City of Abandoned Ships: Remastered - Alpha release

[Hammie]

I can finally share the first alpha version of my City of Abandoned Ship: Remastered mod.

The goal of this mod is to update it to the latest version of the Storm Engine, provide fixes for bugs in the original game, and serve as a basis for other mods in future.

This is the first alpha version, so things may still be unstable and buggy. But any help play-testing this will be greatly appreciated, just play the game and report any issues or problems you encounter. We can then try and fix those issues in future versions.

WARNING: Fullscreen mode is very unstable! Please use windowed mode for now.

Download

You can download the archive here: CoAS-Remastered-1.0.1.zip

Simply unzip the contents into your vanilla City of Abandoned Ships installation folder and run engine.exe If it asks to overwrite files, say yes.

The source code and binaries for the Storm Engine bundled with the mod can be found here: Storm Engine Project
The updated game scripts can be found here: storm-devs/coas

The new engine requires all text to be reformatted to use utf-8 encodings. I have converted all the needed files and added them to the archive. If you notice and errors or translation issues, please report them I will fix any broken encodings.

Reporting issues

If you encounter issues, it would also be very useful to us if you could provide us with the log files. The game's log files are now located at "Documents\My Games\Sea Dogs\Logs".

 

[DH27]

I just played the alpha and I am incredibly impressed! I can finally see my whole ship properly in sail mode, without parts of it being cut off. Also, the overall graphics just look so much better. I started a new game with the Dutch character and I wasn't able to find any bugs related to the engine upgrade in my short run. The only bug that showed up, but which has always been in COAS, is the one of the camera perspective being slightly crooked when landing in a city. Other than that, I didn't manage to encounter one.

 

[DH27]

I guess I found a bug, after occupying a city, when an English squadron came to claim it back, I tried to go into sail mode to attack the ships, but the game just started showing a black screen and then closed itself.

Attached are my logs (the error log is empty):

 

[Hammie]

I guess I found a bug, after occupying a city, when an English squadron came to claim it back, I tried to go into sail mode to attack the ships, but the game just started showing a black screen and then closed itself.

Thank you for testing!


I'll have a look at the town capture bug. I have never captured a town in CoAS before, so this might be fun.

 

[Hammie]

I guess I found a bug, after occupying a city, when an English squadron came to claim it back, I tried to go into sail mode to attack the ships, but the game just started showing a black screen and then closed itself.

Any chance you can share the savegame? I've captured several colonies and haven't been able to reproduce it yet.

 

[DH27]

I played the alpha a little bit more today, sank and boarded some ships and went back to the city after the raid to sell the goods. When switching from the store to the tavern to get more sailors, the game again showed a black screen and closed itself.

 

[DH27]

Any chance you can share the savegame? I've captured several colonies and haven't been able to reproduce it yet.

It seems to me that these black screens and crashes are random when switching from one city setting to another. I loaded up my savegame from yesterday which was automatically created before landing troops in the fort and I was able to just play again.
------
Edit: Yeah, after more testing and jumping between settings in the city, it happened again after a couple of jumps. Attached is my savegame (cheats are enabled), jumping between city settings (shipyard, tavern, store, port and ship) should cause the crash.

 

[doodeeda]

I can finally share the first alpha version of my City of Abandoned Ship: Remastered mod.

The goal of this mod is to update it to the latest version of the Storm Engine, provide fixes for bugs in the original game, and serve as a basis for other mods in future.

This is the first alpha version, so things may still be unstable and buggy. But any help play-testing this will be greatly appreciated, just play the game and report any issues or problems you encounter. We can then try and fix those issues in future versions.

WARNING: Fullscreen mode will crash if you tab out of the game! Please use windowed mode for now.

Download

You can download the archive attached to this post: http://www.piratesahoy.net/attachme...7/?temp_hash=7cd0ecdcf14b1888da201831bf7df4ef

Simply unzip the contents into your vanilla City of Abandoned Ships installation folder and run engine.exe If it asks to overwrite files, say yes.

Spoiler: Uninstalling

This should be a non-destructive install, so you can still run the original, unmodded game using start.exe [Tested with the GOG version]

The source code and binaries for the Storm Engine bundled with the mod can be found here: Release City of Abandoned Ships Remastered 1.0.0 · Hammie/storm-engine
The updated game scripts can be found here: storm-devs/coas

Reporting issues

If you encounter issues, it would also be very useful to us if you could provide us with the log files. The game's log files are now located at "Documents\My Games\Sea Dogs\Logs".

Does this have any of the same features as in the other mods? I've never played COAS before, but I would love to have direct sail 3d mode and be able to encounter ships during that, which I think is available in GOF.

 

[Hammie]

Does this have any of the same features as in the other mods? I've never played COAS before, but I would love to have direct sail 3d mode and be able to encounter ships during that, which I think is available in GOF.

No, it is purely vanilla CoAS.

I'm happy to include any bugfixes, so if you know of any, let me know. But I won't be adding new features to this.

In the future I'll try and write an article with information on how to upgrade existing mods, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

 

[Hammie]

I played the alpha a little bit more today, sank and boarded some ships and went back to the city after the raid to sell the goods. When switching from the store to the tavern to get more sailors, the game again showed a black screen and closed itself.

I've been able to reproduce the issue with your savegame, but I'm not quite sure what the problem is.

I've made a bug report in our issue tracker for now: Crash when switching locations · Issue #1 · storm-devs/coas

 

[DH27]

Maybe it's just a corrupt savegame on my side. It could be that using the add 20 days cheat from the menu might have something to do with it, because I used that to start the British siege of my city and afterwards these crashes start happening. When I have got the time, I will start a new game without using the cheats, maybe the problem comes from there.

 

[DH27]

I played around with the game again and I noticed two things that I thought might be noteworthy:
1) You have probably seen this already, but just in case: Playing the Peter Blood questline, after Peter Blood treats the patient in the chateau,
I glitched through the castle into the floor. This bug seems to be repeatable.
2) I started a new game and tried to reproduce the blackscreen bug again. I was successful in doing that, by having a bounty on me and the
bounty hunters paying me a visit on land. I paid them off or gave them a fake name and they disappeared, but when I tried boarding my ship
again, the blackscreen greeted me. It seems to me that in my last savegame I saved the game before such an incident and the error got carried
on throughout the rest of the game. But it looks like it had nothing to do with capturing towns or destroying forts. I have attached the log again,
just in case you need it.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I played around with the game again and I noticed two things that I thought might be noteworthy

Sounds like you're doing some really thorough testing there!

Thank you.

 

[Hammie]

1) You have probably seen this already, but just in case: Playing the Peter Blood questline, after Peter Blood treats the patient in the chateau,
I glitched through the castle into the floor. This bug seems to be repeatable.

That is the bug I though I had fixed before I released It is almost certainly linked to your framerate, and I will have to rewrite some scripts to fix that properly.

2) I started a new game and tried to reproduce the blackscreen bug again. I was successful in doing that, by having a bounty on me and the
bounty hunters paying me a visit on land. I paid them off or gave them a fake name and they disappeared, but when I tried boarding my ship
again, the blackscreen greeted me. It seems to me that in my last savegame I saved the game before such an incident and the error got carried
on throughout the rest of the game. But it looks like it had nothing to do with capturing towns or destroying forts. I have attached the log again,
just in case you need it.

Good to know bounty hunters may be involved, I have also been encountering an issue with bounty hunters spawning a battleship that turns friendly after a few moments. So there is definitely some funny business going on there.

 

[DH27]

That is the bug I though I had fixed before I released It is almost certainly linked to your framerate, and I will have to rewrite some scripts to fix that properly.

I usually play on a 165hz monitor. I tried to download the game to my notebook with a 60hz screen, but unfortunately it won't let me create a new game. As soon as I hit the button in the main menu, the game just closes without further ado.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

bounty hunters spawning a battleship that turns friendly after a few moments

 

[Hammie]

I've updated the mod to the latest version of the engine: CoAS-Remastered-1.0.1.zip

New game is required!

Once again, let me know if you encounter any issues.

I've also updated the opening post to match the new version.

 

[Tantumrosa]

Hello, really appreciate the work, game looks really good!
I know you said we shouldn't use fullscreen because we can't tab out of the game without it crashing, but that made me think i can use fullscreen just not tab out, but fullscreen dosen't work for me, although i only changed it to fullscreen from the config exe. when i say it dosen't work i mean the game is in a sort of minimised state where i can only see a very thin line in the center of my screen, game is running though.
Also the game crashes quite frequently on the world map, i'd get crashes after every say 30-70 seconds spent on the world map, maybe more.
There is also a lack of sound when at sea, as in no water sounds and no sail sounds, i could hear the ship creaking sounds though as well as the cannons.
Unfortunately i don't have the logs anymore as i thought about reinstalling the game outside "program files" folder and deleted the logs as well when i uninstalled.
I'm sorry if my feedback was unhelpful, and i hope you continue your work.

 

[Hammie]

Hello, really appreciate the work, game looks really good!
I know you said we shouldn't use fullscreen because we can't tab out of the game without it crashing, but that made me think i can use fullscreen just not tab out, but fullscreen dosen't work for me, although i only changed it to fullscreen from the config exe. when i say it dosen't work i mean the game is in a sort of minimised state where i can only see a very thin line in the center of my screen, game is running though.
Also the game crashes quite frequently on the world map, i'd get crashes after every say 30-70 seconds spent on the world map, maybe more.
There is also a lack of sound when at sea, as in no water sounds and no sail sounds, i could hear the ship creaking sounds though as well as the cannons.
Unfortunately i don't have the logs anymore as i thought about reinstalling the game outside "program files" folder and deleted the logs as well when i uninstalled.
I'm sorry if my feedback was unhelpful, and i hope you continue your work.

Thanks you very much for the feedback! I don't have much time to play and test it myself so this is actually very helpful.

I thought the fullscreen bugs were fixed, because things are now working for TEHO. Not sure why it still crashes and it's quite difficult to debug as it can actually freeze up my entire computer

I'll also take a look at the worldmap and sound issues though, they should be a lot easier to fix.