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Flag Locators Repair Project

If you are already working on those 3rd rates, then I will cease and desist immediately. I've hit the wall with the spankers anyway. :drunk

This is a good thing in that those ships are too powerful, with my opponents being almost exclusively the class 4 English fast galleon and the class 3 Spanish fast galleon. And a few VCO ships............. :walkplank


The Boussole awaits her new Captain! :j2
 
I went ahead and put the FR_Superiorwarship2 (Scipion class 3rd rate) on the FTP. The rigging is better looking but I never could get the spanker fixed.
 
I had a bunch of GA yesterday, it was around the port of La Granada and involved pirate ships(Schooners for the most part and the odd Xebec). All the GA was black and again it only seemed to stop when sunken ships had finally dissapeard from the sea floor, so it lasted from a probable demasting(difficult to tell as the battle included about 6 ships and a fort) until that ship(again difficult to be exact) had been sunk and it's hull(and masts etc) had dissapeard from the sea floor.
 
Black GA probably means pirate flags. I am experiencing the same things you are. I can have no GA until a certain ship type loses a mast. Then it starts and doesn't stop until that mast is long gone. Something in the code for fallen masts is causing the flag to persist far too long.
 
Theoretically speaking i'm wondering if it would be possible to ammed the flag code to include a condition for de-masting, something like(in my best fake code):

Code: 
IF ship_mast = Fallen, THEN ship_flag = void; delete ship_flag.

Something along those lines. It's not like you need to see the ship flag fluttering as it sinks to the bottom anyway :shrug
 
YES! :2up

This is currently the biggest cause of GA in my game after the Batavia. It is unsettling to see flags zooming up out of the water and fluttering in mid air.

A coder would know where to put something like that.
 
As much as I'd like to stick in something like that, I don't think it's that easy.
I'm not sure how the game takes care of different masts and even knows how to distinguish between the different ones and whether it "knows" which ones have fallen.
 
Was there de-masting in the stock game? if so there must be somewhere in the code it handles it, and even if we can't locate(or get to even) that place we could, in theory, simply make this a function of the flag code as that was a mod addition. So i'd think working out some routine for the flag code to check for a de-masting, then getting rid of the flags(all of them if we can't deduce which one etc?) at a goodtime, prior to the GA effect(so whatever state is returned when a mast falls), might be the way around the problem.

Whatever introduced the problem(and i understand it was new flag code in build 14? It wasn't in build 12, not sure about 13) is probably the place to look in terms of coding the solution :shrug
 
There are flags and de masting in build 13 so this is a build 14 issue. The flag mod is a big complicated one.
 
the dismastment code was always in the game though. it just wasn't finished until the mods came along.
 
The stock game indeed didn't have demasting, but the modpacks finished that. The problem only started with the Different Flags mod.
That was a difficult one to write in the first place, because it's difficult for the game to figure out which flag is which.
All flags are drawn in a certain order, so what I think the code for this does is to swap the texture used for the flags depending on which flag in the order is being drawn.
But then with demasting, flags disappear from the order, messing things up altogether.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
The stock game indeed didn't have demasting, but the modpacks finished that. The problem only started with the Different Flags mod.
That was a difficult one to write in the first place, because it's difficult for the game to figure out which flag is which.
All flags are drawn in a certain order, so what I think the code for this does is to swap the texture used for the flags depending on which flag in the order is being drawn.
But then with demasting, flags disappear from the order, messing things up altogether.
Click to expand...

What exactly does the Different Flags mod do? sorry to ask a probable well known question, but i know ships always had flags in terms of Nationalities so what does the mod do differently?

Then i'd ask do all the flags have to have references on the models, like for ropes etc? If so i'm guessing that unless you have a routine to clean up the flag references on the models that may indeed cause the GA thing as the game tries to keep those points 'attached' to something.

Still, even if this is the cause of the issue, then how come the work that Armada and Hylie have been doing on the ship models seems to have massively reduced GA? It's a weird conundrum isn't it!?
 
What has been done to the individual ships is to give them all the same naming convention for the flags. I studied the ships that did not give GA and made the others like that. The engine was getting confused by the different systems used over the years.

Every mast has flag and pennant locators. On most ships they are the same, which I think causes more confusion. When you see a ship flying both a flag and a pennant from the same mast, that is the probable reason. So I am making sure that the flags and pennants are different size and shape whether they are used or not. Then there are the VCO ships which follow no rules. I've given up on them.

I believe the different flags mod lets you choose what nationality of flag to fly.

By reducing the number of ships giving GA we are now finding other causes of GA. Like forts, islands, and flags attached to dismasted masts that persist long after the mast is gone. As long as that ship is around, it looks like that flag will stay around somewhere.
 
You could take out ship sails and masts in the original game, at least that's what I thought...
 
The Different Flags mod does the following:
- Enable Period Dependent Flags
- Enable Ensigns and Pennants on masts instead of ensigns only
- Allow different flags for Merchant and Navy ships as well as Forts/Towns
- Allow different Pirate and Personal flags, which can be changed through code (and dialog since Patch 7 WIP 2)

In short, it does some very cool things that I'd never want to lose.
 
I agree with Pieter, losing that feature would be a big set-back to the game...
 
Agreed. But until someone figures out how to remove a single flag from a ship without disturbing the others, perhaps it would be best to remove all flags from a ship when it loses a mast.
 
We noticed before that performing a Flag Update once a mast has fallen causes problems, so we disabled that as soon as a mast falls anywhere.
It might be possible to set a ship with a fallen mast to use the invisible flag texture; however, that DOES require performing a Flag Update, which we know causes issues at that time.
 
hylie does have a good trade-off idea, but pieter makes a good point, what to do, what to do...
 
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