Alyx:

 
Armada said:
Books are a good idea. Maybe we should have a few joke ones like the infamous "Boelen Algebra" in New Horizons? :razz
Click to expand...
Haaaaha!
Jokes are always good to have.

And on that subject...
Hide a rubber duck in there!
And a colander full of pasta. ;)
 
We've now added a lot more characters to towns to make them more lively, with different ones appearing throughout the day. :pirates

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1119299691804003

On lower-spec PCs, you'll be able to change how many appear to save performance (essential quest NPCs will always be present).
We're also working on adding more animations to give these NPCs a wider variety of things to do.
 
Here's a first look at stormy weather in ship battles! :sail

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=2649335315345894

We made the sea rougher than normal, but not so rough that smaller ships are overwhelmed by the waves.
This makes boarding impractical, partly because we turn off buoyancy for the ships involved and large waves would clip through them, but thematically it also makes sense. :wp
That means navigation and gunnery are your only tools for defeating your foes during storms, so may the best man-of-war win!
 
We've been working on a major overhaul for the large town environment, and it's finally ready to show off! :dance

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=548892685992218

The new layout features a much greater walkable area to explore with different building designs that make it very distinct from the other towns.
We also replaced the fort with a new design inspired by Castillo San Felipe del Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's much larger than the other forts in the game and serves as the toughest fort to defeat from both sea and land, so conquering towns of this size will require an impressive fleet. :pirate41:
 
We've shown off cabin customisation before, and now we're showing one of the ways you can acquire more customisations to use.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=3675105202505600

You'll come across several merchants in each town selling different items, including cabin paint schemes, paintings, props and more.
Some rarer items will also be obtainable as quest rewards, and we might include some ultra-rare items that can only be found from buried treasure.

We'll share some more interactive customisations soon, so watch this space. ;)
 
As promised, here's a follow up to the previous video showing how you can place items in your cabin... as well as introducing your newest four-legged crew member! :D

[VR footage]
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=710118889554741

All of this will be possible in non-VR as well through a similar UI (and a button prompt for interacting with pets).
You will be able to choose a pet for your cabin, either by visiting a merchant or finding one as a quest reward. This will include dogs, cats and parrots at first, though we may look into more animals later on.

We do also have more stuff in the works besides cabin customisations. We've done a lot of work on new features, bug fixes, polish and performance optimisation in recent weeks; all very important, but not worth their own videos (unless you'd like to see a video about hours of optimisations which gained 5 FPS in large battles :razz ).
 
This week we're excited to show off the ship upgrade system! Turn your :pirateraft into a :ship in no time!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=3036069466489555

You can install four types of upgrade on your ship, starting with one slot in each category in addition to your faction's pre-installed upgrades. The categories include:
  • Sails - Improve your ship's sailing characteristics or rigging durability
  • Hull - Improve your ship's hull strength, sailing characteristics, cargo capacity and more.
  • Cannons - Improve your guns' damage, range and reload times.
  • Crew - Improve your crew's health, melee or ranged combat, cannon reload times and more.
You'll notice that some categories have overlapping benefits, so it's possible to double-down on, say, your ship's speed and acceleration by installing certain sail and hull upgrades.
These also stack with your faction upgrades, so you can specialise heavily in some areas depending on which faction you join (or the faction of a ship you captured).

The video shows two examples of a feature I've wanted to include since the start: upgrades that have a visual impact on your ship!
While most of the upgrades are behind-the-scenes improvements, some like the copper sheathing and bronze barrel upgrades change the look of your hull and cannons, respectively.
We previously had a simpler copper effect on some ship paint schemes, but this will now be removed in favour of the upgrade.

You may also notice two buttons in the upgrade info panel: "Buy" and "Buy and Install". The latter is a convenience option, and I'll explain why it exists.
You can acquire upgrades by either buying them from a shipwright or finding them in the world (e.g. as quest rewards or in buried treasure). Think of these as "plans".
Once you own an upgrade, you can install it on as many ships as you want, but there's an installation cost that scales with the upgrade's rarity and the size of the ship. So if you can afford it, you can choose Buy and Install to do both at once, but if you can only afford to buy the upgrade, you can do that and then install it later once you have more funds.

This is to make upgrades an investment that can justify sticking with a smaller ship instead of buying a larger one. So if you find a ship type that you really like, but want to stay competitive against the next tier above it, you can heavily upgrade it to boost its stats. Equally, if you prefer to have a smaller fleet of fully upgraded ships instead of a larger fleet of ships with fewer or no upgrades, you can do that too. Think of it like the "tall" or "wide" playstyles in a 4X game, but for ships and fleets instead of cities and empires.

The last thing to note is that all upgrade values in the video are subject to change, as we still need to go through and thoroughly test them for balancing.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this system. Which upgrades would you like to see in the game?
 
I know it is probably too late, but have you considered dividing the mast into several damageable parts, so that individual sails or a topmast could be shot out?
 
Martes said:
I know it is probably too late, but have you considered dividing the mast into several damageable parts, so that individual sails or a topmast could be shot out?
Click to expand...
The reason we haven't done that is for better performance on low-end hardware. More mast components and individually animated sails incur a higher rendering cost on the CPU, which is why we only have a detachable mainmast and group sails into as few meshes as we can.

It is something I'd still like to test so we can measure the performance difference, though.
 
Armada said:
More mast components and individually animated sails incur a higher rendering cost on the CPU, which is why we only have a detachable mainmast and group sails into as few meshes as we can.
Click to expand...

You mean that performance is more affected by the number of meshes, rather than faces inside the mesh? o_O
I was absolutely sure it was the other way around.

In AoS2 the masts set is composed of different models for each mast and sail. Sails animation is completely rudimentary (reefing and turn of the yards according to the wind). I thought it may be possible to emulate topmasts as staysails that do not have turning animation or as additional masts, like the bowsprit, but I don't see a way to ensure that the upper spar will disappear first when damaged, so I left that out :(
 
Martes said:
You mean that performance is more affected by the number of meshes, rather than faces inside the mesh? o_O
Click to expand...
They both have an impact. The CPU has to tell the GPU which meshes to render (by issuing "draw calls"), so the more objects there are in the scene, the more work the CPU has to do. Skinned meshes such as animated sails or character models incur a further cost as their vertex weights need to be calculated as well. Draw calls can be batched together to improve efficiency, but only for non-animated meshes which are below a small vertex count. Objects need to be rendered a second time if they cast shadows, and again if they appear in reflections, and again if they are rendered to the depth buffer for post processing. So there's a lot to consider, but a good rule of thumb is the fewer objects, the better. ;)

On most PCs, the GPU is indeed the bigger bottleneck when high polycounts are involved, as the CPU can easily handle thousands of draw calls per frame. On lower-powered systems such as consoles or mobile devices, the CPU isn't very powerful, so draw calls become an issue.

With all that said, I briefly did some research last night and found it might be possible to dynamically break the masts by modifying the mesh at runtime. That way, we could have a single mesh containing all the masts together and break it into two or more parts only when we need to apply damage. We'd need to do the same for the sails and yards (they're each grouped into one mesh per mast), but that should be doable in theory. I may look into this further at some point.
 
Here's a first look at player abilities you'll be able to unlock via levelling up. :dance

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=986537908452982

We've grouped them into three categories based on different playstyles:
  • Fleet Commander focuses on expanding and upgrading your fleet
  • Opportunist involves using deception and cunning to outwit your enemies
  • Swashbuckler focuses on combat and boarding capabilities
You will only be given enough ability points to unlock all abilities in two of these categories, so choose wisely! (There will be an option to refund your points so you can choose different abilities if you want to experiment.)

This video also gives you a brief glimpse of the revamped post-battle menu which lets you manage any captured ships. By default, all captured ships will be sold for prize money if they have enough crew left, and you'll see a preview of the total reward below them. If you have the "Requisition" ability from the Swashbuckler path, you have the option to add captured ships to your fleet instead of selling them (though you can still sell them later via a shipyard if you choose). However, if a captured ship does not have enough crew to sail it, you can choose to burn and sink it, salvaging its crew and as much cargo as you can carry.
 
Armada said:
This video also gives you a brief glimpse of the revamped post-battle menu which lets you manage any captured ships. By default, all captured ships will be sold for prize money if they have enough crew left, and you'll see a preview of the total reward below them. If you have the "Requisition" ability from the Swashbuckler path, you have the option to add captured ships to your fleet instead of selling them (though you can still sell them later via a shipyard if you choose). However, if a captured ship does not have enough crew to sail it, you can choose to burn and sink it, salvaging its crew and as much cargo as you can carry.
Click to expand...
That sounds like a relatively navy-like approach.
How about free pirating?

I'm a bit surprised adding ships to your fleet isn't part of the "Fleet Commander" category...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top