WIP Black Barts Playtesting thread for Build 14 Beta 4 WIP (ver:18 Jan 2016)

[Black Bart]

So i think i did something like this in previous testings, and the main purpose is to get that view from the outside (i've not been involved in the Build Mod for a long while, but know it pretty well (as in where and why it started etc)), and have a place for me to throw down things i'm noticing and possible suggestions to perhaps improve some things?

Many of the things i list may already be in the bug tracker, this is just a catch-all list of stuff to help me (mostly) get a feel of where we are at in this build.

Anyway i've only had this latest build for a few hours play-testing so far and these are my current findings:

Bug/Issue:

1. The playership icon in the 'Ships' tab sometimes does not display (currently the Heavy Lugger is a greyish blank tile for me). XP as OS only issue

2. (in Speightstown) The Officers for hire at the upstairs table often sit sideways and thus clip half-way through the table. I think this is related to them sometimes also now appearing on that table downstairs nearest the stairs in the tavern which has a different orientation. Fixed in latest patch

3. Had one corrupt save creation issue, i think that was because i tried to delete my latest save 'before' creating the new one. I think this is an old issue we have had before and not sure how to fix that? old issue due to deleting you last latest save before making the newest one.

4. In the new free play mode, it would be nice to have all the characters names displayed somewhere in their description text perhaps (maybe as a bold/underlined title to the text)? As it is if you are not familiar with their historical outline it is impossible to know exactly whom it is you might be picking before you do so. potential fix underway

5. In the upgrade path for 'Abilities' it is sometimes hard to tell what the pre-requisite skills are due to the large padlock symbol over them. That symbol could maybe made smaller, or those skills mentioned in the text for the specific ability you are looking at that has those pre-requisites? Affected: All trade upgrades, Advanced smuggling, Musket vollay, Master of boarding. potential fix underway

6. In direct sail from Barbados to Martinique, the land for Barbados is still clearly visable when you get the land ho! loading screen to load in Martinique. They seems a bit close to one another in the direct sail mode? I know all the map has changed, but i seem to remeber we had it work a little more smoothly on the transitions between islands, so it seems the distances have been shortened perhaps? This is adjusted in internalsettings.h file

7. Confirmed that active Officers are not getting XP, and in general some balance may need to be applied to XP as in my trip to Jamaica and back my char has got to level 8 and skill of 5 in sailing just from the journey! My active Navigator recieved zero XP (his skill % is the same as when i hired him) for sailing. fix available, balance needs looking at perhaps

8. Ability ''cooking lessons': This Officer won't contribute this perk to the ship. Your food consumption per day will be reduced with 10%

Should this be: This Officer won't contribute this perk to the ship, so their food consumption per day will be reduced by 10%?

A few abilities are phrased like this (in that the Officer won't contribute to the ship) but then it is sometimes not clear how it will be applied?

9. in the passenger list for officers, when you want to change an officers role, you don't have the 'master at arms' rank, and using 'remove officer' from their role often creates a 'fighter'.

the list of roles to pick from the list are: First Mate, Navigator, Gunner, Boatswain, Surgeon, Carpenter, Quartermaster or Remove from post.

Is this a space issue on that screen tab? You can sort of muddle around it to get a 'Master at arms' but IF this is just a missplaced skill in that list it might be better to put it back in?

10. I'm going to look around for new graphics for the 'leather jerkin' and 'leather cuirass', just in case i can find and make something that looks more authentic for the period (no slight on whomever made those!). Also i think we should look at the reduction of damage caused by gun fire, it 'should' be much less imho, as pretty much gunpowder weapons made armour obselete, even old early guns and pistols!

11. When in a tarvern you sometimes get to meet a ship captain that wants to dual you at sea for wanting his table.......did this happen? Feels a bit like the old western shoot-out thing (which historically never really happened, Hollywood made it up!), so i was wondering if maybe we could have a better 'reason' for these duals at sea, something much more serious, revenge for a loved one killed by the player at some point or some such? Just thinking out loud on this one

12. on my successful game that did not CTD during sailing, i did see that old graphical glitch thing, you know the 'spider-web' on screen stuff that seems (iirc) to be related to flags or lost masts (having been shot off) or something, so we never got a fix for that one (that was around for a while, build 13 onwards perhaps...iirc)? I took some screenshots that i can fix up to post if need be, but i'm sure folk here will know what i'm talking about.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

1. How is that even possible? If it happens, does it then happen ALL the time?
As in: Could you upload a savegame where you consistently get that?

2. That also shouldn't be happening. Any chance of a savegame for that too?

 

[Black Bart]

-=Player=- Barbados. Speightstown tavern April 16th, 1750 2.zip

See if that link works for you? I included both .log files along with the save game. Upstairs is a british soldier sitting 'sideways' at that top table where the officers for hire are usually. I think this guy will just tell you to stop bothering him (so is not an officer for hire), but i went in and out of the tavern a few times and this was the first 'sideways' sitting char i saw. You should also see the missing graphic for the heavy lugger in that 'Ships' tab.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

1. The playership icon in the 'Ships' tab sometimes does not display (currently the Heavy Lugger is a greyish blank tile for me).

I loaded your save and see no problem:

2. (in Speightstown) The Officers for hire at the upstairs table often sit sideways and thus clip half-way through the table. I think this is related to them sometimes also now appearing on that table downstairs nearest the stairs in the tavern which has a different orientation.

That one is confirmed though:

It seems that the guy is supposed to be sitting DOWNSTAIRS:

location = Oxbay_Tavern
  locator = sit10
  group = sit

@pedrwyth, any thoughts?

 

[Black Bart]

The ship icon does come and go for me, i got it back on that same save about 20 mins later, and looking in the system.log file i gave you you can see it has an out of memmory error for that graphic. Now that same log file has no mention of it and the graphic displays. Maybe this is an issue due to the mod being developed on Windows 7 (i assume) these days and that change that was made to memmory management we've talked about recently? In XP maybe this is an issue, not a big one admittingly (so far, if it is just the odd icon now and then).

As for the sideways sitting guy, the place he is meant to be in also now has hireable captains sometimes, so there seems to be some changes to the npc's and where they sit. I also notice you now get normal crew in these seats too, with a slightly awkward dialog that i will think about how to make more clear. Currently they say this at first:

'Alright, let's try this again.... 'Would you, sir, happen to be someone willing to take me on as crew aboard your merchant and/or other vessel?'

Which is just a bizare first sentence! But they appear to be just normal crew (as in your normal crew number goes up by one if you take them on). Does the game do a check to make sure the limits of crew for your ship are not past using this method of recruitment?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The ship icon does come and go for me, i got it back on that same save about 20 mins later, and looking in the system.log file i gave you you can see it has an out of memmory error for that graphic. Now that same log file has no mention of it and the graphic displays. Maybe this is an issue due to the mod being developed on Windows 7 (i assume) these days and that change that was made to memmory management we've talked about recently? In XP maybe this is an issue, not a big one admittingly (so far, if it is just the odd icon now and then).

Might be a memory thing. You can try the attached older version of ENGINE.exe and see if that behaves better.

I also notice you now get normal crew in these seats too, with a slightly awkward dialog that i will think about how to make more clear. Currently they say this at first:

'Alright, let's try this again.... 'Would you, sir, happen to be someone willing to take me on as crew aboard your merchant and/or other vessel?'

Which is just a bizare first sentence!

This one @morgan terror. Seems I have found someone who agrees with me that sentence is a weird start.

Spoiler

To explain this to @Black Bart: I mentioned that one to Morgan before, but he said it was intentional.
I still think it is weird and now you do too.

Does the game do a check to make sure the limits of crew for your ship are not past using this method of recruitment?

Looks like it does:

               if(Pchar.Ship.Crew.Quantity<maxCrewquantity)
               {
                 Link.l1 = DLG_TEXT[4];
                 Link.l1.go = "engage"; //MT: activates crew hiring options; see bottom of file
                 Link.l2 = DLG_TEXT[5];
                 Link.l2.go = "exit";
               }

 

[pedrwyth]

On face value this is just another sit locator which sticks on the floor above but given this is a main stock game tavern I wonder why this has not been raised as a long standing (or should that be sitting ) issue. I checked back it was already the case in 14 3.4 when I started with the build a year ago.

Rather than lose another tavern locator I will try and adjust its height to be upstairs (although that's where the character gets stuck the "visible" locator would remain downstairs if I don't change its vertical component) and rotate it. There doesn't look to be room to shift it downstairs enough to avoid the upper floor walkpatch related to the table because there are already two other locators on the downstairs table. However, as already noted the upper table is already used by candidate officers (despite having no locators). I have commented on their placement without locators before (in that case for Turks tavern)

Answer is she isn't !?! Random officer NPC's can be placed without reference to locators - I haven't actually found out where in the code it happens.

- so I might go looking for where and how that happens - particularly since it seems to be able to deal with correct orientation too, any clues where the code might be ? As you can see from my screen shot I can fit the sit 10 character (where Hawk is standing with a slight tweak to the left) alongside the current upper floor placing of an officer.

 

[morgan terror]

This one @morgan terror. Seems I have found someone who agrees with me that sentence is a weird start.

Spoiler

To explain this to @Black Bart: I mentioned that one to Morgan before, but he said it was intentional.
I still think it is weird and now you do too.

I still don't think it's weird, but i guess it's going over people's heads. Might as well change it i guess. Try pasting this over the original file in PROGRAM\DIALOGS\ENGLISH:

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Please post that on the List of Fixes thread so I remember to add it into the game.

 

[Black Bart]

I'll give that exe a go and see if it resolves the missing ship icons for me (i also noticed a bunch of them missing when visiting the shipwright and looking at new ships in stock), this is a new issue for me with the Build mod (not present in my other game version) and as i'm on a really old OS might not be that big a deal for the majority of people.

The orientation of the recruitable officers is also not in my older version of Build 14 (Beta 1 patch 7) so as pedrwyth mentions seems to have been added later I do like that they have different places now, and that they are not ALWAYS recruitable officers, but sometimes other types (those lone sailors looking to join your crew, or guys that tell you to not bother them, or soldiers from the fort etc) and this variety is excellent, just need to tighten how all that plays out so it does not stand out as too strange.

@morgan terror, ahoy matey It really just is the first bit 'Alright let's try that again..' because as far as the player is concerned there was never an earlier attempt? So my initial reaction was 'huh? did i talk to this guy before?' but because there is no persistence to the npc's i obviously can't have spoken to them before. The rest of the sentence makes perfect sense, so it was just a slight 'odd' moment

I'll update that first post with new stuff as i come across it, as per my old method. I would suggest this thread not be followed as vital, these are going to just be my opinions on things but if i can help squish a few bugs before the next main release then that is all to the good :

 

[morgan terror]

Please post that on the List of Fixes thread so I remember to add it into the game.

done

 

[Levis]

I still don't think it's weird, but i guess it's going over people's heads. Might as well change it i guess. Try pasting this over the original file in PROGRAM\DIALOGS\ENGLISH:

Included in here:
Mod Release - Build 14 Beta 4 Internal WIP For Testing | PiratesAhoy!

 

[Black Bart]

And just a little update, that new (well old!) engine.exe file sorted out the missing ship icons graphics glitch i was getting Pieter, so thank you for that idea

 

[pedrwyth]

OK here's an amended Large Tavern locator file with sit 10 now at the upstairs table & rotated (other side of the normal officer placement to that I showed before) and since I found I could pass through the floor whilst tweaking distance from the upstairs table to land the other side of the table downstairs an additional locator (sit 14) just for the variety.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

OK here's an amended Large Tavern locator file with sit 10 now at the upstairs table & rotated (other side of the normal officer placement to that I showed before) and since I found I could pass through the floor whilst tweaking distance from the upstairs table to land the other side of the table downstairs an additional locator (sit 14) just for the variety.

Thanks! I was surprised to find that did NOT fix Black Bart's savegame.
But then, characters are saved with their x,y,z coordinates and that would explain it just fine.

 

[Black Bart]

And just to say on the old Engine.exe i have not been able to reproduce the sitting sideways NPC's bug (been in and out of that tavern about 80 times so far!!), so maybe for testing purposes i will go back to the latest exe.

Any pure oddities (like the ship icons not showing) we can put down to my running it on an older OS(XP)! But atleast i can find some bugs that might need fixing if this is the version you are going with.

I got a free day today so lets see how much i can get done

 

[Pieter Boelen]

And just to say on the old Engine.exe i have not been able to reproduce the sitting sideways NPC's bug (been in and out of that tavern about 80 times so far!!), so maybe for testing purposes i will go back to the latest exe.

You can stick to that old EXE; effectively, it should make no difference. And it is prevents you from reporting "ghost errors", that just makes our life easier.

That sideways NPC is VERY unlikely to be affected be the engine itself. Since nobody ever reported it before, I simply suspect that it is extremely unlikely to happen at all.

 

[pedrwyth]

That sideways NPC is VERY unlikely to be affected be the engine itself. Since nobody ever reported it before, I simply suspect that it is extremely unlikely to happen at all.

Even using console as a reset ( pretty much an instantaneous reload - much simpler than leaving the tavern) to a goto locator upstairs by that table (so I could see straight off) saw me getting a random character at the table on sit 10 only in about 1 in 50 with an upstairs non locator officer type about 1 in 4 (I would guess) - and never together - I must take the time to look for that code sometime out of interest.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

It happens a lot, but is a no priority item so was never reported.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

It happens a lot, but is a no priority item so was never reported.

I wished people WOULD report stuff. It is exceedingly difficult to deal with any bugs if we don't know they're even there.
It is really very valuable to know when errors get introduced, even small ones.
Otherwise by the time someone DOES report, we end up thinking it is something new and start wonder "what recent changes have caused this"?
When in fact, it wasn't recent at all. Which would end up with us searching in completely the wrong spots for the problems and wasting our time.