Vanilla POTC

[Grey Roger]

I was indeed thinking of "vice versa". "Space" is, for me at least, also the "attack" button so as you yourself mention as well,
it could be quite annoying to accidentally reload to the next location when you pressed space right after the last enemy was killed.
So I'd imagine: F3 transfers to next location and Space does looting (as long as your sword is NOT drawn).
Would that be OK?

In general I'm happy the way it is, and most of the problems are basically me being careless and not making sure the right icon is showing before pressing F3. The check that you can't loot a body while pressing Space when your sword is drawn would certainly help, though.

All completely true, which is why I think the current worldmap is pretty much as good as we're ever going to get in PotC.
To use another, we'd need to rework the worldmap, add brand new islands and towns AND modify all the quests to still work with them.
That's a crazy amount of work! So let's not do it....

I don't think quests would need to be modified. Islands would need to have the same beaches as they have now, not least because every town needs a nearby beach if smuggling is to work properly. Islands which replace stock ones would presumably need to keep their stock ID's for code purposes, e.g. Barbados would still need to be Oxbay as far as code is concerned, and if all the beaches keep their original ID's then quests shouldn't notice the difference. New islands would presumably need to be accounted for in general quests such as cargo and escort, but storylines and sidequests shouldn't be affected.

Very true.
I do reckon the "Spanish" textures do look notably different from the "regular" textures.
If I recall, the stock game "Bonaire town" has been moved to Cayman and there's a Spanish textured version in Havana(?) and the actual Kralendijk has been retextured to look more Dutch.
Of course having unique models everywhere would be even better, but I do like that all our towns are at least not completely the same.

There are different texture folders "ENGLAND", "FRANCE", "HOLLAND" and "SPAIN" (but no "PORTUGAL", which means "Early Explorers" Barbados is still going to look English). So Cayman and Kralendijk have the same model but use "ENGLAND" and "HOLLAND" textures respectively. (There was a Spanish version in Havana. It's grown a bit. The little town district which looked like Kralendijk is now a huge VCO location. I wish I could have seen the face of anyone staying in the tavern when he woke up the next morning. )

The VCO ones are also good for variety, but unfortunately some of them do have a "scale issue" that isn't easily solved.

Volunteer needed to add some locators and make some of the extra buildings mean something. The hotel in Cartagena is a good start...

I'm really happy with that! I still remember how much time and effort it took us to sort that out.
But I think we even managed to sort it out in the end so that sign is correct in the Early Explorers period when the island is Portuguese and all the town names are different.
Of course if anyone decides to capture a town and rename it, it'll be wrong again. But there's nothing really to be done about that.

For one thing, Portugal has no business being there. Realistically it shouldn't be on Grenada either, but it has to have somewhere so that quests which require Portuguese involvement can work. If anyone had colonised Barbados at that time, it would have been Spain. Which means if I ever give the island to its rightful owners, I'll need to find out where the sign is textured and do a bit of repainting... As for renaming a town, the sign hasn't changed either because the new owner hasn't sent anyone to change it, or the sign-changer failed to complete the job because he met some highwaymen.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

There are different texture folders "ENGLAND", "FRANCE", "HOLLAND" and "SPAIN" (but no "PORTUGAL", which means "Early Explorers" Barbados is still going to look English). So Cayman and Kralendijk have the same model but use "ENGLAND" and "HOLLAND" textures respectively.

All true. Nobody ever bothered to make a "PORTUGAL" folder.

There was a Spanish version in Havana. It's grown a bit. The little town district which looked like Kralendijk is now a huge VCO location. I wish I could have seen the face of anyone staying in the tavern when he woke up the next morning.

Volunteer needed to add some locators and make some of the extra buildings mean something. The hotel in Cartagena is a good start...

Would admittedly be nice.

For one thing, Portugal has no business being there. Realistically it shouldn't be on Grenada either, but it has to have somewhere so that quests which require Portuguese involvement can work. If anyone had colonised Barbados at that time, it would have been Spain.

Can't remember by which logic we gave it to Portugal, but I like having it like that.
A little bit of "compensation" for the otherwise massive historical "discrimination" against Portugal in the modpack.

As for renaming a town, the sign hasn't changed either because the new owner hasn't sent anyone to change it, or the sign-changer failed to complete the job because he met some highwaymen.

 

[LarryHookins]

Oo, I forgot. One thing that really impressed me in New Horizons... I visited a lighthouse from the sea, not sure which one, but when I left I noticed the island 3D model matched the lighthouse location model. They have the same lighthouse area many places in TEHO, but nowhere does the 3D island model match the lighthouse. Most of the time, they don't even have a lighthouse in the island model!

I really mean it. I'd never seen the lighthouse from the sea before.

The TEHO lighthouse keeper has a lot of normal trade goods, he'll take orders for amulets (with a 2 month wait for delivery!), he buys bottles of rum at 10 times the normal price, and as for the washed ashore goods, how does a price of 40 for mahogany sound? Rum can occasionally be found at a street merchant who sells various medications.

There are specialized street merchants. One sells medications (including rum), another weapons, a third various magical items, and a fourth is a junk merchant for various items used in crafting. A fifth is a monk who deals in some specialty items. There's some overlap between the four on some stuff. Each one has amulets specific to that type of merchant. Each also carries random other goods. The store doesn't handle personal items at all, only trade goods. The banker buys gems and jewelry at better prices than the merchants.

You can only find officers sitting in taverns, one or two at a time and they're not usually there, so it can take forever to find a purser (quartermaster) to give you the price breaks needed for trading. They're often at a better level than the early officers we get in PotC. Without a purser, there are no profitable trades.

Officer loyalty is affected by reputations, and if you're a good guy hiring a bad guy, he won't stay around long, and vice versa. I've heard that if one of your officers leaves and you don't treat him well, he'll sign on to another ship which will come looking for you... but I always let my officers keep their weapons and gave them a bonus payment when they left. You have to have some officer turnover, as there's a maximum you can have and eventually you'll end up with a full ship of quest officers. The only officers who can accompany you on shore are boarder type officers.

One thing I like is that you can find sailors looking for work walking the streets, and they always have skills (sailing, cannons or boarding) which are tracked by the game. They're more expensive than sailors hired in the taverns, but do not affect your crew's morale. You can only hire the full group, and there are about 7 to 15 in a group. Oh, and you can overload your ship by 25% of the max crew size with some penalty to morale. Loading and unloading cargo doesn't take days, but hours.

There are a lot of good side quests. The harbormaster will ask you to haul mail, and after he trusts you he pays a lot for new missions, but those missions involve getting chased by ships or attacked on land. I had a few land fights where every citizen in 100 yards decided walking through the middle of the fight was a good idea. I had a few choice words for that one.

The church might have you deliver mail, find prayer books, and occasionally track down robbers. Some of these only pay a single cheap amulet, not even a rare one, others pay very well. Retrieving church manuscripts involved chasing some guy all over the Caribbean, but paid 4 chests of doubloons (60,000 gold). All of these gave a good reputation boost.

There are a large variety of Damsel In The Jungle quests. Rescue them from bad guys, get them away from guys who had paid for their company, one girl is looking for pearls for a necklace (gives a large reputation boost if you help her), one is a runaway daughter of one of the shopkeepers and you can either return her to her father or meet her fiance and take them to some far off island.

The shipwright wants you to find a stolen tool... this is where you can end up searching every house in town, or looking for the thief in the jungle if you haven't found him in the houses or on the street. The storekeeper has cargo to be delivered, but you don't have a map with the location marked... you either accept or decline. Governors want mail delivered. The storekeeper has a mission to get rid of bad guys who want to close him down; deal with the smuggler who sits in every tavern to complete this one. This one pays 35,000 for maybe a half hour of game play, which is a good payday for TEHO. A man approaches you on the street because his son has to fight a duel. This one puts you against a very high level opponent who can kill you in 2 hits, and it's always at the local lighthouse.

Didn't we used to be able to get a weather report, possibly from the harbormaster? I can't find it now.

Oh yeah, weather is randomized when you go to your ship from the dock, not when you enter and exit a building.

You might consider moving the TEHO discussion to its own thread as we're pretty far off topic.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Oo, I forgot. One thing that really impressed me in New Horizons... I visited a lighthouse from the sea, not sure which one, but when I left I noticed the island 3D model matched the lighthouse location model. They have the same lighthouse area many places in TEHO, but nowhere does the 3D island model match the lighthouse. Most of the time, they don't even have a lighthouse in the island model!

I really mean it. I'd never seen the lighthouse from the sea before.

That lighthouse was part of the stock game. I think it's been in the appropriate spot on Barbados (formerly Oxbay) ever since then.
It was relevant even back then, since that lighthouse serves an important role in the Standard Storyline of course.

I do believe that, apart from the rushed release, the developers put in a lot more effort to get things "right" on PotC than they did on any of the subsequent games.
Because they started pretty much from scratch and didn't copy any existing content from Sea Dogs at all.
On the other hand, every game after PotC has been based on what used to be the PotC code and, some more than others, have reused PotC resources as well.
So in a way, you could argue that every game released after PotC has been more a mod than a true, genuine new game.
Of course there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I dare say it is quite efficient! And we know very well just how much of a great base the original PotC truly is!

The TEHO lighthouse keeper has a lot of normal trade goods, he'll take orders for amulets (with a 2 month wait for delivery!), he buys bottles of rum at 10 times the normal price, and as for the washed ashore goods, how does a price of 40 for mahogany sound? Rum can occasionally be found at a street merchant who sells various medications.

What does rum DO in TEHO? Or is it just a regular "cargo good" and not a "rum item"?

A fifth is a monk who deals in some specialty items.

Seriously? That sounds VERY PotC Build Mod inspired!

In general though, I really like what you describe with the different types of item traders.
PotC could do much better in that respect.

You can only find officers sitting in taverns, one or two at a time and they're not usually there, so it can take forever to find a purser (quartermaster) to give you the price breaks needed for trading. They're often at a better level than the early officers we get in PotC. Without a purser, there are no profitable trades.

Indeed stock PotC also just had the "officers sitting in taverns". The mod added a lot of different ways to get them.
One of those ways being "talking to the tavern owner to ask for a certain type", which is specifically intended to prevent you the trouble from searching longer than you want to.
In TEHO, do officers "regenerate" between you leaving and entering the tavern on the same day?

Officer loyalty is affected by reputations, and if you're a good guy hiring a bad guy, he won't stay around long, and vice versa.

I want that in PotC too, dammit! I've had a great idea on how to make that work for well over a year now. And we've got most of the necessary underlying code already in place.
But because of all the bugs (and recently really busy real life), I still haven't gotten around to actually making that new feature a reality.

I've heard that if one of your officers leaves and you don't treat him well, he'll sign on to another ship which will come looking for you...

Really? Sounds cool!

You have to have some officer turnover, as there's a maximum you can have and eventually you'll end up with a full ship of quest officers.

Is the maximum that low?

The only officers who can accompany you on shore are boarder type officers.

Interesting!
In PotC, as it is now, you CAN take other types of officers ashore with you.
Whether that is wise though, is up for debate. It might be a bit pointless to do so.
But hey, who are we stop the player from doing it?

One thing I like is that you can find sailors looking for work walking the streets, and they always have skills (sailing, cannons or boarding) which are tracked by the game. They're more expensive than sailors hired in the taverns, but do not affect your crew's morale. You can only hire the full group, and there are about 7 to 15 in a group. Oh, and you can overload your ship by 25% of the max crew size with some penalty to morale. Loading and unloading cargo doesn't take days, but hours.

Cool!
The PotC Build Mod does have hireable sailors in the street, but ONLY if you tell some of your own sailors on your deck to follow you ashore.
That enabled the "Crewmembers on Shore" mod, which triggers some extra encounters.

Of course PotC considers any and all sailors as "just a number", so there's no difference between "good" and "bad" sailors.

Overloading your ship is cool too! I once was very close to allowing that in PotC with number of crew, plus cargo and cannon weight.
But that brought to light some new bugs that we couldn't quickly fix at the time, so that particular modification is disabled by default (though it IS still in the mod, ready for future use).

There are a lot of good side quests. The harbormaster will ask you to haul mail, and after he trusts you he pays a lot for new missions, but those missions involve getting chased by ships or attacked on land. I had a few land fights where every citizen in 100 yards decided walking through the middle of the fight was a good idea. I had a few choice words for that one.

The church might have you deliver mail, find prayer books, and occasionally track down robbers. Some of these only pay a single cheap amulet, not even a rare one, others pay very well. Retrieving church manuscripts involved chasing some guy all over the Caribbean, but paid 4 chests of doubloons (60,000 gold). All of these gave a good reputation boost.

So a lot of variety in RANDOM sidequests, then? That's definitely cool, that is!

Didn't we used to be able to get a weather report, possibly from the harbormaster? I can't find it now.

In PotC? No, we never had such a feature.
Would be nice for sure! Probably not so easy to add, though.

Or do you just mean "a log of the current weather"?

The storekeeper has cargo to be delivered, but you don't have a map with the location marked... you either accept or decline.

Just like stock PotC. That map is a mod-added feature. (And one I like very much!)

Oh yeah, weather is randomized when you go to your ship from the dock, not when you enter and exit a building.

PotC doesn't (usually) do that, right?

You might consider moving the TEHO discussion to its own thread as we're pretty far off topic.

I'm not too fussed. I think the original purposes has been served, but this is very interesting all the same!
I've always been curious about what TEHO offers that is different from earlier games.
There's been a lot of "urban myths" surrounding it (plus some incredible amount of trolling!) and a bit of very generic negative feedback.
But I like to know specifics!

 

[Jack Rackham]

I was and and still am FOR adding these VCO towns. They are really differentiated
from each other which you can't say about AOP/COAS towns. The stock POTC towns are
far more better in that aspect. I imported Tortuga as @Bartolomeu o Portugues and I both really liked it.

Some people like to sail for hours with directsail - some like to explore large towns.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I was and and still am FOR adding these VCO towns. They are really differentiated
from each other which you can't say about AOP/COAS towns. The stock POTC towns are
far more better in that aspect. I imported Tortuga as @Bartolomeu o Portugues and I both really liked it.

We talked about it at the time and, after some discussion, agreed to include them in the modpack. And I still fully support that.
I'll admit they're not 100% perfect, but neither is the alternative. I do prefer having them than to not have them.

 

[Talisman]

I imported Tortuga as @Bartolomeu o Portugues and I both really liked it.

While I generally like Tortuga - I don't like the very uniform texture/colour used for the buildings. I think they should have more variety.

The current colour is very grey/light green -grey -- it makes me think the town is in the Baltic rather than the Caribbean, especially when the game weather is anything less than bright sunshine.

A few darker colours plus some white stone for contrast would be good.

 

[Jack Rackham]

Well I did add some more color than the original VCO location had from a suggestion of @Pieter Boelen.
I didn't want to change it too much though - keep it sort of badly used or washed out jeans.

 

[LarryHookins]

Some people like to sail for hours with directsail - some like to explore large towns.

Point taken.

While I don't care much for Tortuga, it's a more interesting place to explore due to the layout. Fewer areas of open space. It has an industrial complex look about it, where people are making something that might destroy the building and they don't want to take other buildings with it.

I felt very much the same with the jungles in TEHO as I do with the large open towns during the TEHO tutorial. You have to complete a variety of quests before you even get your ship, and some of them require going through the jungle multiple times. At that point in the game, all the jungle goodies haven't been unlocked yet, and it's just a pointless trek. You might find a plant used later in crafting medicines, but they're worth 2-5 each... not worth the effort of stopping to pick up even in the early game. At one point you find yourself in a pirate colony with an hour to kill and usually don't have the option to pass time yet. At least if you decide to use that time to explore the town, you can find spawn points behind many of the buildings, and maybe a few good items.

If you haven't heard much about the TEHO tutorial, it's... a royal pain. All I really wanted to do was see what the sailing was like, and at the 4 hour mark I wasn't there yet and requested a refund. It was refused because I was past the 2 hour point for refund availability. It was 7 hours before I got my ship that first time. After a dozen new games and numerous replays of parts of the tutorial, I had the time down to just under 70 minutes to get my ship. There was no manual and not even a readme file, so you weren't even told what the key commands were. I eventually wrote one and posted it as a guide on Steam.
The only good thing about the tutorial was that by the time you were done, you'd done an example of pretty much everything in the game. Lots of quests, getting attacked when you left port, sailing to a nearby island, more quests there, sail back and talk to a character a second time, which unlocks the sandbox game and you have 3 game months to make a million pesos. But before then, you can't even hire replacement crew or repair your ship.

After the 3 months and a day, you have the option to do one of the three versions of the main storyline. These have considerable depth from what people told me. I started one, but went back to sandbox play. It's nearly impossible to have less than a million in three months... my highest was near 8 million, but most people won't play the way I did. The biggest difference in time passage between the two games was that cargo only took a few hours to load or unload. In PotC, with a gaff schooner with 90 crew and 1600 cargo, it can take days.

Hook

 

[LarryHookins]

@Pieter Boelen: Rum is the same as in PotC, I think. It can be used to heal wounds. Lots of those kinds of items, and my favorite is ginger root, which does some healing without side effects. I never experienced the side effects myself. There's also a rum cargo item.

The different items traders pay more to buy items in their specialty. Of course, they sell for more too.

There are monks wandering the streets as well, and they might have a quest, offer to bless your ship for a donation (which causes more crew to be available that the tavern in the next island and may raise morale), and eventually one you pay 50,000 to take aboard your ship who keeps morale higher and gives some bonuses to ship combat. It's unclear exactly how effective he is, but I always hired one when I found him. It's probably like having a permanent blessing.

The officers persist while you're in the town, at least for that day, but randomly generate the first time you enter the tavern when arriving in that town. You can get a different variety of tavern patrons by saving the game outside the tavern and reloading it.

I think the maximum is 10, and it's limited by one of your PIRATES attributes. Ten is enough to fill all officer slots and have a few boarders (max is 4 for them). Officers can serve more than one role on the ship with a perk, and you can have one officer filling up to 3 roles. You won't see that in early games. It's not so much that the slots are limited, but that there are that many quest officers to be found.

I remember getting a weather report, which included the current conditions and a short term forecast. I haven't played many RPG sailing games, so it almost had to be PotC.

The way weather is generated in PotC, I'm not sure a weather report would be that useful. The report I remember was just the current wind speed and direction, with a forecast of how it's changing and maybe some information on storms.

Edit: I ain't touching making a new weather system.

In PotC, weather used to be randomized quite a bit by going into a building. It's not so much any more, but fast travel to somewhere and back to the port will give you a good variety of randomization. I like that you can predict the wind speed by looking at what the grass is doing in port.

After getting my refund request turned down, I got over 800 hours in TEHO. I like both games, and prefer PotC. I can answer most any question except those about the storyline quests, so feel free to ask. If you have any urban myths you want confirmed or dispelled, I can help.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If you haven't heard much about the TEHO tutorial, it's... a royal pain. All I really wanted to do was see what the sailing was like, and at the 4 hour mark I wasn't there yet

Wow!
As much as I think a good tutorial is worth having, a "skip tutorial" option is ALSO worth having.

The biggest difference in time passage between the two games was that cargo only took a few hours to load or unload. In PotC, with a gaff schooner with 90 crew and 1600 cargo, it can take days.

Sometimes PotC gives hours, sometimes days. I've often wondered how that can be, but never bothered to investigate.
Of course stock PotC didn't bother adding time for that at all, so that's all mod-added features.

Rum is the same as in PotC, I think. It can be used to heal wounds.

Really? That's a bit of a shame; I had hoped rum items would do something a bit more clever, because actual rum is not much of a health item.
Rather the opposite.

The officers persist while you're in the town, at least for that day, but randomly generate the first time you enter the tavern when arriving in that town. You can get a different variety of tavern patrons by saving the game outside the tavern and reloading it.

At least when they're generated, they stick around for a day. That's an improvement over PotC, I reckon.

I remember getting a weather report, which included the current conditions and a short term forecast. I haven't played many RPG sailing games, so it almost had to be PotC.

Current conditions are shown as on-screen log when you have a compass equipped, but only at sea and in port (because there's no real use for it further inland).
But a forecast was never in the game, because the future weather is quite random anyway.

The way weather is generated in PotC, I'm not sure a weather report would be that useful. I'm playing with the idea of implementing an actual weather system, with low and high pressure areas, which will determine wind speeds and directions and the locations of storms, with trade winds included. At that point a weather report would include "There's a low pressure area northwest of Martinique" and sailing into the center of a pressure cell would include the possibility of calm winds. I'll have this completely designed before I write a line of code, and play it through in my head a lot. I'll also adjust it to be playable as a game.

That would be COMPLETELY EPIC!
Especially if you add in the concepts of "trade winds", "land and sea breezes" and moving high/low pressure areas that result in calm weather/storms/rain!

In PotC, weather used to be randomized quite a bit by going into a building. It's not so much any more, but fast travel to somewhere and back to the port will give you a good variety of randomization. I like that you can predict the wind speed by looking at what the grass is doing in port.

True, that.

After getting my refund request turned down, I got over 800 hours in TEHO. I like both games, and prefer PotC. I can answer most any question except those about the storyline quests, so feel free to ask. If you have any urban myths you want confirmed or dispelled, I can help.

The main "urban myth" was about actual DirectSail functionality in any game that isn't PotC with the Build Mod.
I'm now pretty much convinced that no other game in the series has that feature (in fact, the developers of CoAS told us it was impossible within the game engine, even though we had it working for years).
It just SEEMS that way because the individual island models have the entire Caribbean in them.

Other than that, the other "urban myth" that I've heard is very generic feedback that "SD:TEHO is bad".
But in what ways it is bad and what things are actually GOOD about it has been a mystery to me.
Until now!

 

[LarryHookins]

You can look at the real Caribbean winds here:

Windytv, wind forecast

I edited my post, didn't notice you'd already posted. I don't think I want to mess with the weather system, at least at this time.

As far as I can tell, the cargo loading times are reasonable in PotC. The problem with that schooner is the low crew and high cargo capacity.

TEHO has nothing whatsoever like direct sail. While you can see a few nearby islands, and you can actually sail to where they are, there's nothing there but the textured land mass. No trees, no towns, most importantly no ability to moor, although I did see a ship once. The map is divided into invisible island regions, and you have to cross a region boundary in the world map or the game puts you back at the point where you crossed it when you go back to your ship. So, one time I sailed from one island past another intending to get to a third island. That island wasn't there when I got close, and when I went to the world map I was back at the boundary between the first and second islands.

I did all of my sailing on the deck of the ship, and eventually had navigating the region boundaries down to an art and a science. Every hour I'd note how fast I'd gone, add the values up to get nautical miles travelled (a NM was actually about 320 yards for that scale) and I knew where the boundaries were. I'd go to the world map just in time to cross the boundary. At least that's what I intended; sometimes it didn't work quite as well as I've described. When I went back to the deck of my ship, I'd be in the new island region. Eventually I had a copy of the sea background for the world map with the regions marked, and this made it easier. All this took a tremendous amount of planning and bookkeeping, but it was pure dead reckoning and I enjoyed it.

Attached is a map showing the borders. The grid is 15,000 yards on a side. The blank areas top and left are so I could use a grid function in photoshop to help draw the borders. Many of the empty regions would have islands in them at some point in the quests.

The world map did not always match the 3D islands very well. Shapes were right, placement might not be. The mainland was a major problem, although you could sail to all the locations marked on the map. Sailing between Puerto Rico and Hispaniola could get weird.

I think a lot of the negative feedback came from people who had fonder memories of playing COAS than the game actually deserved. As if you could compare a heavily modded game to a stock one. I don't think I ever saw negative remarks about TEHO from the PotC community, only from the COAS community, and you know what that one can be like.

I suspect a lot of complaints came from people who hit the tutorial and never finished it. Some were from people who actually got into the sandbox, but decided TEHO didn't compare well to the mods for COAS. Because of that tutorial, TEHO does not make a good first impression on anyone who has played other games in the series, although I doubt it's worse than COAS's Captain Blood storyline. The developers have acknowledged that the tutorial is a problem and new DLC will have a different one.

TEHO does a lot of things right. Islands you can see in the distance, ship lighting at night, the sun and moon actually move across the sky, trees on the islands when you're sailing. Storylines with a lot of depth. The various info screens give you a lot more information, and there's no horizontal scrolling, it's all vertical. The controls are better in my opinion. The game doesn't crash enough to worry about. The land combat system is more detailed.

Other things I liked less. I was constantly saving my game just to keep from getting quests I didn't want. The sailing model was bizarre. I was constantly wishing for direct sail, but that's not TEHO's fault. The music and dialog... I eventually muted both... neither is very good. "Land has become Wery Waluable in our day and age." The sailing music not only isn't very good, but it plays continuously, and there's only one version for day and another for night. Probably a lot more but I'm not here to rag on TEHO: it's a good game.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I think a lot of the negative feedback came from people who had fonder memories of playing COAS than the game actually deserved. As if you could compare a heavily modded game to a stock one.

Has CoAS actually been heavily modded to the same level as the PotC Build Mod?
From what I saw back in the days, it was only ever "adding more content" and never really thoroughly reworking any substantial game systems.
Maybe indeed it has now been taken further somewhere else though. I wouldn't know, because:

I don't think I ever saw negative remarks about TEHO from the PotC community, only from the COAS community, and you know what that one can be like.

Actually, I DON'T know what "the COAS community" is like. Apart from what CoAS community used to exist here at PiratesAhoy!
But I think there is now another and I have completely and utterly avoided that.
If it is anything there like it is here when some of their members come pester us again, then I really have zero intention of ever going anywhere near that place.

The sailing music not only isn't very good, but it plays continuously, and there's only one version for day and another for night.

Did they not reuse the music from PotC/AoP/Sea Dogs like in past games?

Probably a lot more but I'm not here to rag on TEHO: it's a good game.

No need. I'm not actually very interested in what's wrong with it. What's right with it is far more interesting to me!

Attached is a map showing the borders.

I'm surprised by how much that maps differs from the actual Caribbean!
Seems pretty much in line with the PotC Build Mod as far as real-life accuracy is concerned.
Looks like they added an extra island and Jamaica is nowhere near that position.
Doesn't matter for gameplay, of course. And I'm fine with the PotC map as well.
But for some reason, I though the newer AoP-based games, especially after CoAS, were really quite accurate with their worldmap.

 

[LarryHookins]

I believe their extra island is supposed to be Bermuda. Aside from the location of Jamaica, the map matches the real world quite well, and the islands are the correct shape. I think this is basically the same map from COAS.

These maps all need to be marked, "Not to be used for real world navigation."

I don't know how much if any music was reused in TEHO. The sailing music for both day and night is new. I quickly got sick of it and muted it, so I don't hear other music either. In PotC, the only music I've changed are the two additional night sailing music themes. I like all the other music and dialog, and never considered turning them off. I doubt there could be any music from TEHO that you might want to reuse in PotC.

I knew from the earliest days that AoP2 modding wasn't going to go well. The gatekeeper for the engine source code made a rather nasty comment about only letting very few people have access, not for the quite legitimate reason that you won't want a bunch of amateurs tracking mud through the code, but because, in his words, some modders were badmouthing others. Actually, the comment never needed to be made, and if it ever was, it should have been a lot more tactful.

I don't know where COAS modding went after that, except that there was quite a bit of drama and bad blood, and now there are two mod versions. I had a look at another site and it didn't give me a good feeling, although I'll probably brave those waters eventually.

The only reason I bought a new in the box copy of COAS ($50+) is because someone on Steam said one of the mods had directsail. Then EBay screwed up, charged me 2 transaction fees, charged me in a foreign currency, then spammed my inbox 2-3 times a day for other stuff. COAS remains on my desk, uninstalled, but I've gone so far as to get a no-cd file, not because I'm a pirate or that I mind having to have the cd in the drive to play the game, but to prevent getting Starforce on my computer... even if the version I have isn't supposed to have Starforce. I'm adamant about Starforce, and I'll go so far as to refuse to buy from any publisher who has ever used it even if they aren't currently... take note, Ubisoft: you only get to screw up ONE computer.

If I'd realized at the time that COAS had Starforce in any version of the game, I'd never have bought it. As it is, I'm sorry I did.

That won't keep me from eventually installing and playing it. I can't know at this point whether I'll like it, and it does allow modding, so it can't be all bad.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That won't keep me from eventually installing and playing it. I can't know at this point whether I'll like it, and it does allow modding, so it can't be all bad.

In theory at least, CoAS is a TREMENDOUSLY AWESOME base for further modding work.
Especially considering we do actually have the actual game engine code available (e.g. the files used to create ENGINE.exe and the contents of the MODULES folder).
What we don't have is anywhere near the manpower to make anything happen. Let alone a person in charge to carry such an effort.

It could very well be that the only reason PotC carried (carries?) on as long as it did (does?) is because I've been around for the past 10 years, nudging things along.
Though I could also be giving myself too much credit there as indeed this past half a year I've done very little indeed and thankfully @Grey Roger has been stepping in now!

But I do think neither AoP nor CoAS ever had anyone pulling the modding effort like I did on PotC.
And I simply could never afford to split my efforts. And so it remains a missed opportunity.

 

[LarryHookins]

Ok, where the hell is my last post?

Synopsis: I installed and played COAS for about an hour. It appears to be TEHO with different content. The controls are the same as TEHO, there are trees on the islands when viewed from the sea, the graphics are similar. The lighting is correct indoors, a big difference from New Horizons. I don't know if I'll need constant use of my gamma adjuster program like I did in TEHO, and only needed in PotC for indoors and some town lighting conditions.

I was able to play most of the game with just the mouse: moving, dialogs, doors, etc. The character runs a lot faster than what we see in PotC, and no frame rate limiter is needed.

I didn't allow the game to install various drivers, so sound is messed up. I'm not needing the cd, so the extra file worked.

The first time I played TEHO, I thought that if we had that engine and the mods for PotC, it would be just about perfect. Since we can't mod TEHO, it looks like COAS is a good candidate for that game.

Hook

 

[LarryHookins]

Turns out it wasn't the DirectX driver needed for the sound problem Setting UseMM = 0 in engine.ini fixed it.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

What's wrong with the lighting in PotC?
It is quite easy to change that per location if necessary:
Guide - Generating Location Lighting Files (.COL) | PiratesAhoy!

 

[LarryHookins]

For the post part, PotC lighting is perfect. Like I said, I didn't have to adjust gamma on the fly constantly like I did in TEHO.

But some of the interior locations are very dark. One that's far too dark is the store at Governor's Harbor in Eleuthera. It's the starting location for America freeplay.

Thanks for the info on how to fix it.

Hook

 

[Pieter Boelen]

But some of the interior locations are very dark. One that's far too dark is the store at Governor's Harbor in Eleuthera. It's the starting location for America freeplay.

Should be fairly easy to change that.
If you do change it, feel free to upload the files for the next modpack update.