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Included in Build Additional Select Storyline Customization Options

Pieter Boelen

Pieter Boelen

Navigation Officer
Administrator
Storm Modder
Hearts of Oak Donator
There are still two things that should ideally be added to the Select Storyline interface.

1. Ability to change STARTING DATE and therefore play a storyline in whatever time period you want.
No coding has been done on its, but it is a very important feature to have!

2. Ability to change whatever STARTING LOCATION you want.
Some coding has already been done for this, allowing you to click on different spots of the archipelago map.
However, this is not a very important feature as far as I'm concerned.
After all, wherever you start, you won't be staying there. So it doesn't make a lot of difference in the end.
 
And with that comes all the exceptions. Some storylines shouldn't be possible to change.
 
Absolutely, completely and utterly agreed!
In fact, the exceptions are already programmed in. Just check your WoodesRogers.c file:
Code: 
sl.(sn).start.date.lock = true;
What is NOT programmed in is a way to actually change it at all! :rofl
 
I wonder how much work it would be to add some Left/Right arrows around the Starting Date in the Select Storyline interface.
Shouldn't be that hard, really.... And I would very much like to be able to include this in the next release too if at all possible!
It is basically one of the last huge gaps in our features. It would also allow us to do some cleaning up in our available storylines.
 
From my side, this is easily the most important feature wish that I have for Beta 3.5 .
Shame it could not be finished in time for Beta 3.4 but it MUST be in the next release!

@Levis: Would you be able to easily add working Left/Right arrows around the date in the Select Storyline interface?
I could probably figure out how to make the actual period change take effect when you press those buttons if necessary.

This feature would allow us to do a massive cleaning up of the available storylines.
Additionally, I am hoping to merge the various opening together in one single story and have them be player-type dependent.
 
Selectable date will be in the next release
 
This is a definite must for Build 14 and cannot be left until Build 15.
 
Right, this might be even higher on my list and as soon as the rc candidate is uploaded I will try to do this first so people can start finding problems with it.
 
Thanks a lot! :woot

If you can add the buttons, I may be able to do some finishing on it too. I've done a fair bit of stuff in Select Storyline already to make it work.
 
For further reference, this is what I intend to do:
1. Allow changing of storyline start YEAR (unless locked)
2. Delete all "generic" Free Play storylines
3. Attempt to work various storylines with only an opening into one single storyline where your choices define the opening

Especially #3 may get a bit complicated, but I reckon it ould clean things up quite nicely.

We should discuss this a bit before we go ahead and do it, though.
For example:

- Can we merge Brave Black Flag with the Standard Storyline?
Since the one is a near carbon-copy of the other (with main quest disabled), I see no reason why not.
Brave Black Flag can be what you get when you select PIRATE as starting nation.

- Can we merge Jack Aubrey/Horatio Nelson with the Standard Storyline?
This may be difficult as the Standard storyline already starts with the player being English.
Perhaps there should be a "Generic Navy Free Play" storyline where the player type or character model selected defines whether you get the Jack Aurbrey or Horatio Nelson opening.

- Can Devlin Opera be merged with anything?
I don't think so, since the opening sets the scene for quite a substantial and potentially unique quest.
It just has to be made....

- Can La Croix be merged with anything?
Tough choice. It does actually have the best opening to a Free Play storyline.
If we merge this, we can either merge it with Jack Aubrey/Horatio Nelson and make one single "No tutorial and Free Play only" storyline.
Alternative would be to merge with the Standard Storyline, but that probably would not work out so well.

- What reasons can be thought of to have a separate navy and non-navy storyline available?
Especially since Hornblower will remain, of course?
 
I'm still a bit hesitant as to whether it's a good idea to remove all the Free Play starts - or rather stick them into one. The reason for them being there in the first place was, I assume, that we wanted to have at least one start in each period. Now, if you let people choose their starting year freely that'll make that redundant; this in turn might lead to some other problems though, wouldn't it mess with the historical accuracy of the nation relationships for example?
 
The only period-related issues you might have when changing the year is when a storyline assumes it takes place in a certain time frame.
For example, placing Hornblower in Early Explorers would make no logical sense at all.

Other than that, pretty much everything hangs on the starting date and is not related to the storyline at all.
Therefore on a full Free Play storyline, changing the starting date changes the entire game world to match and make sense.

In other words, national relationships would be correct even if you change the starting date.
Assuming that no "overrides" are in place in the storyline file, but that should not be the case for a generic Free Play storyline.

I think that ideally I would like to put Brave Black Flag together with the Standard Storyline as Pirate starting choice.
Then one additional Free Play Only storyline should suffice, I think.

La Croix would be the odd duck out, since that one does contain story elements that may not match with a every single time period.
Still not entirely sure how to handle that one, so suggestions would be welcome.
 
But most of the Free Play protagonists are known fictitious/historical characters. Playing as Jean Lafitte in the 1600s or Jack Aubrey in the 1500s doesn't make much sense.
It's all about the setting, ship, and officers that belong to a specific character and time. For example my Nelson start involves quite some research to find as close to the exact set of officers/crewmen that he'd have had in his first command (HMS Badger) - in that specific year.

I'd much rather have a completely free "standard storyline", where you can choose exactly what starting date, what ship, etc. etc. you want - and then leave the historical/famous character starts as is.

So unless there's a way to initialise a pre-made start by picking the portrait of, say, Jack Aubrey or Jean Lafitte, I can't see what we'd benefit from removing them from the new game screen. Of course it would be nice if they were expanded upon, maybe making a short introductory quest and adding some characters from their story, but in general leave it to the player to decide what to do after that.

What I meant with the possibility of messing up the accuracy of the nation relations when allowing complete freedom in the choice of starting date was that there can be quite a change even within the select periods. Not that they're 100% correct now, but this new option would underline the problem even more. To take an example, the last period is 1790-1830 and obviously there'd be huge variance in who's at war with who - if you want to start during the War of 1812, you pick a suitable date but unless there's a storyline file telling that England should be at war with the U.S. the game will just pick the default values and thus ignoring the war. If you want to support Napoleon as a Danish captain after Denmark's entrance in the war in 1807, (supposing the Danish nation has been added) this won't be possible without alterations to the default relations either.
 
Jean Lafitte is just a name that we threw together since we needed *something* for the last time period free play.
Dropping him makes no difference. His model isn't even unique; it was intended for a character in the Assassin storyline.
And Jack Aubrey has nothing special either, other than a model and a ship. We lose hardly anything by dropping him.

I mentioned before that linking certain presets to character model choices should be possible.
So we could still do that.

But other than that, if you can already customize everything you want to in the game,
I see no point in having a lot of separate presets all side by side.
As far as I'm concerned, the actual behind-the-scenes quest coding must be different for a storyline to warrant its existence.
If it isn't, we should merge them together to make different starting choices actually be as different as possible.

Completely spot-on nation relations are nearly impossible to accomplish anyway. All wars and peace treaties would have to be pre-programmed.
While you can simulate that for an actual storyline, having it in Free Play doesn't really work.
We deliberately cut the game into separate periods to make things simpler to handle, since doing everything by year becomes even more complex.

With any Free Play storyline, Changing Nation Relations is always ON anyway. So whatever the starting relations might be, they won't stay the same.
Once Levis gets into creating a more dynamic game world, this will only get better. And eventually the hope is to have a believable progression.

Recreating a history that has already happened doesn't really work well within a game. The way I always look at it is that when you play the game,
you are transported back in time and get to witness and participate in creating a whole new history.
It is the player choices that shape the game world, along with random events of course.
 
@Levis, how hard would it be for you to add the buttons to make this work?
I can probably sort out some of the functionality, but I think you are much better with the interfaces themselves than me. :wp
 
Won't be that hard :).
 
Cool! Any chance you could get to that some time soonish?
Then I can get started on sorting out the starting customization options within the storylines, since that will be the beginning of a fairly involving project....
 
Pomptidomtidom.

Here you go @Pieter Boelen
To make it look nice I had to remove the box which showed the start location. But customizing this was disabled everywhere already I believe so that's no real problem I guess.

Guys let me know if you can break it, and what should be the max date you can start? Now its the end date of the last period but I guess we want it to be sooner right?
 

Attachments

  • CUSTOM_START_DATE.zip
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we might need to disable this for some storylines, but I dont know for sure. @Bartolomeu o Portugues and @Jack Rackham do you think that's needed? If so which variable should say its locked or not?
 
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