Planned Feature Include Cannon Weight and Number in Cargo Capacity

[Pieter Boelen]

I have been checking and so far every load is just under the limit.

That is with the latest EXE installer that still has this mod enabled, right?

What loads are you referring to? The load in your hold after filling it up manually? Or the load of the random ships you encounter?

Technically "just under the limit" should be OK. But I would expect random ships to sometimes be a bit further under the limit.
For player ships it all depends on the order in which you do anything.
But if you do cannons and crew first and afterwards do an Auto Buy or manually fill up the hold, you should indeed always end up below the limit.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

1. I have never ever done an auto buy as it gives me lots of stuff I don't want and not nearly enough of what I DO want. It is a complete waste.

2. Yes, when I buy cargo after taking care of the basic supplies there is always a little room left over 1-3 cwt.

3. Yes this is with the latest installer.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

1. I have never ever done an auto buy as it gives me lots of stuff I don't want and not nearly enough of what I DO want. It is a complete waste.

You can tweak the settings in PROGRAM\InternalSettings.h and "educate" the Auto Buy button to do what YOU want.
Might save you some trouble in manually supplying your ships all the time.

2. Yes, when I buy cargo after taking care of the basic supplies there is always a little room left over 1-3 cwt.

So let's see if I got that right:
1. Sell your cargo
2. Resupply ship manually
3. Fill up cargo hold with extra trade goods
4. There is some free space left over

Was that not always the case? Some goods take up more than 1 unit of capacity, so therefore wouldn't be able to fit into the hold.
That could leave your ship with a small amount of space left over because you wouldn't be able to fit in any more of that particular good.
If you find a good that takes up less space per unit, you might be able to fill the hold completely with that.

3. Yes this is with the latest installer.

My main query is whether you had the latest ZIP as well, since that disables this mod again.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes it is with the latest zip also. I was checking to see if the math went bad as it sometimes does. If that zip disables it, then I don't have to worry about getting overloaded.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If you didn't start a new game after installing the ZIP, then you would still have the larger capacities, but the crew and cannons are no longer dynamically included.
That would just give all ships stupidly huge cargo holds.

Either way, overloading and capsizing was disabled with the latest ZIP.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ah. New game required.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Ah. New game required.

You can try F11 to reinitialize as well, then the GiveShip2Character(pchar, pchar.ship.type something something command in console.c to update also your own ship's stats.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Ah. New game required.

Better yet, execute these lines through console and continue play:

      ShipsInit();
       for (i = 0; i <= GetCompanionQuantity(PChar); i++) {
         ch = GetCharacter(GetCompanionIndex(pchar, sti(i)));
         GiveShip2Character(ch,ch.ship.type,ch.ship.name,-1,ch.ship.stats.nation,true,true);
       }

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Ah. New game required.

And going even further.... How about I make Reinitialize AUTOMATICALLY update the stats on the player and companion ships?
So if anyone ever plays with ships_init.c again, you just need to press F11 for even the player's ships to be updated.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

And going even further.... How about I make Reinitialize AUTOMATICALLY update the stats on the player and companion ships?
So if anyone ever plays with ships_init.c again, you just need to press F11 for even the player's ships to be updated.

That would be a nice feature that would speed up the process of dialing in a ships stats.

I did do F11 when I installed that last zip. I'm playing a new game now and it is very different. But in a good way! I think........ When I landed at Havana I was attacked by SEVEN pirates but I survived.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

That would be a nice feature that would speed up the process of dialing in a ships stats.

Already done and will be in the next upload. Should allow updating the stats from ships_init.c without even closing the game, I think.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Levis: Just so you're aware of it, I did a substantial amount of work on this mod but it proved too huge to finish in a hurry.
It is still in the latest modpack, but disabled at the bottom of PROGRAM\globals.c so we can build on it again in the future.

 

[Levis]

It looks really interesting and I like this to be actually working.
Could someone tell me what the problems are?
From what I got from the first page the problem probably lies in the check for over capacity. But its no problem if you get over capacity on shore right? Or even at sea. There is something in place now which makes you capsize when you are over capacity right?
So just having the gun weight and crew weight (and maybe some upgrade weights) substracted from your cargo would now work? Altough if we do enable it I would advice to have a small multiplier or addition to the cargo spaces to keep it more balanced.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If you search your PROGRAM folder for the toggle at the bottom of globals.c, you can see everything that can already be done.

I think the main problem is indeed that ships are considered to be over capacity when they shouldn't be.
Apparently the code that loads NPC ships doesn't properly take into account the maximum capacity.
Which want a problem before but is now.

And there are multiple ways you can overload your own ship which should ideally be prevented.
And the recalculate Cargo load function probably isn't always called when necessary.

 

[Grey Roger]

The fundamental problem remains that guns occupied a lot more space than would be accounted for simply by taking their weight out of your cargo allowance. You can see this very easily, just go to the gun deck of your ship and see how much empty space there is around the guns. That's so the crew have enough room to service the guns. What this means is that if you count guns as if they were cargo, warships are going to end up with silly amounts of capacity and merchants are going to become obsolete. And this did indeed happen last time someone tried to count cannons as cargo. I raided a convoy and took the entire contents of two well loaded fast merchantmen aboard, over and above the food, rum, ammo, sailcloth and planks which I was already carrying.

One reality check is to take an Aurora class corvette and reduce its armament to match a fast merchantman, which is supposed to be an Aurora with its armament reduced to provide more cargo space. If the Aurora with reduced armament has more cargo space left than the fast merchantman, something is wrong. If the Aurora with reduced armament has less cargo space than the fast merchantman, that's accounted for by the fact that you haven't really converted the gun deck to a cargo hold properly. Such a conversion would probably involve replacing the side planks so that there aren't holes through which guns can poke, and installation of mount points to secure the cargo.

For that matter, if you want to replace your 12lb guns with a larger number of smaller guns, you'd need to replace the side planks and have more gun ports cut out. Otherwise all you can do is replace the 12lb guns with the same number of smaller guns, which you can do now, and it wouldn't get you any extra cargo space because the gun deck is still a gun deck.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The fundamental problem remains that guns occupied a lot more space than would be accounted for simply by taking their weight out of your cargo allowance. You can see this very easily, just go to the gun deck of your ship and see how much empty space there is around the guns. That's so the crew have enough room to service the guns. What this means is that if you count guns as if they were cargo, warships are going to end up with silly amounts of capacity and merchants are going to become obsolete. And this did indeed happen last time someone tried to count cannons as cargo. I raided a convoy and took the entire contents of two well loaded fast merchantmen aboard, over and above the food, rum, ammo, sailcloth and planks which I was already carrying.

Is that because of the weight to volume ratio of the cannons OR is that because I doubled the "regular supply capacity" for all navy ships at the time?
That also did give navy ships a much larger capacity than is currently the case.
However, that would be very easy to prevent: just remove the one line I added that did that.

For that matter, if you want to replace your 12lb guns with a larger number of smaller guns, you'd need to replace the side planks and have more gun ports cut out. Otherwise all you can do is replace the 12lb guns with the same number of smaller guns, which you can do now, and it wouldn't get you any extra cargo space because the gun deck is still a gun deck.

You cannot really add more cannons than can fit on your ship anyway, so that should pretty much be a non-issue.

 

[Grey Roger]

Is that because of the weight to volume ratio of the cannons OR is that because I doubled the "regular supply capacity" for all navy ships at the time?

It's the weight to volume ratio. Cannons don't occupy much space, but there's a lot of empty space above and around them so the gun crew can do their jobs without having to be hobbits who sit on top of the gun while loading it. So a gun which is part of a ship's armament, as opposed to sitting in a cargo hold being transported to somewhere else, effectively takes up much more volume than its weight would indicate. Plus, as I said, gun deck and cargo hold aren't interchangable without some carpentry work, preferably in a shipyard.

So you can't replace twenty 12lb guns with a larger number of 4lb guns because the number of gun mounts is fixed. The gun crew are happy because these smaller guns take up less space so they have more room in which to do their jobs. That's until the captain uses up that extra space to fit in some extra cargo, which isn't properly secured because there are no mount points in the middle of the gun deck, so now the gun crew are miserable because the cargo keeps sliding around and getting in their way. Worse, the gun deck is above the normal cargo hold, putting that new cargo above ths ship's centre of gravity, so the ship rolls more. To avoid mutiny, the captain has some mount points jury-rigged. The cargo can now be tied down properly. The gun crew keep tripping over the ropes and mutiny anyway. The last we see of the captain is after the gun crew have thrown the extra cargo crates over the side with the captain tied to one of them.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

So you can't replace twenty 12lb guns with a larger number of 4lb guns because the number of gun mounts is fixed. The gun crew are happy because these smaller guns take up less space so they have more room in which to do their jobs. That's until the captain uses up that extra space to fit in some extra cargo, which isn't properly secured because there are no mount points in the middle of the gun deck, so now the gun crew are miserable because the cargo keeps sliding around and getting in their way. Worse, the gun deck is above the normal cargo hold, putting that new cargo above ths ship's centre of gravity, so the ship rolls more. To avoid mutiny, the captain has some mount points jury-rigged. The cargo can now be tied down properly. The gun crew keep tripping over the ropes and mutiny anyway. The last we see of the captain is after the gun crew have thrown the extra cargo crates over the side with the captain tied to one of them.

It's the weight to volume ratio. Cannons don't occupy much space, but there's a lot of empty space above and around them so the gun crew can do their jobs without having to be hobbits who sit on top of the gun while loading it. So a gun which is part of a ship's armament, as opposed to sitting in a cargo hold being transported to somewhere else, effectively takes up much more volume than its weight would indicate. Plus, as I said, gun deck and cargo hold aren't interchangable without some carpentry work, preferably in a shipyard.

Indeed the volume of the cannons and cargo is very relevant, as is their centre of gravity.
But if we want any feature like this one in the game, some simplification is necessary. Otherwise we would need to include a "ship loading simulator" and that is probably a bit overkill.

Installing smaller cannons or removing cannons altogether has to be done in the shipyard anyway (excep when cannons are destroyed in battle, of course).
So you might imagine that this action also comes with the required changes to the ship's structure.

Having lighter cannons installed does mean you can load more cargo without your ship being at risk of sinking.
This is assuming that the HOLD is large enough to fit all this extra cargo, though.
But if we don't make that assumption, none of this is ever going to make any sense.
Which would be a bit of a shame because a trade-off between cargo capacity, cannons and number of crew could make for more involved gameplay.

Perhaps a cannon should be counted for LESS than its actual weight.
That way, if you remove a cannon, you only get a little bit of extra cargo space and not the entire real weight of the cannon.
This to simulate the effect that a cannon takes up more space than just its own volume.

An alternate idea would be to give each cannon equal weight, regardless of calibre to simulate them effectively occupying near-equal volume.
Of course this bypasses any stability concerns from too heavy cannons (ugh, WASA!), but I don't think we can make it weight AND volume-dependent.
Which is to say... While that probably is theoretically possible, it would make a complicated modification even more complex.

 

[Levis]

Let's see.
these are variables set for a ship:
Capacity
Max cannons
Max caliber

So this would be in the case there is a cargo deck and a gun deck and the guns are all in use.
This means a calculation can be done that says how much "weight" is added by the cannons.
Cannon weight(for max caliber) * num of cannons = max cannon weight
this together ith the max capicity would be the max load.
Now say the cannons are made smaller so they weight 4 less and the num cannons is 32 then you get a extra 128 of cargo hold.
This part is easy and probably implemented already.
Now for the simplification part.
Say we assume there are 2 decks, both have cargo in the center and guns at the side (As the are modeled when you are boarding). We could even increase or decrease the amount of decks based on say the class (or wherever the boarding looks at).
So lets say for each deck 50% of the total space avaible is used for cargo and 25% is used for guns and 25% is used for walk space etc, I think that sounds reasonable. Again these values could be tweaked for say the type of ship (navy or trader etc).
So lets say there are 2 decks now and we have a max capicity of 2000 and 20 guns. That means both can store 1000 and have 10 guns.
Now say we want to remove 1 gun, how much capicity would that give us?
I'd say that means the deck should when completly filled be able to have 2000 cause only 50% is used for the 1000. We said 25% is used for the guns, so the guns in total when all removed on this deck would add 500 (25% of (1000/0.5)) So 1 gun would add 50 to the capacity in this case.

For crew we could do a same kind of esitamtion. Say we have 1/2 a deck for the crew (could be dependable if its navy or trader etc) and we have a max crew of 50. we could then see again that a complete deck would host 2000 capacity. so a half deck would host 1000 capcity. Ofcourse we still need some place to walk so 25% off means we are left with 750 capacity.
So 1 crew member would be equal to 15 capacity in this case.

Mind i just took some arbitrary numbers and there might need to be some tweaking to this.
For example there are upgrades which might change the percentages etc. But I think this could work. we just need to find the right percentages and see what to take and what not.

 

[Grey Roger]

As I said, the reality check is that this sort of modification has already been done, in a way - the fast merchantman is an Aurora with 9lb guns instead of 12lb and no fore or aft guns at all. The Aurora has capacity 1500, the fast merchantman has 2200. So the baseline reference is that the difference between 30 guns of 12lb and 26 guns of 9lb should be somewhere around 700. Another reference is that RevengeM has capacity 4800 and 40 guns of 12lb, RevengeF has capacity 3500 and 40 guns of 18lb, so the difference between an 18lb gun and a 12lb gun should be about (4800-3500)/40 = 32.5. (And I should have knocked some capacity off RevengeW as it now has 24lb guns, though really that ought to be a larger ship representing something like Ark Royal.)

The assumption would be that the cargo hold is large enough to hold <capacity> cwt of cargo of low density, e.g. cotton. You can either fill it with such cargo or part fill it with denser cargo, e.g. gold. Reducing the armament means you can get more of the dense stuff in there. (Of course, the game will let you get more of the light stuff in there as well, but that's probably relatively low value so you're not making much profit on it anyway, so it's not much of a game breaker.)