Low Priority 3D Sailing Mode: Various boxsize errors

[morgan terror]

I reckoned this counted as a single bug, since they're identical in nature. I ran across these messages in game once, and thought i'd report them:

AICannon: CrHispaniola6 with ship type PiratBrig50 has no boxsize! (including typo)
AICannon: CrHispaniola6 with ship type Schooner50 has no boxsize!

Found in build 14 beta 3. Fresh install, straight out of the download recommended in the build mod FAQ.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Can anyone confirm this for those ships in the Beta 4 base?

 

[morgan terror]

I should probably mention i encountered them in the Sea Hawk storyline, since that might help with encountering those ships. Which time period is that?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I should probably mention i encountered them in the Sea Hawk storyline, since that might help with encountering those ships. Which time period is that?

4th one, Colonial Powers.

What I wonder about is if that ALWAYS happens for those ships; or if this issue is of a more random nature....

 

[morgan terror]

4th one, Colonial Powers.

What I wonder about is if that ALWAYS happens for those ships; or if this issue is of a more random nature....

What are those ships called in-game? I can't find them in the ships list. If i knew, i could keep an eye out for those ships even when i don't encounter the error message. It's a bit slow though.

 

[jsv]

AICannon: CrHispaniola6 with ship type PiratBrig50 has no boxsize! (including typo)

PiratBrig is not exactly a typo, it's Runglish. In Russian, "pirate" is "пират" (pirat). There are legions of those "pirat"es in Akella code.
The same thing with "data" used occasionally instead of "date".

 

[morgan terror]

PiratBrig is not exactly a typo, it's Runglish. In Russian, "pirate" is "пират" (pirat). There are legions of those "pirat"es in Akella code.
The same thing with "data" used occasionally instead of "date".

Fair enough. If it's russian though, that ship could be quite old. You'd think the isssue would have been found sooner in that case, or somebody simply copied the naming scheme. Or it got imported from another russian game, like CoAS.

I've had a thought here: What if the problem isn't with the ships, but hispaniola? That would certainly be easier to check.
Also, sorry about the double posts. I don't know what's causing it, but it should stop once i'm posting from back home again.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

PiratBrig50 was named by me; the Russians had nothing to do with that...
It is the stock game Brig with a piratey paint scheme done by our own @Petros.

Easiest way to find their ingame names:
- Open PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h and set ENABLE_CHEATMODE to 1 at the bottom
- Open the Select Storyline interface, select the Standard storyline and click your Ship
- Type that ID you got in the search box; I think that will return the ship you're looking for

Otherwise, you'd have to find the ship in ships_init.c and find its refShip.Sname line.
Then check common.ini to see what display name goes with that.

Also, sorry about the double posts. I don't know what's causing it, but it should stop once i'm posting from back home again.

I'll just keep removing them. When I've got crappy internet, I tend to create a lot of double posts too.

 

[jsv]

PiratBrig50 was named by me; the Russians had nothing to do with that...

I stand corrected... but not entirely convinced. Are you absolutely certain you are not a Russian programmer from late 1990s? That's exactly the kind of naming scheme one of those would use.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I stand corrected... but not entirely convinced. Are you absolutely certain you are not a Russian programmer from late 1990s? That's exactly the kind of naming scheme one of those would use.

Pretty sure I'm Dutch.

Can't remember why we went with "Pirat" instead of "Pirate".
It is the default nation prefix we came up with, just like "RN_", "HMS_" (England gets two ), "FR", "NL", etc.

And back in the early days, to avoid different modders overwriting each other's work, they were all assigned numbers. For example, 47 is @Thomas the Terror and 50 is @Petros.
But eventually we didn't have some many people doing stuff at the same time, so now we don't really use that anymore.

 

[morgan terror]

PiratBrig50 was named by me; the Russians had nothing to do with that...
It is the stock game Brig with a piratey paint scheme done by our own @Petros.

Easiest way to find their ingame names:
- Open PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h and set ENABLE_CHEATMODE to 1 at the bottom
- Open the Select Storyline interface, select the Standard storyline and click your Ship
- Type that ID you got in the search box; I think that will return the ship you're looking for

Otherwise, you'd have to find the ship in ships_init.c and find its refShip.Sname line.
Then check common.ini to see what display name goes with that.

I had no idea you could even select your starting ship that way. These things should really be made more clear somehow.

At any rate, PiratBrig50 is the three-masted one, called the sloop of war. I think it's the one used by Claire Larrouse in fact, which is interesting, since having her in my party does not yield the same error. Could be a reskin though. I've made a screenshot of both that ship and the schooner that gave the same error:



I'll now do some experimenting to see if i can replicate the bug.

 

[morgan terror]

I've tried the following:

Sailed out of port with PiratBrig50 and shot at the french fleet.
Sailed to hispaniola and shot at both forts.

Neither yielded the error message. I'm not sure what else to try other than keep an eye out for when it happens again.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I had no idea you could even select your starting ship that way. These things should really be made more clear somehow.

I'm pretty sure the Select Storyline interface has a text saying "click anything to customize". When it says that, it means it.
That text changes depending on the storyline; some say "some/all customization options locked", for example.

If you've got any further suggestions on how to make it more obvious, I'm all ears.

At any rate, PiratBrig50 is the three-masted one, called the sloop of war. I think it's the one used by Claire Larrouse in fact, which is interesting, since having her in my party does not yield the same error. Could be a reskin though.

Indeed Claire does use specifically THAT model.

I've tried the following:

Sailed out of port with PiratBrig50 and shot at the french fleet.
Sailed to hispaniola and shot at both forts.

Neither yielded the error message. I'm not sure what else to try other than keep an eye out for when it happens again.

So that suggests that whatever is going on, it is inconsistent indeed. Which makes figuring it out really very annoying.

Did the fort shoot back at you? That boxsize error gets specifically triggered by firing ON that ship; not when firing FROM it.
Actually, it may only occur when the PLAYER fires ON that ship.

The simplest way to test that hypothesis is to use console to give yourself a companion with that ship, then use cheatmode to set yourself to Hero and the companion to Bloody Terror.
It won't be long before that companion then turns hostile, allowing you to test to your heart's content.

 

[morgan terror]

I'm pretty sure the Select Storyline interface has a text saying "click anything to customize". When it says that, it means it.
That text changes depending on the storyline; some say "some/all customization options locked", for example.

If you've got any further suggestions on how to make it more obvious, I'm all ears.

What i would have expected to see is a highlight when you mouse over it. That's what most people come to expect from an interface like that, i'd imagine. Most menus in the game do already have this functionaility, so it should be possible to copy over some code from somewhere.

So that suggests that whatever is going on, it is inconsistent indeed. Which makes figuring it out really very annoying.

Did the fort shoot back at you? That boxsize error gets specifically triggered by firing ON that ship; not when firing FROM it.
Actually, it may only occur when the PLAYER fires ON that ship.

The simplest way to test that hypothesis is to use console to give yourself a companion with that ship, then use cheatmode to set yourself to Hero and the companion to Bloody Terror.
It won't be long before that companion then turns hostile, allowing you to test to your heart's content.

It did shoot back, as did the fleet. What i can still try is shoot at claire. I've got a savegame for it.

 

[morgan terror]

Nope. Nothing. I do think it's really cool how her flag turned pirate though. That was a nice touch. I do have some logs, but no error log.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Another easy way to identify ships is to look them up in GMViewer as they are named like that there.

 

[morgan terror]

I've had the boxsize error again, this time at 'Redmond':



The only logfile this seems to show up in is the compile log.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Seems to me like it happens seemingly randomly. It may or may not do it for the very same ship model.
Which means that the game may somehow be "losing" the boxsize information somehow.

Agh, really have no clue what is going on there....

 

[morgan terror]

Seems to me like it happens seemingly randomly. It may or may not do it for the very same ship model.
Which means that the game may somehow be "losing" the boxsize information somehow.

Agh, really have no clue what is going on there....

Yeah. Maybe it's got something to do with how the ships are loaded or something, i don't know. I'm not really sure how i could help solve this any further, unless i can somehow define what kind of group it exactly is. I suspect that the ships giving that error are all part of the same group, you see. The one i opened this topic with were all pirates, and these were all british.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Yeah. Maybe it's got something to do with how the ships are loaded or something, i don't know. I'm not really sure how i could help solve this any further, unless i can somehow define what kind of group it exactly is. I suspect that the ships giving that error are all part of the same group, you see. The one i opened this topic with were all pirates, and these were all british.

So far, they all seem to be "Coast Raiders", e.g. the random ships surrounding islands.
You can sell by the "Cr" before the island name in those log messages.

As far as I can tell, these issues don't actually do any notable harm in the game.
So I'll just mark this as "Low Priority" for now.