• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


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Build 14 Beta 1 Feedback

strange. there was this nagging little thing in my memory which told me it had happened before though. i think that you had to visit the lair at least once before for the dialogue to work or something like that. i'm trying that now.

on a sidenote, i made the passage from la grenade to cayman in one stretch in 6.5 in-game hours, averaging around 14 knots with my frig, using directsail. i peaked at 14.9 just before cayman, but had my fastest part of the voyage going past aruba, averaging 14.5 for the whole hour. 30 knot winds and clear skies all the way. never seen anything like it.
 
You're absolutely right. It looks so bizarre, really.
I don't recall it always being like that, but maybe it was.
I remember the Petros fix; I think I even almost managed to "fix" that reverse lighting.
But now I don't remember if I ever really did or not.
I think I managed to fix the inside-out AND the reverse lighting,
BUT the edges were not smoothed anymore, making the rey square-ish.
Seems it's a no-win scenario.

On the more positive side, we've got Maya now, which opens up more perspectives.
Though we could also not care about it and only make sure it's correct in "CoAS Build 15".
Since we've got the source code for that, if it isn't already good in CoAS, we can change it properly.

Pieter, Didn't the reverse action of the gaf change after the worldmap change (rotated 180 degrees) This was back in Build 13 but i don't remember it in the stock game. Can be a bit annoying as the ships are now very beautiful and sail so wellbut you do get used to it. :cheers
 
A few little things that irked me (don't know if any have come up before, but...):

Navigation in towns. I kind of like the fact that you have to find the place before you can fast travel there, but it's VERY annoying to go into a "new" town (one added by the mod) and try to find the relevant buildings when there are a) no locals giving directions, and b) no signposts (even if the signposts are in French/Dutch/Spanish/etc, you can still make a guess at what they mean). I have yet to find the store in Santiago... Either place all the "important" buildings in their "original" locations or move the signposts to the "correct" places...or even provide maps of the colonies in the same way as there are navigational charts of the islands...or at least add an NPC who will tell me where the tavern is (someone in this town must know...they can't all want to sell me the location of a hidden treasure cache...can they?)

Wind direction at sea. Yes, the sea looks pretty, yes, the weather effects are nice (save for the fact that the storms sometimes look a little cartoon-y), but they do not allow us to deduce the wind direction. I get no result when licking my finger and holding it up (unsurprising, as my PC is indoors...). Maybe a little arrow? or even someone telling you an approximate direction might help?

Rum is contraband on Dutch islands. So, every time I do a contraband run to a Dutch island, my crew morale plummets to rock bottom, they mutiny and I lose. No more smuggling to Dutch islands, then. There isn't even a way to refuse to sell the rum but still sell the other goods. Maybe they need to take another, alternative product as contraband, I'm fairly sure there are some overlooked things floating around somewhere.

And, to ensure my first "real" post isn't just a huge, endless rant, things I liked: Realistic sailing, counter-rudder, more than 3 officers per ship, decent boarding actions, a plethora of quests, and the ability to take the ship of the line that attacks Oxbay/Barbados ("Sir, I regret to inform you that one of our colonies has been attacked...but, don't worry, I have the enemy's flagship sitting in the harbour...unfortunately, that was all of the fleet that I was able to run off with...").
 
We did have someone working on making every town have locals that give directions but he sort of hasnt done it for ages now :facepalm
 
That's some definitly valid comments. Thanks very much, mate! :doff

I very much agree with you on searching for locations in the new towns. As Captain Maggee said, we would like to add regular citizens who can point you in the right direction in the new towns also, but nobody is working on that at the moment. Updating the signposts would be very nice too, but so far we haven't figured out how to do that properly. Maps would be cool too. In any case, something needs to be done on that account before we can call Build 14 Final, because as you say, you really end up searching all over the place. :facepalm

Can't you tell the wind direction from the flags? In any case, if you buy a compass and equip it, you will get to see the wind direction on the screen again. :yes

Well, that's a new type of comment on the contraband rum! It's been contraband ever since the stock game and we left it so far. But it indeed doesn't help gameplay-wise and I reckon we should redo all imported/exported/contraband settings for all the islands. Until we do some improvement though, you could store your rum supply on another ship and hopefully in a contraband transaction, the rum is then no longer sold along with the rest. Alternatively, if you get the "Trustworthy Lad" ability, at least you'll be able to buy rum again from the store in town.

Question: Does the store in the pirate town sell rum by default? Technically it should, shouldn't it? Considering they're pirates, they shouldn't care about it being contraband and just sell it, right?

Thanks very much for your comments and if you've got any others, please do post them! :woot
 
Flags! Doh! Knew I was missing something obvious...

As for the rum thing, it's taken no matter where you store it (I'd hope the goods in my second ship was sold as well...I didn't bring them along to look pretty...), didn't know Trustworthy Lad let you buy the illegal goods (something to look into, then).
By "pirate town", I assume you mean the one on Dowesen-replace (sorry, can't remember all the re-names). Not checked, but that only works for one island, anyways.
This whole thing only occured to me because I smuggled linen to Dowesen-replace, lost my rum, and found myself surrounded by Dutch islands...ow.

Additional (and unrelated-ish) observation(s) about the reputation thing (Hero, Bloke, Horror of the High Seas, etc). Is there actually any benefit (besides minor quest threat dialogues) to being a Horror of the High Seas? There seem to be many drawbacks (can't do many side quests, can't use shops in towns, even have to spend more time and money looking for Rheims (sp?)) and a) I'm sure not all pirates in the Caribbean were heroes and b) it doesn't seem right to tell everyone their purse is hanging out...repeatedly (no-charge rep increases...).

The part that's vaguely related is maybe there should be some services that are only open to the more viciously inclined characters, accessible in a similar fashion to the smugglers, possibly with similar drawbacks (luck-based ambushes), like buying illegal goods, illegal ship repairs/modifications, etc, etc (make some stuff up), maybe with a bonus of being independant of nation relations? Or something.
 
If there are any advantages to being a Horror of the High Seas, I don't think they're many. Though there's a good chance that if you are, you can skip paying your crew longer than if you've got a neutral reputation and mutinies might be less frequent. Still, I agree that there should ideally be more of an advantage so you can play the game by being a complete and utter bastard as well. :cheeky
 
i agree. it's the main reason i haven't been backstabbing neutral countries under false flags and smuggling around.

did you know that there's unique negotiational dialogue when you manage to attack and board a ship of the same nationality as you? i never knew that.
 
I always found the cabinfight dialog a bit confused; there's a LOT of stuff taken into account there, but I can never find the "put in brig" option when I want it. I very frequently end up having to hire or kill the enemy captain. :facepalm
 
the prisoner thingy doesn't quite work either. they keep ending up back in my hold after i feed them to the sharks. then i feed them to the sharks again. and again. and again. :))
 
i wouldn't call it an extremely high priority though. the game's playable with the bugs. still, important.
 
after the restarts, which seem to have woken up the engine enough that my only Nasty errors were choosing the wrong dialog box during a surrender of an Enemy ship, great fun...
One nasty thing: encountering my first battlefleet, with my formation of 3 spanish fast galleons. Nine Manowars... remind me to Never mess with the French, and hope for just One manowar when i run into the first Spanish battlefleet, or i will know True pain.
..."Be Careful What You Wish For" i guess, spent So long hoping for something above spanish galleons class, and Wham... I'll only try this once, but it'll be the most violent fight i'll have. *Boards the Manowar furthest to the windward direction*

Funny experiences: captured a War galleon out of a formation of 12... of All the ones i could choose, i picked the one with the Entire hold Full of Bricks.
A captured spanish galleon where the captain surrendered... his portrait picture shows one of our Skeleton boys.
...Charlestown, and Devils Island. details would probably be spoilers, just something to look forward to... oh, and you don't wanna know how long it took to get close enough to charlestown to land. i was convinced the flag was just something left over from pre-build mod for a while.
 
What is this? I and others have commented on this before, but this was the first time it locked up the game long enough for me to take a screenie.

My limited research into the fractals/ tearing suggests that it is caused by either bad video card ram, in which case it would happen everywhere instead of only here, or poorly drawn maps causing the video card to try to lock onto too many moving points causing tearing. This suggests to me that the latter may be the culprit. Comments?
 
What the F*CK??? That looks like the regular dialog interface, but it's loading the wrong texture files!
Does that always happen when you go into dialog? Does it fix itself?
Are you using the brown or the blue interface setting in the Options menu?
 
Whenever I pick up an object or loot a corpse there is a black flicker. Sometimes but not often at all it will slow down enough to see a momentary flicker of text. Every once in a great while the game will stop and flicker between two screens. When this happens I hit "Esc" and it usually starts up again. Or it ctd's. While reading the forums I have occasionally read others trying to describe this. Last night it stopped the game here long enough for me to get a screenie of it. Doing that got the game going again, and it continued like nothing had happened.

I had given up on this program and stopped playing it. Then a bit later the puter shut itself down. It turned out to be the psu. I replaced it and noticed that other programs seemed to have a bit sharper graphics and better fps. Hmm, could the puter have been being starved of power? So I did a complete fresh install of B14. It was buggy at first and I started to despair, until I went to Havana and saw the missing graphics. :modding So I installed the Patch! It then started working quite well! :onya Every bit as well as B13, especially when transferring items like looting a corpse. No more BIG lag while items were moved one second per item. Anyway, this screen happened early on last might when I was at level 10 or so. I'm at level 12 now and it is working smoothly except for the fractals/tearing. I am NOT playing the main quest but am doing side quests from it like the kidnapped children.

I chose the brown interface font in options.
 
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