PotC Build Mod Ship Cleanup

[Armada]

Some of the things that happened while I was at sea did pass over my head, to be honest.

Quite understandably, too. No-one here expects you to know about every single thread. That would be crazy!
I was just making sure you know what I mean when I mention the new Corvette hull, so you can appreciate what it's worth.
It's a significant improvement to the stock ship which brings it up to a much higher standard.
Granted, it's not the work of Pgargon or KrisWood for example, but you must admit it looks more realistic, at least.

Anyhow, your updated ships folder looks absolutely fine so far. Definitely looking much more organised!

Concerning the St Albans and Centurion models, I agree they're definitely works of art that we must include in the Build at some point.
There's a lot of work to do, though, mostly through optimising them to remove unnecessary polygons, and preparing them for a proper export to GM through Maya.
I'd love to take them on, same as the Christianus Sextus, but there's no way I can fit them in with my current workload. We'll just have to wait and see if any volunteers appear.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Here's a probably less-than-popular thought for you all on some of the recently added ships, mainly the Poseidon/Fleuron, Lyon Hoy, Neptunus and possibly also the Revenge.
There's three variants of each, which seems to stem from CoAS' three-hull-system. However, there's no such system in PotC so we don't have to use just three variants or could use less variants if we'd want to.
It seems to me that the re-textures done for these ships do not particularly match up with any specific nation colour schemes.
Since we've already got over 200 ships, there's plenty of variety as it is. Therefore I'd prefer if any new variants would have a specific national purpose as well.

Am I saying completely insane things now or does anyone think there's some sense in there?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well, your idea will give the painters more work. ) The Lyon Hoy is a generic ship and does not need national colors, similar to the Lugger IMO.

The others? Sure, but we don't need a dozen Poseidons or Revenges running around like we have with the frigates. The Neptunus is a sweet sailing ship that should be spread around.

Yes there are a lot of ships in POTC, but I keep seeing the same ships over and over and over. I wish that could be addressed. I'm currently seeing too many of the class 3 light east Indiaman, the Batavia2, with no crew for instance.

 

[Armada]

@Pieter, there is sense to what you're saying, and I completely agree. It would be convenient to have the new ships tied to specific nations.
I'm guessing you'd like the textures to be modified to be more distinctive national colours?
That can be arranged, as long as we don't go overboard and make them too black-and-white, if ye get me meaning.
For example, rather than having simply red-and-black for French ships, we could maintain some of the other colour variations. After all, not all of these ships should be painted in navy colours.

Yes there are a lot of ships in POTC, but I keep seeing the same ships over and over and over. I wish that could be addressed. I'm currently seeing too many of the class 3 light east Indiaman, the Batavia2, with no crew for instance.

That can be addressed, but it requires a lot of trial-and-error and fine-tuning to get the encounter chances more balanced.
It's definitely something we'll need to cover before Beta 2, though.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Well, I do consider the Boussole colour scheme to be French-looking as well and that's not black-and-red at all.

 

[Seb]

It is actually inspired from the Hermione colour scheme, the ship that brought Lafayette in the US

http://www.hermione.com/home/

Here is the 3D remake of the Dauphine, made after archeological excavations :

http://www.natiere.culture.fr/fr#/fr/annexe/reconstitution/t=Reconstitution%20de%20la%20Dauphine

You can also think about the Soleil Royal :

La Foudroyante (1803) :

yep... this one is yellow and black

The Louis XV (1769) :

 

[Captain Armstrong]

Interesting, it is definately true that while there were popular color schemes (like red and black in France), most countries favored several color schemes, ( asshown by Seb) and some color schemes were used by multiple countries. the black and yellow normally associated with the royal navy was used at some point by just about every navy, though the hue of yellow varied, and was sometimes nearly brown. the french and spanish both used the black and red fairly commonly, but the black and yellow was probably just as common.




yellow and blue on black was used in more navies than just the french as well


same with black and white like the constitution (mainly after 1815)
and thin yellow stripes on black



hopefully I am not too off topic here, I just wanted to point out that it might be easier in some cases to make textures that work well for several countries. I think more flexibilty for textures could be a good thing

 

[Pieter Boelen]

We've discussed about the accuracy of having national colour schemes before and we then decided that even though some colour schemes technically WERE used by other nations,
for game-play purposes we'd keep things more rigid since the colour schemes help with recognizing the nation of your opponents.
That's especially relevant in Realistic Game Mode. And in Iron Man Mode, you'll probably be relying on it.

Back then, we decided on the following:
- Black-and-yellow will be British Royal Navy only
- Black-and-red will mainly be French navy, though can occasionally be used by Spain too
- Light blue with light wood can be French as well (La Licorne/Boussole/Soleil Royal)
- Black-and-white will be United States ships
- Green stern with gold decoration and brown wood will be Dutch

This seems to agree reasonably well with historically used colour schemes and also with national colour schemes as depicted in the Hornblower and Master & Commander movies that players might be familiar with.

Colour schemes that do not fit to any of the above descriptions do make things a bit complicated though. If the ship itself is intended to be used by one nation only, it's still fairly simple.
But if we've got several skins of the same ship with colour schemes that don't fit in with the above, I end up wondering if we have to keep all those re-skins or keep only the original.

 

[Armada]

What's always annoyed me is that, while Britain, France, Holland and the US all have very distinct colour schemes, it's not the same for Spain and Portugal.
Those two (more Portugal than Spain) are always the hardest to assign colour schemes, and often get given ships with colour schemes which simply don't match any of the other nations.
Portugal seems to be particularly unclear due to the lack of custom Portuguese ships we've had built, which in turn gives us less of an idea of what they should look like.

I think we'll need to do something about that for the clean-up, otherwise those nations will have very inconsistently coloured ships sailing around. :?
I guess it would be one reason why being more flexible about the colour schemes would be a good thing, along with added realism, but that's still up for debate.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Very true. Portugal especially is REALLY bad. They use caravels and that's about as specific as I know to be.
I do sort-of like the white-and-brown wood scheme that a couple of the Portuguese ships have;
even if that's not historically accurate, I think it's a nice colour scheme that's distinctly different from the other nations.
Then there's also the Portuguese ships that are generally not painted at all, but just display a lot of wood; I quite like that too.

As for the Spanish, they also seem to be using a fair amount of unpainted wood in their designs, along with the red-and-black which gets them confused with French ships.
Then obviously galleons are the main Spanish ship type. As for colour scheme, I quite like the SP_Pinnace50's colour scheme: red with unpainted wood and some gold touches here and there.
Alternatively, the San Felipe's black with unpainted wood looks rather nice and unique too.

If you compare only the French and Spanish SotL's with each other, it becomes apparent that we do need to actually decide on something sensible.
The two seem to both have pretty much the same colour scheme, with the French one being a bit brighter.
But that's a difference that you won't be able to detect in the game, so we might as well not have two different models for this altogether.

Anyway, what with my rambling, let's see if I can come up with a proposition as well:
- Portugal: White with unpainted wood like the PO_Manowar
- Spain: Red OR black with unpainted wood like the San Felipe or SP_Pinnace50

If we decide to go with something like this, the following ships will need to have their colours reworked:
PO_FastNavy
PO_SotL
SP_Battleship1
SP_Battleship2
SP_Frigate

The following nation-specific ships look fine to me and can stay as they are as far as I'm concerned:
SP_BattleGalleon
SP_Galeon50
SP_Pinnace50
PO_Caravel50
PO_Fleut50
PO_Manowar

Does the above make any sense at all? Or should I really just go to bed?

 

[Armada]

What you're suggesting does make sense, but only for certain time periods.
I think Portugal would be fine with the white and plain wood colours in the 16th/17th centuries, but is difficult to cater for in the 18th/19th centuries.
It's the last two periods that make things worse. All navies should use frigate-type ships by that time, and we've only ever seen frigates in yellow/black, yellow/blue, red/black or white/black.
Equally, the French colour scheme of blue and plain wood is more suited to the 16th/17th centuries, with red/black better for the 18th/19th centuries.

I know I'm basing this on my amateur guesswork 'knowledge', but it again leads back to the whole "navies use whichever colours they like" argument.
The trouble is that some colour schemes just don't look right on ships of certain time periods; imagine an 18th century frigate or warship in the same colours as the San Felipe or La Couronne...

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Absolutely valid points. The French light-wood with light-blue definitely looks "older" to me than the black-and-red which looks more modern to me.
We might have to make up a colour scheme for more modern Spanish and Portuguese frigate-type ships, just so we've got something to work with.
I suppose the unpainted wood look wouldn't match with a frigate-like ship type; on the other hand, we can give it a try and see whether we like it for more modern ships too.
The Boussole has a similar paint scheme and that's a frigate-like hull that looks pretty good with it as far as I'm concerned.

Since we seem to have done away with the yellow-and-blue for the British Royal Navy, maybe we can give that paint scheme to, say, Portugal?
Then for Spain...? Maybe yellow-and-red? That would match with the Fleuron's paint scheme, indicating her to be a Spanish ship and then the original Poseidon can be the French version.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Another thought for the clean-up that might help us decide on what to keep and what to lose is that maybe we should only keep those ships for which we've got a specific reason to keep her.
These reasons could be anything from "good model" or "good texture" or "game-play value/fills a gap in the ship line-up".
Basically, I'm thinking all ships and especially all re-textures should add something to the game rather than just "be there".

If you agree that this is a good way to go about this, we should start assigning reasons to all the ships in the game so we can decide which ones to lose.
Personally, with the incredibly huge size of the modpack, I wouldn't mind trimming quite a few of them if they don't serve much purpose. It might be harsh, but then so is a 2GB+ Build 14 Beta 2 download.
It probably IS going to be around that size even without Jack Rackham's new storyline, which I know is going to add a lot of content as well.
But anything we can do to control the damage of such a big file would be much appreciated as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Captain Armstrong]

all looks good to me,the red and yellow would be pretty accurate for spain too, http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/gallery-announcements/13288-santa-leocadia-1-96-shipyard.html my only concern would still be telling the difference between that and the french scheme, but I guess thats what flags are for. for the bare wood, I think it would look fine for frigates if the hulls were black in the same parts as in the black and yellow schemes, but had the bare wood texture along the gunports instead of the yellow.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I have nothing to add about paint schemes, but when you get serious about dropping ships I would not be surprised if as many as 50 ships go, starting with yacht1 and yacht2, 2 English Barks.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Do you think we should drop certain stock game ship models altogether? I agree the yachts aren't very brilliant, but should we lose them altogether?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Stock Game Battleship models: All four have got different figureheads and detailing.
If we use the Battleship5 additional detail with the Battleship4 skin, we manage to keep everything.

Stock Game Brig models: All five (if we include RN_Brig44) have got different figureheads, which is pretty cool.
Brig1 and Brig2 are pretty generic, while Brig3 and Brig3_44 both seem to have a colour scheme similar to the US black-and-white.
However, there is also the US_SloopofWar47 which is based on the same brig hull, with an even more obvious US colour scheme and yet another figurehead.
Do we need to keep all of the above? And what about the Brigantina? I recall liking to use that ship many years ago when I still played the game.

Stock Game Caravels: I suppose we can keep both original skins, since they're going to be in everyone's game anyway so there's no download size won by losing them.

Stock Game Corvettes: Corvette1 is the newly re-modeled version by Armada, which has a griffin figurehead.
Many of the original corvettes have got a panther figurehead. So which corvette skins do we want to keep? We've got rather a lot.
My choices would be:
Corvette1 is a nice stock game texture
Corvette2 is rather generic and I don't really care about keeping this one
Corvette3 has a weird colour scheme; drop this one
Corvette4_44 has a vaguely US colour scheme; use as US ship for real or drop this
Corvette5 has beautiful detailing; keep this one for sure!
Corvette5_44 has a vaguely RN colour scheme; however, RN_Light_Frigate also uses the corvette hull (Armada's updated version), so drop this

I think I'll go and adapt the other corvettes to Armada's new model and see how that turns out. I'll try to keep using their original figureheads.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Do you think we should drop certain stock game ship models altogether? I agree the yachts aren't very brilliant, but should we lose them altogether?

There are currently 2 European Barques and they are both quest ships. They are both looking good and updated versions are in my folder on the FTP.

Then there are the 4 English barques and the Jackass Barque. They all have the unicorn figurehead. Do we need 5 of these? Any ship named Jackass is a keeper! I was able to upgrade barques 3_50 and 4_47 and think they should stay.

But I had no such luck with the other 2 English barques, yacht 1 & 2. Their lateen is awful plus having 3 sails per mast on a ship that small is overkill. So I've copped an attitude for them similar to Batavia 1, a ship that I just cannot get the flags to work properly on.


About corvettes:

I don't like figureheads with parts dragging in the water. In reality they wouldn't last a month, so I'm partial to the panther.

I'm back working on Armada's tall masts for these ships part time and corvette 5_44 is my test mule. For some reason I like that flower on the stern.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If I recall, Seb never could edit the Yacht1 and Yacht2 model files either, resulting in them being pretty much the only stock game ships that do NOT have added detail.
That's quite unfortunate. On the other hand, we hardly gain anything by removing them from the game since players are already going to have the files for them anyway.

 

[Seb]

I didn't edit the Yachts, as well as the Xebecs, the manowars, the schooners, the schnyavas, the warships, and probably a few nation specific ships... And this work is stopped for and undertemined period of time

Since the last pack, I keeping having so much IRL priorities that I can't work on that at the moment ...

Searcher's life...