From what I have seen so far from AoP, it is definitly not worth moving our modding to that platform. However, CoAS might be better in this respect. I think it is quite certain that for any final decision to move on to CoAS, we must first decide if we consider CoAS worth the trouble, which means we will need to play it first. Our current PotC Storm 2.0 engine still allows us PLENTY of opportunity for improvement until Judgement Day as far as I'm concerned and it looks much more realistic to me than at least AoP does. So I pretty much agree with Seb and a simple virtual sailor as well. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/yes.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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I've rewritten the letter to accomodate the <i>TX Converter limitation of Death</i>, <i>a simple virtual sailor</i>'s comments on his work on the spoken dialog mod and our intention to finish Build 14 first before moving on to CoAS:<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Dear Mr. Zaitzev,
Thanks very much for your reply. We have also read the interview with Mr. Yury Rohach on City of Abandoned Ships that was published on <a href="http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/841/841808p1.html" target="_blank">RPGVault</a> on December 17th 2007 and are quite interested in your game. We are considering to continue our modding work on City of Abandoned Ships once released after finishing PotC Build 14, provided that we can take most of what we have done so far on Pirates of the Caribbean with us. There is such a wealth of good stuff in our current Build mod that naturally we do not want to lose that.
We would also like to support your game, but we don't know what kind of support you might need. Additional information regarding that, would be most welcome. I can assure you that many of our community members are interested in your game and are willing to purchase it when it becomes available.
As for the navigation from island to island without loading to the worldmap, we are pleased to inform you that we have already managed that in such a way that a quantity of polygons restriction in the engine is not a problem. The DirectSail mod made by one of our oldest modding community members allows sailing from island to island without visiting the worldmap. The mod is not perfect, but it does work and adds a lot of gameplay value for those who like to sail in real time. The main problems with this mod are maintaining a proper voyage length. Sailing from island to island on the worldmap takes several ingame days; doing the same in 3D sailing mode takes only a couple of game hours.
The spoken dialog is just something we're experimenting with to see how far we can get with it. One of our modders has made some good progress, allowing a dialog sound to start when the player switches to the next dialog case and ended when another sound is launched, to avoid sound jam. We do not intend to add lip synchronisation; just audio in combination with facial expression (an unused feature from the original PotC game that we have figured out how to re-enable). Also we have no intention of recording all dialog due to workload and filesize limitations; just a couple to hopefully improve the game's ambient and the player immersion.
One of the main things we need help with is to make proper 3D models. With our current tools, we can do some modification of 3D models, but making new models remains a major challenge. We can do it, but we get quite some issues with them. This is most noticable with the completely new ships we've added: They lack proper collision detection (we have to take the collision detection from an existing ship) and the 1st person camera mode is also wrong (also taken from another ship). Also we get what is known as the "reversed lighting effect": When the sun or moon is on one side of the new model, the ship appears lighted as if the light source is on the other side. This looks very weird. We have tried to fix this on many occasions, but have been unable to. Your help with getting ships and other completely new models (character, locations) into the game would be most valuable. One of our members reckons he can figure out how to export his ship properly using Maya if somebody could supply him with a Maya file of a ship, ready to be exported. He already has Maya 5.0 with the appropriate plugin, but lacks the knowledge on how to use them properly.
We're also having some challenges with the limited number of flags we can put into the game. All flags visible in game on masts must be in one file, exactly in one line, which maximum width should be no greater than 2048 pixels. That means that the more flags we add, the narrower those flags will need to be, which will negatively affect quality. We would like to be able to use multiple files for the flags or at least multiple lines. However, we cannot do that because this is hardcoded in the ENGINE or MODULES.
Also since you have experience with porting modding work from the Storm 2.0 engine to the Storm 2.5 and Storm 2.8 engines, your help with that would also be most appreciated.
Thanks a lot for all your help.
With kind regards,
Pieter Boelen
Community Leader<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
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