Gentlemen of Fortune: Historical Eras Module #2 (1648-1725)
New version of MOD RELEASED 11/29/13: link suspended until new website up and running
link suspended until new website up and running (see the following link)
http://www.moddb.com/members/modernknight1
This mod has Pieter's installer bundled so you can choose to install manually or with the push of a button.
EDIT: Some people have reported black screen in some town building locations which means I left some files out in attempting to make the mod as small as I could. Here is a fix for that. I am 95 percent certain that this will alleviate the problem. Please tell me if I'm right:
link suspended until new website up and running
EDIT2: STOCK VANILLA CAMERA VIEW conversion: Some people don't like what I've done with the camera. Please understand that I don't like claustrophobic games and like to zoom way out to see all the action - especially in large battles. After a lot of tweaking and experimenting the current settings were the best I could come up with to give that open experience. With the center mouse wheel you can zoom way out. However, some people don't like it when you're closer in and have said it looks like a cartoon. So here for those who want it is a fix that will change your cameras back to stock vanilla COAS values. Please note in the engine.INI file that you will need to enter your own native resolution and do the 1/0 notation change if you want widescreen and not full screen.
link suspended until new website up and running
WARNING: Managed to get the size down a little but this is still a huge mod at 5.3gb so be prepared for a long download time. I will eventually make a torrent and break the mod up as well but probably not till Christmas when Patch1 is ready.
With the new link above the mod is already completely updated (some new ship textures as well) so I am no longer keeping the update link up.
***However if you did happen to upload the first 6.4gb version released on 11/18/13 (300 downloads), the LAi_boarding file is still attached below. This file is required for boarding and surrender to happen correctly in your version.***
Read Me file: attached at bottom of this post. EDIT: "ReadmeV2" updated as well. Left out some folks accidentally. They are now included.
Instructions: Have fresh working install of COAS ready with TAGES already run. Then drop the new GOF ERAs 2 7z files into the game folder and when prompted to replace original game files say yes to all.
Recommended settings: Corsair difficulty. Few ships encountered. Toggle off show information about other ships. In mod options select "In Between" for cannon damage *Note you can change this to realistic when you become very powerful above level 25 or so. Last ensure that check "Surrenders Occasionally" at the bottom of the mod options.
FOR NEWBs: If you've never played before I recommend playing on an easy setting. After starting a new game ensure you set Authority to at least 5 to gain crew/recruits when you talk with the bosun at the beginning dialog. Once you're in town, hit ESC, go to OPTIONS, select Mod Options in lower right hand corner and set default cannon to "in between", weather to COAS default, encounters to COAS default and acquaint yourself with these options as they can be changed at any time during your game. Push ACCEPT when finished and enjoy the game.
* Game start date is 1665.
*New Ships: Besides many of the PO:TEHO ships, there are new ship models from SOFS and almost every old ship in COAS has been reskinned by me. Most of the PO:TEHO ships have also been reskinned. Ship encounters will be a completely new experience.
NOTE: There are no flush deck frigates or ships in the game that would have appeared or been built after 1725. If the ship is very close to that date or like ships in the same class would have been around I make exceptions. One exception to this is the Gentlemen of Luck and a few player characters. I have not been able to successfully prevent the use of later ships in these instances, but they are VERY rare.
*Ships encounters and behaviors have been overhauled. No more spinning ships in single positions. They will occasionally still spin but in a wider circular maneuver. Convoys will look correct with like classes appearing together and only ship types belonging to specific nations appearing in their convoys, patrols and ports. This significantly improves the flavor of the game to a much more historically accurate feel.
* More harbor clutter/ships encountered for a hustle and bustle feel as you enter/exit ports - as it would have been.
*All uniforms have been redone to match the appearance of the correct nation during this era.
*New officers: half of the recruitable officers have been changed to new character models/textures. Less pirate flavor here and more mercenary/military flavor.
* Two dozen new characters imported and specially modified. Many of these are Metazot PO:TEHO characters with my own changes incorporated to give personality and historical flavor where I desired.
*New Pirates and ship captains. Most of the pirate crews and ships captains have been replaced with better more authentic models. No more eye patches or peg legs.
* Playable character interface allows for 67 different player choices. Most of these are historical figures. No more POTC characters although I did keep and modify a few POTC models into historical personalities. New detailed portraits and narratives included with each RPC which is not only fun to look at, but also provides an education on the REAL buccaneers and corsairs of the Golden Age.
*New Items:
- There are 81 blades in the game (thats over 40 new blades and 40 more than in any other GOF
mod)
- There are 39 pistols and pistol combinations (pairs and braces of pistols) All other GOF mods
only had the standard five pistols in game which means 34 new pistols/pistol combinations
- Over 40 new items and 10 existing items revamped or replaced.
NOTE: There are only a few sabers that meet the pre 1725 cut off and most weapons are cutlasses, military rapiers and the like. The type of weapons you would expect to find during the Golden Age. Module #3 will eliminate most of the rapiers and favor many more varieties of cutlass and sabers.
*Weather and the ocean movement, transparency, color, and skies have been overhauled.
*Surrender is enabled in mod options: for best results in game-play set to "Surrenders Occasionally"
* Direct Sail is enabled but rarely do you encounter any ships in this mode.
*Saint Ashley's 8 ship max mod is part of the mod so your character can control up to eight ships in his/her fleet. The max ships that can be encountered in an enemy fleet is 10 ships which potentially allows battles of 28 ships to occur if you walk into a battle between two opposing fleets plus your fleet. The most I've encountered thus far in testing is 24 ships.
* Pirates, Gentlemen of Luck and Bounty Hunter encounters have been overhauled to reflect realistic numbers and ships.
* Over 140 new loading screens incorporated into the game with a wide variety of different screens (mostly germane historical paintings) for taverns, brothels, governors, churches, stores, shipyards, etc. These screens are also different for each nationalities ports. In addition. multiple boarding, cabin, and death loading screens will be seen depending on where you are and how large the encounter. This adds a level of immersion never seen before in COAS.
* Music and sounds overhauled with even better historical music variety germane to the situations encountered. Sound bytes changed for common encounters such as the guards when you come into towns.
* Many new small interface changes. New compass
* New intro movie.
***Work still being done: Importing new locations and lower deck locations enabled for boarding encounters.
Also I added lateen sails to ships replacing spankers incorrect for the time period. These have no rigging. So they need rigged. Also many of the PO:TEHO ships have no mizzen shrouds/ratlines and one of the sloops has none on the main. Someone who knows how could assist by adding shrouds.
Known bugs:
- Occasional CTDs going into Gentlemen of Luck encounters and punitive encounters. Simply reload until it runs. Not that big of a deal. Almost have this one fixed.
- Character list mis-match error at sea. No issues with gameplay except that you will see the error message.
- New items are memory intensive. May have difficulties seeing the pictures of all the new items if you have an older PC.
- Flag and floating mast bug with PO:TEHO ships. Not all the time. Not a game breaker. Not a crashing bug.
also there is occasionally a screen flicker on half or quarter of the screen. Usually happens during battles. If it becomes too bothersome try the following, go to cabin and come back on deck. Go from 3rd person view to deck view and back. If it persists save, quit and restart. Not a crashing bug just annoying.
- Bad relationship with NPC captain bug: So if you agree to talk to a NPC captain about a venture he wants you to help with and you go to his ship and decide that you don't want to go on the mission and he decides to try to kill you this is where the bug happens. After you defeat his crew and get back to your ship you will fight his ship. Because of the different flag and surrender code I am using he will not change to Pirate and you will not be able to board him 90 percent of the time. So what to do. OPTIONS: Dismast him and run away out of his range (850). You can sink him but that will cause you to become hostile with whatever nation's flag he was flying. You can take the mission but blow off doing it and let him follow you about until the time on the mission expires (this can be helpful if you want an extra free ship to battle enemies - maybe they will sink him or take him - you never know.) Not a bad bug just annoying and I'm still working on it.
- Lighting: Every now and then you may get undesirable lighting effects. I was going for a very Caribbean flavored lighting and color. Some people will like it others will not. If you don't like the lighting at a particular time simply use the enabled bracket keys ][ and change until you like how it looks.
- Large battles: Still some occasional mast crashing issues, but nothing like in the other GOF mods. I recommend you quicksave F6 often during large scale battles.
- Eight ships in inventory sometimes causes a crash at the port controller when you want to give a ship. So ensure you save before doing this. A simple shuffling of your ships around and changing one of the captains will allow you to give a ship even if you have eight in your fleet.
-Sound: Still have the sound bug occasionally in ship encounters where more than eight ships are involved. Don't know what's causing this. You can still hear the music and ocean sounds, but the cannon fire is mute.
- Horsepower/RAM: with all the new content this game requires a decent computer to run quickly. If you don't have a good computer the game sometimes lags - especially between setting transitions.
If you are interested in looking over some of the new skins take a look at this topic: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/new-skins-for-gof-eras-mod.19695/
Here is a video of the new items. This one is only two minutes so I call it the low attention span version:
Spoiler alert! This is the longer version. If you don't want to see descriptions of over 80 percent of the new weapons and items, don't watch this video. I go pretty fast, so pause if you want to see a particular description:
Here's a video of the new character interface showing all 56 available characters. Simply maximize screen and resolution of YouTube vid to see the narratives and pause if you want to read the whole paragraphs as I move rather quickly. EDIT: There are now 67 characters so this video does not show all of the new ones. If you want to see them look at the screenshots towards the end of this thread. I'll make another video soon.
Enjoy!
MK
New version of MOD RELEASED 11/29/13: link suspended until new website up and running
link suspended until new website up and running (see the following link)
http://www.moddb.com/members/modernknight1
This mod has Pieter's installer bundled so you can choose to install manually or with the push of a button.
EDIT: Some people have reported black screen in some town building locations which means I left some files out in attempting to make the mod as small as I could. Here is a fix for that. I am 95 percent certain that this will alleviate the problem. Please tell me if I'm right:
link suspended until new website up and running
EDIT2: STOCK VANILLA CAMERA VIEW conversion: Some people don't like what I've done with the camera. Please understand that I don't like claustrophobic games and like to zoom way out to see all the action - especially in large battles. After a lot of tweaking and experimenting the current settings were the best I could come up with to give that open experience. With the center mouse wheel you can zoom way out. However, some people don't like it when you're closer in and have said it looks like a cartoon. So here for those who want it is a fix that will change your cameras back to stock vanilla COAS values. Please note in the engine.INI file that you will need to enter your own native resolution and do the 1/0 notation change if you want widescreen and not full screen.
link suspended until new website up and running
WARNING: Managed to get the size down a little but this is still a huge mod at 5.3gb so be prepared for a long download time. I will eventually make a torrent and break the mod up as well but probably not till Christmas when Patch1 is ready.
With the new link above the mod is already completely updated (some new ship textures as well) so I am no longer keeping the update link up.
***However if you did happen to upload the first 6.4gb version released on 11/18/13 (300 downloads), the LAi_boarding file is still attached below. This file is required for boarding and surrender to happen correctly in your version.***
Read Me file: attached at bottom of this post. EDIT: "ReadmeV2" updated as well. Left out some folks accidentally. They are now included.
Instructions: Have fresh working install of COAS ready with TAGES already run. Then drop the new GOF ERAs 2 7z files into the game folder and when prompted to replace original game files say yes to all.
Recommended settings: Corsair difficulty. Few ships encountered. Toggle off show information about other ships. In mod options select "In Between" for cannon damage *Note you can change this to realistic when you become very powerful above level 25 or so. Last ensure that check "Surrenders Occasionally" at the bottom of the mod options.
FOR NEWBs: If you've never played before I recommend playing on an easy setting. After starting a new game ensure you set Authority to at least 5 to gain crew/recruits when you talk with the bosun at the beginning dialog. Once you're in town, hit ESC, go to OPTIONS, select Mod Options in lower right hand corner and set default cannon to "in between", weather to COAS default, encounters to COAS default and acquaint yourself with these options as they can be changed at any time during your game. Push ACCEPT when finished and enjoy the game.
* Game start date is 1665.
*New Ships: Besides many of the PO:TEHO ships, there are new ship models from SOFS and almost every old ship in COAS has been reskinned by me. Most of the PO:TEHO ships have also been reskinned. Ship encounters will be a completely new experience.
NOTE: There are no flush deck frigates or ships in the game that would have appeared or been built after 1725. If the ship is very close to that date or like ships in the same class would have been around I make exceptions. One exception to this is the Gentlemen of Luck and a few player characters. I have not been able to successfully prevent the use of later ships in these instances, but they are VERY rare.
*Ships encounters and behaviors have been overhauled. No more spinning ships in single positions. They will occasionally still spin but in a wider circular maneuver. Convoys will look correct with like classes appearing together and only ship types belonging to specific nations appearing in their convoys, patrols and ports. This significantly improves the flavor of the game to a much more historically accurate feel.
* More harbor clutter/ships encountered for a hustle and bustle feel as you enter/exit ports - as it would have been.
*All uniforms have been redone to match the appearance of the correct nation during this era.
*New officers: half of the recruitable officers have been changed to new character models/textures. Less pirate flavor here and more mercenary/military flavor.
* Two dozen new characters imported and specially modified. Many of these are Metazot PO:TEHO characters with my own changes incorporated to give personality and historical flavor where I desired.
*New Pirates and ship captains. Most of the pirate crews and ships captains have been replaced with better more authentic models. No more eye patches or peg legs.
* Playable character interface allows for 67 different player choices. Most of these are historical figures. No more POTC characters although I did keep and modify a few POTC models into historical personalities. New detailed portraits and narratives included with each RPC which is not only fun to look at, but also provides an education on the REAL buccaneers and corsairs of the Golden Age.
*New Items:
- There are 81 blades in the game (thats over 40 new blades and 40 more than in any other GOF
mod)
- There are 39 pistols and pistol combinations (pairs and braces of pistols) All other GOF mods
only had the standard five pistols in game which means 34 new pistols/pistol combinations
- Over 40 new items and 10 existing items revamped or replaced.
NOTE: There are only a few sabers that meet the pre 1725 cut off and most weapons are cutlasses, military rapiers and the like. The type of weapons you would expect to find during the Golden Age. Module #3 will eliminate most of the rapiers and favor many more varieties of cutlass and sabers.
*Weather and the ocean movement, transparency, color, and skies have been overhauled.
*Surrender is enabled in mod options: for best results in game-play set to "Surrenders Occasionally"
* Direct Sail is enabled but rarely do you encounter any ships in this mode.
*Saint Ashley's 8 ship max mod is part of the mod so your character can control up to eight ships in his/her fleet. The max ships that can be encountered in an enemy fleet is 10 ships which potentially allows battles of 28 ships to occur if you walk into a battle between two opposing fleets plus your fleet. The most I've encountered thus far in testing is 24 ships.
* Pirates, Gentlemen of Luck and Bounty Hunter encounters have been overhauled to reflect realistic numbers and ships.
* Over 140 new loading screens incorporated into the game with a wide variety of different screens (mostly germane historical paintings) for taverns, brothels, governors, churches, stores, shipyards, etc. These screens are also different for each nationalities ports. In addition. multiple boarding, cabin, and death loading screens will be seen depending on where you are and how large the encounter. This adds a level of immersion never seen before in COAS.
* Music and sounds overhauled with even better historical music variety germane to the situations encountered. Sound bytes changed for common encounters such as the guards when you come into towns.
* Many new small interface changes. New compass
* New intro movie.
***Work still being done: Importing new locations and lower deck locations enabled for boarding encounters.
Also I added lateen sails to ships replacing spankers incorrect for the time period. These have no rigging. So they need rigged. Also many of the PO:TEHO ships have no mizzen shrouds/ratlines and one of the sloops has none on the main. Someone who knows how could assist by adding shrouds.
Known bugs:
- Occasional CTDs going into Gentlemen of Luck encounters and punitive encounters. Simply reload until it runs. Not that big of a deal. Almost have this one fixed.
- Character list mis-match error at sea. No issues with gameplay except that you will see the error message.
- New items are memory intensive. May have difficulties seeing the pictures of all the new items if you have an older PC.
- Flag and floating mast bug with PO:TEHO ships. Not all the time. Not a game breaker. Not a crashing bug.
also there is occasionally a screen flicker on half or quarter of the screen. Usually happens during battles. If it becomes too bothersome try the following, go to cabin and come back on deck. Go from 3rd person view to deck view and back. If it persists save, quit and restart. Not a crashing bug just annoying.
- Bad relationship with NPC captain bug: So if you agree to talk to a NPC captain about a venture he wants you to help with and you go to his ship and decide that you don't want to go on the mission and he decides to try to kill you this is where the bug happens. After you defeat his crew and get back to your ship you will fight his ship. Because of the different flag and surrender code I am using he will not change to Pirate and you will not be able to board him 90 percent of the time. So what to do. OPTIONS: Dismast him and run away out of his range (850). You can sink him but that will cause you to become hostile with whatever nation's flag he was flying. You can take the mission but blow off doing it and let him follow you about until the time on the mission expires (this can be helpful if you want an extra free ship to battle enemies - maybe they will sink him or take him - you never know.) Not a bad bug just annoying and I'm still working on it.
- Lighting: Every now and then you may get undesirable lighting effects. I was going for a very Caribbean flavored lighting and color. Some people will like it others will not. If you don't like the lighting at a particular time simply use the enabled bracket keys ][ and change until you like how it looks.
- Large battles: Still some occasional mast crashing issues, but nothing like in the other GOF mods. I recommend you quicksave F6 often during large scale battles.
- Eight ships in inventory sometimes causes a crash at the port controller when you want to give a ship. So ensure you save before doing this. A simple shuffling of your ships around and changing one of the captains will allow you to give a ship even if you have eight in your fleet.
-Sound: Still have the sound bug occasionally in ship encounters where more than eight ships are involved. Don't know what's causing this. You can still hear the music and ocean sounds, but the cannon fire is mute.
- Horsepower/RAM: with all the new content this game requires a decent computer to run quickly. If you don't have a good computer the game sometimes lags - especially between setting transitions.
If you are interested in looking over some of the new skins take a look at this topic: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/new-skins-for-gof-eras-mod.19695/
Here is a video of the new items. This one is only two minutes so I call it the low attention span version:
Spoiler alert! This is the longer version. If you don't want to see descriptions of over 80 percent of the new weapons and items, don't watch this video. I go pretty fast, so pause if you want to see a particular description:
Here's a video of the new character interface showing all 56 available characters. Simply maximize screen and resolution of YouTube vid to see the narratives and pause if you want to read the whole paragraphs as I move rather quickly. EDIT: There are now 67 characters so this video does not show all of the new ones. If you want to see them look at the screenshots towards the end of this thread. I'll make another video soon.
Enjoy!
MK
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