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    Maelstrom New Horizons


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Baltimore Steam Propulsion Laboratory

That's my mistake, not yours. Until Captain Maggee can include the proper files in a next patch,
just use the Build-default weathered sails. Then at least you'll have something.
Sorry about that. :facepalm
 
i thought napoleon said the idea of a steam engine on a ship was absolute nonsense?

anyway, i'd love to use it (without the modding factor involved), but i simply can't encounter it right now.
 
Modding? Shouldn't be required. But they're last-period only, so that's Hornblower quest.
With Captain Maggee's next patch, you'll be able to buy them from Vanderdecken as well.
 
The smoke from the steamships still has one very annoying problem left: when the ship starts moving,
the smoke doesn't come out of the stack anymore but from further aft.
Then it struck me that while I compensated the smoke emitting point for the ship's course, I didn't do this for pitch and roll.
As such, the smoke emitting point does not move according to the movement of the ship which makes for weirdish effects.

However, trying to fix this I just ended up totally confused on x,y,z and ax,ay,az and sin,cos,tan, etc.
The best I could come up with is that:
fX = Width and needs to be compensated for Course(fAY) + Roll (fAZ)
fY = Height and needs to be compensated for Pitch (fAX) + Roll (fAZ)
fZ = Length and needs to be compensated for Course(fAY) + Pitch(fAX)

Are there any rocket scientists around who are capable of figuring this out? Because I'm a bit lost now. :wacko:
 
More research led me to find that the smoke emitting point apparently moves backwards based on the relative wind.
If the wind comes from ahead, the point moves backwards and when the ship starts making speed, it moves backwards further.
As a temporarily "solution", I just shifted the point 2.5 forward which looks better at speeds than it did before.
Still not a proper fix by any stretch of the imagination. :modding
 
I may have just cracked the nut of proper steam propulsion! I executed the following line of code through console:
Code: 
PChar.Ship.Impulse.Rotate.z = 0.20;
This makes my barque go 10 knots. Regardless of wind direction, including against the wind. Without any sails. And she remains controllable. In other words: PROPER ENGINE POWER! :woot
 
SteamShip.jpg

Take note that this ship is sailing at 7.6 knots against the wind when this screenshot was taken. Note also that I was on Realistic Game Mode at the time!
She eventually built up to 10 knots as well on full sail and 5 knots at battle sails.

This is the code that I've got now in PROGRAM\SEA_AI\AIShip.c:
Code: 
			switch(sti(rCharacter.LastSailState))
{
case 0:
rCharacter.Ship.Impulse.Rotate.z = 0.0;
StackSteam(rCharacter, 2);
break;
case 1:
rCharacter.Ship.Impulse.Rotate.z = 0.1;
StackSteam(rCharacter, 4);
break;
case 2:
rCharacter.Ship.Impulse.Rotate.z = 0.2;
StackSteam(rCharacter, 8);
break;
}
It seems that 0.1 equals 5 knots and 0.2 equals 10 knots regardless of wind direction and regardless of the ship used.

Weird effects with using steam propulsion:
- The steamship does 7 knots instead of more than 10 when sailing WITH the wind, so the sails actually HINDER the ship. This may be due to the way she's set up in ships_init.c to mimic steam propulsion WITHOUT the engine power.
- Upon a Land Ho, the ship's speed drops down to what it would be with sails only and has to build up again; there probably is no way to retain the ship's speed on transition.

This means we could, in fact, make sailless ships that still work!
 
what if you'd revert the best wind direction back to that of ordinary vessels? i suppose 7 knots against the wind and 10+ with the wind would be pretty accurate, wouldn't it? or something like that. judging by the remaining hiccups, that seems what would happen if the favored wind direction would be from behind.
 
Guess what I did now? I've got engine propulsion 100% separate from the sail propulsion. You can increase power with [+] and decrease with [-].
This will add as appropriate to the speed already obtained from the wind. All I need to do now is to make things work ever so slightly nicer.

Morgan Terror said:
what if you'd revert the best wind direction back to that of ordinary vessels? i suppose 7 knots against the wind and 10+ with the wind would be pretty accurate, wouldn't it? or something like that. judging by the remaining hiccups, that seems what would happen if the favored wind direction would be from behind.
Click to expand...
Indeed putting the "BestPoint" code back to the Constitution default has some pretty believable results.
 
You know how the game makes a beautiful list of all locators in a land location in lcn.locators ?
That way, it is possible to add new locator types at land and have those used for whatever you feel like, such as the jetty ship locators we added in ports.
If we could figure out how to do the same at sea, we can do all sorts of amazing thing. Such as attaching particle systems to locators on ships.
Which I was wanting to use for the coordinates where the steam smoke starts, but could ALSO be used to attach lights to lamp locators on the stern of ships.
IMAGINE THAT! :woot

However, I cannot find such a thing at sea, which is really quite crappy. I was hoping to use this to interrogate that list. :modding
 
this is excellent news indeed. i'd still like to see my idea for introducing sound to the engine in-game some day though. just tell me if the soundbite attachements are no longer there. i might have some better ones for the engine by now.

i'm not entirely sure, but i think the streetlight particle effect looks almost identical to the AOP ship lanterns, if not exactly the same.
 
I once did some experimenting with light particles on ships, but for whatever reason, I couldn't make a particle effect looking like light at the time.
Indeed I recall using one of the street lights, but at sea it wouldn't appear properly while on land it does. At sea it ended up being black-and-white with a square around it. :modding
And attaching the particle effects to the ship is NOT easy. Though the steamship stack code certainly should help.
I may do some experimenting with this later on; something has to be possible and I never did finish.

Already ahead of you on the sound! :razz
 
if you have any new sound effects related to steam, i could actually use those. though i guess i could just wait for the patch if that's all you have.
 
Have a look at this picture, which shows the progress I made today:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/new-horizons/images/progress-on-steam-propulsion
 
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