Mod Release Build 14 Beta 3.5 Internal WIP For Testing

[Pieter Boelen]

The La Croix opening is indeed linked to Rogue now because there was no actual story logic in it being a Gambler start.
I could link it to both though.

I just tried and yes something is wrong in the opening dialogs , but only for some background characters.

Which ones don't work? They'll all need to at least be functional.

So be it. Devlin Opera still works, but who knows for how much longer?

My most recent idea is to put that as extra installation option and remove it from the regular install.
It isn't a bad start, but the story is unfinished and it doesn't really fit as a proper custom opening scene either.
So since it won't be finished any time soon, I don't think it should remain available in the modpack because we want to move towards something that IS finished.

The idea is for all Free Play to be available through Brave Black Flag, but that is quite a new feature and does need more testing and development.

Well, now I dont know what to say! I tried again and now everything is OK.
The ship and The soldiers now is waiting for you, when you leave the church.
It seems like the problem whit the opening scene is a Random thing. Sometimes
it works, other times not.

La Croix on default settings worked when I tested last weekend.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Hylie Pistof: Do you want to look like La Croix and have the skills of a Gambler or do you also want to play the whole prison opening scene as a Gambler?

I just tested La Croix on Gambler and everything else on default settings and did not notice anything wrong.
The original Tutorial starts and I can either skip it and go ashore or play through it and the contents of my ship's chest are there just fine.
So I'm not sure what is wrong for you, but I cannot seem to replicate the problem.

To allow me to test this more fully, please post:
- A screenshot of all your Select Storyline settings so I can see if there is anything non-default that I am not replicating
- Your InternalSettings.h so I can check if any non-default settings are messing things up
- Your "options" file because perhaps it is one of the Advanced Options that makes for the difference

 

[HellSailor]

Hi to all people! Yes, I know it was some long time ago last time I posted something here, but I was kind of busy during these months and I couldn't visit this place for some time.

For what I see, there is a new WIP Beta version to test. Anyone would be kind to make me a summary of what does this new version WIP brings to the game? If I have free time I would test anything you need to test

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Ahoy there! Good to see you again.

For what I see, there is a new WIP Beta version to test. Anyone would be kind to make me a summary of what does this new version WIP brings to the game? If I have free time I would test anything you need to test

The opening post contains the near-complete list.
Other than that, I've been working primarily on this: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/build-14-beta-3-5-master-plan.24909/
Main stuff for testing are different custom starts for the new Free Play Only storyline and the various sidequests outside the Standard storyline.
See here for a list of all quests and whether they've been confirmed to work or not: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/sidequests-for-additional-storylines.20555/

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I want to look like an old white haired guy because that is what I am. Today I used the Morris character and yesterday I used the Linch one. What character I use is not important.

I personally want the gambler skills as those are the most important ones to me. I choose the LaCroix time period because it is very interesting to me while the later periods are very boring to me. Currently I am doing just fine in the Early Explorers period.

I honestly do not understand your difficulty in understanding the FREE part of free play.

I already posted this on the previous page. I manually picked the character, manually typed in a convenient name, picked a starting ship and its name, chose the flags, gambler, and swashbuckler, and started the game.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

In what way am I misunderstanding the free part of the free play?
That is the whole purpose of me doing this in the first place. You can customise just about everything independently.

Different player types get different opening scenes for variety though.
The La Croix one is now linked to Rogue.
But since apparently you care more about your player model than the opening scenes, I really do not see the problem here.
You can select the La Croix model, change your player type to Gambler, change the starting date to Early Explorers and it should work just fine.
You'd get the Standard Tutorial and can do whatever you want after that.

Please explain exactly what freedom you're missing so that I can ensure you do get what you want.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Why should someone be stuck with a certain character? Or a certain type? Remember, I just recently found out that there is a prison fight, or the church, or sinking the Vorteljuice. Why should I have to be a rogue when that skillset is not what I want?

If you are going to make all these different scenarios into a one size fits all storyline, then there should be no restrictions at all. Let Nelson sail in 1550 and Columbus sail in 1850.

 

[tercioviejo]

So be it. Devlin Opera still works, but who knows for how much longer?

not quite, there are two problems in Devlyn Opera all goes well until you get to Grand Turks, and talk to the Inkepper, when you go to the pirate council Pieter Boelen is not there, the others do, but the only thing they respond to you when you try to talk with them, is that they are busy, nice boat etc ..., you can not leave the building and not work fast trip once you are inside, so you can not continue the story.the other problem is with the mission of Will Turner Silver Train, like all goes well until you get to the jungle area where sits the Captain KK, and if you talk to him repeat the same thing in the room Pirate council that this busy, and can not continue the story.I wish I knew schedule and be more useful, but it is notnow I'm content with who could fix those two things, the truth is I'm happy to do the other sidequest, they have no problem and they work great with the Storyline Devlin Opera someday will leave a great job your hand, for now I'd settle for some island to reach and to find Blaze Devlin although the story does not continue.that said, the work that you realize is wonderful, I wish I could help in any way thanks for everything

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Why should someone be stuck with a certain character? Or a certain type? Remember, I just recently found out that there is a prison fight, or the church, or sinking the Vorteljuice. Why should I have to be a rogue when that skillset is not what I want?

Vorteljuice? WHAHAHAA! Sorry, couldn't resist....

At the moment the ONLY limitation is that the opening quest scenes depend on your character type.
Sometimes there are custom nation relations linked to player type as well. That seems to make the most sense to me.

This is the current status:

REBEL:
Puts your OWN nation against you and basically triggers the Brave Black Flag opening.
The main difference is that you can now select ANY original nation so that you're not stuck with England being hostile to you.
If you use this on Arcade Game Mode, then ONLY your original nation is hostile to you; on Realistic/Iron Man, your original nation's relations are taken into account.
If you start as PIRATE Rebel, then EVERYONE except the pirates hate you.
If you start as PERSONAL_NATION Rebel, then a random original nation is chosen for you (can't have your own nation being hostile to you ).

AGENT:
This basically triggers the old Aubrey/Lafitte start by putting you in a random town hostile to your chosen nation.
The main difference is that you can now select ANY nation. This still needs some further tweaking.

NAVAL OFFICER:
This is used for the Nelson/Aubrey/Hornblower "Commissioned" play style and substantially influences the actual gameplay as well.
However, as per a few days ago, the start works fine for non-England nations as well. The only think still missing are ship and reward officer progressions for them.
But that is on the to-do list and hopefully @Grey Roger can take care of that some time.

ROGUE (will be changed to work for Gambler as well):
Triggers the La Croix opening. This makes the most logical sense, because that player type triggers a logbook entry that refers to you having escaped from Paris.
That fits in well with the France-based La Croix opening, though you can of course play as a non-French Rogue as well.
At the moment that doesn't change the dialogs to match, but gameplay-wise would work just fine.

Apparently you DO want to be able to have this opening as Gambler, so I can change this so that the "escape from prison" scene is triggered for Gambler AND Rogue.
The "Sinking the Vogelstuijs" quest is now available in ALL storylines regardless of player type.
So basically the only thing you are missing out right now by selecting Gambler instead of Rogue are the prison/church scenes at the beginning.
Other than that, there is no difference. And I'll be changing that for you now.....

Edit: Done. Gambler now starts out with the same quest scenes as Rogue.

ALL OTHERS (including Gambler for now):
Start with the Standard Tutorial, then put you in a port of your chosen nation just like the Standard storyline would do.

Possibly the player type descriptions should be rewritten a bit to explain the above.
At the moment this is all set up behind the scenes but I can understand that players wouldn't readily understand this because the only place it is written down right now is this post....

If you are going to make all these different scenarios into a one size fits all storyline, then there should be no restrictions at all. Let Nelson sail in 1550 and Columbus sail in 1850.

There is nothing preventing you from doing just that.
Some character models do have default settings defined for them, but after select your model and getting those defaults, you can then change them to whatever you want.
That is already in place, so please try it and see how it works. If it doesn't work as intended, I'd like to know so I can fix it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

not quite, there are two problems in Devlyn Opera all goes well until you get to Grand Turks, and talk to the Inkepper, when you go to the pirate council Pieter Boelen is not there, the others do, but the only thing they respond to you when you try to talk with them, is that they are busy, nice boat etc ..., you can not leave the building and not work fast trip once you are inside, so you can not continue the story.the other problem is with the mission of Will Turner Silver Train, like all goes well until you get to the jungle area where sits the Captain KK, and if you talk to him repeat the same thing in the room Pirate council that this busy, and can not continue the story.I wish I knew schedule and be more useful, but it is notnow I'm content with who could fix those two things, the truth is I'm happy to do the other sidequest, they have no problem and they work great with the Storyline Devlin Opera someday will leave a great job your hand, for now I'd settle for some island to reach and to find Blaze Devlin although the story does not continue.that said, the work that you realize is wonderful, I wish I could help in any way thanks for everything

Thanks for reminding me about that. The problem is that the same characters are used twice, because PB and KK are used in generally available sidequests AND the Devlin storyline.
So that interferes with each other. As a simple solution, I'm just replacing PB and KK in the Devlin storyline altogether with some different characters.
Will be included in the next update; hopefully that will be better.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The Devlin storyline gets broken when I play while still on the waterfront. I am after the time period, not the story. Plus the nice eye candy!

Again, I choose the most interesting time period first, which means LaCroix. The skillset I value most happens to be under the Gambler heading, so I use that in all storylines. Besides, splitting hairs, walking on the blade of a knife, balancing on the head of a pin, LaCroix is fleeing from gambling debts. It says so in the Wiki.

Anyway, if I want to play a storyline there are plenty of those. But mostly I like sailing around the Caribbean having the occasional adventure.

 

[tercioviejo]

Thanks for reminding me about that. The problem is that the same characters are used twice, because PB and KK are used in generally available sidequests AND the Devlin storyline.
So that interferes with each other. As a simple solution, I'm just replacing PB and KK in the Devlin storyline altogether with some different characters.
Will be included in the next update; hopefully that will be better.

thats will be great thx Pieter

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Again, I choose the most interesting time period first, which means LaCroix. The skillset I value most happens to be under the Gambler heading, so I use that in all storylines. Besides, splitting hairs, walking on the blade of a knife, balancing on the head of a pin, LaCroix is fleeing from gambling debts. It says so in the Wiki.

The La Croix storyline description mentions gambling debts. The actual story makes absolutely zero reference to that.
Anyway, Gambler now triggers the La Croix opening too (update to be posted soon), so that renders any discussion quite pointless.

The Gambler profession Logbook Entry suggests that you won your ship by being lucky. That doesn't match with "gambling debts" either.
So probably a fair bit of dialogs, quest texts and descriptions should be rewritten to make internal sense for this and several other points as well.
But first I want to focus on getting the functionality as we want it.

The Devlin storyline gets broken when I play while still on the waterfront.

What happens there? That part should at least work.

I am after the time period, not the story. Plus the nice eye candy!

You can change the starting date and therefore use any character in any time period you want.
The buttons for that are already there, courtesy of @Levis. You just have to press them.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

For all we know he got lucky and got the ship, then got unlucky and lost the ship and just took off rather than lose it. Who knows?

I break the Devlin storyline myself. Right after talking to the harbormaster I'm off in a completely different direction and never get close to San Salvador.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That's not breaking the quest; that's just deliberately not following it. Which is fair enough because that is what Free Play is all about.
I was afraid there was something going wrong there with the code, so I'm glad that isn't the case.

For all we know he got lucky and got the ship, then got unlucky and lost the ship and just took off rather than lose it. Who knows?

Perfectly true; indeed that could be how La Croix got his schooner. So not actually a problem there.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well, I did break something. I accepted an escort quest from Jamaica to La Tortue but the merchant never showed up at the dock. I searched all over the place for him but never did find him. Then the game crashed. It crashes every time I go to La Tortue.

These logs might be interesting.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Too many characters in the location is what it's saying.
Do you have a savegame while you do have that Escort Quest active, but before making port in Tortuga?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

No, I deleted it and got another escort mission that worked. Sorry.

That brings up another issue. With the smaller ships it is nearly impossible to sink a ship. It isn't too hard to get their HP down under 20% but then it stays in the 5-20% range until I am out of ammo. I have even tried ramming them without success. The only thing that works is when several ships blast it at the same time.

 

[Red Back Dude]

Will be getting back into playing very soon , is there anything that needed a particular test / look at ?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Will be getting back into playing very soon , is there anything that needed a particular test / look at ?

Ahoy there! Have a look at post 324 above on this page. That was my answer to a very similar question.