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Notice List of Development Roles

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Ah, you meant the economy in the game! I thought you may mean the real-life commercial aspects of the game.
Indeed the trading and economy aspect will be important in the game for sure and it'd be great if you were interested in working on that. :yes
 
Programer it is, welcome aboard mate! A dynamic economy is going to be critical to this game. Do you have experience with the UDK?
 
danduk82 said:
Exactly,
I know, my english is not so perfect...
Click to expand...

Sorry for my direct entry to this theme but in remember of our project, in my eyes the follow things are most, most important and need to be solved before all other options. Without, the game WONT WORK! If youre a progammer, i think you need to attention the follow list:

1. Ships must swim in the water and have collission with it and the waves. It should be realtime calculation at the base of the mesh. Mass calculation and dynamics for the interaction with weather conditions. Inside the ships no water must be setup, so maybe vis-areas or something
2. Sails need to be animate for open and resting position
3. Setup dynamics for flag and sailanimation (wind interaction)
4. Gun setup at a ship. Setup locater for its positions and work out useable animations for them
5. Gap animation, maybe bonebased, bring out the gun - animations, and gun resting animation
6. Set anchor animation with paths for the ropes
7. Rope animation when setup or turn the sails etc.
8. Setup UI Elements, Shipbased, to steer and to fight with the ship
9. Ruder setup and animation
10. Weather setup
11. Land setup, boarding procedures, collission locaters for harbor entry and ship mooring
12. Damage system in battle situations, damage modells, collission setup when a ship sinks or burn
13. AI setup for crew
14. AI in the gameworld
15. Gamecontent, interaction in the world and trading system or something other
 
Nope, but I have in C++ and python. So I guess (hope) I should learn quite easily the unreal script ;) And depending on how we choose to program the economy in the game, it could be also written as separate DLLs, I guess.

I have some ideas, but I think this is not yet the time to discuss the implementation too deeply. The economy should be realted to the NPC boats movements. We could imagine different "LOD" for the economy, i.e. a local economy (fishers with small boats, farmers, don't know) and a large scale economy, that is used by merchants to transport goods from one Island to the other. The prosperity of a colony could therefore be related to the size of the small boats fleet around the Islands or something similar.

One think that I always find unrealistic in the naval games, is the relative absence of small (non weaponed) boats around the coasts (in proximity to the colonies). At that time they where quite common, while the big ships where quite rare. When one line ship was entering in an harbor it was an exceptional event for the local people. Imagine a full fleet!

Concerning UDK, I've played a little bit with the landscape feature one month ago to see what it offers, that's all for the moment...
 
I will not write for the whole PA-Team, only from my eyes: Based of our own project in the CryEngine its most important number 1 to solve all enginerequirements the game need. My proposal is for the best game succes to focus the first 5 points:

1. Ships must swim in the water and have collission with it and the waves. It should be realtime calculation at the base of the mesh. Mass calculation and dynamics for the interaction with weather conditions. Inside the ships no water must be setup, so maybe vis-areas or something / Wateranimation
2. Sails need to be animate for open and resting position
3. Setup dynamics for flag and sailanimation (wind interaction)
4. Gun setup at a ship. Setup locater for its positions and work out useable animations for them
5. Gap animation, maybe bonebased, bring out the gun - animations, and gun resting animation

When these are solved, the rest of the options can integrate later when the mainrequirements are still solved. I know I write this much but we are in the CryEngine at the moment in a dead end. The engine cant deliver what we we need and now its a real hard situation what to do. We dont stop the work and wait for the next CryEngine BUT this situation shows how important the enginework is. Its the base for the game. Without it wont work. Thats the point. Its extremly hard to work a 1 year at a project and find out that some things wont work like we want. So excuse me please my 25454. note to focus the engine, i will only beware the PA team to get the same dead end as we have at the moment!!!
 
Wedori, we do appreciate your advise mate, we need all the help we can get. Those are definitely issues that the programers need to concentrate on, but the rest of the team needs something to do as well. There are things that we can work on that aren't engine specific.

danduk82, from what I understand, your knowledge of C++ will help quite a bit, and I am sure your other skills will come in handy as well. I have started a new thread for economy and trade, please feel free to post your ideas there mate.
 
Wedori said:
1. Ships must swim in the water and have collission with it and the waves. It should be realtime calculation at the base of the mesh. Mass calculation and dynamics for the interaction with weather conditions. Inside the ships no water must be setup, so maybe vis-areas or something / Wateranimation
Click to expand...
I guess Hammie is already working on the swimmable water / boat interaction stuff. For what concerns the collision, UDK has a collision implementation which is very impressive. It also has 2 kind of NPC players that can be implemented. The first are the most complex ones, which can interact with the collision system, and each other (i.e. they can have collision between them). The second kind is lighter in term of needed computational resources, but far less complex. They are intended to populate a level with additional characters. I think we could use the first kind of NPC for NPC boats, in this way the collisions would be very easy to compute, because the engine should take care of it. It should also compute the movement paths alone. But we should work on the rules for the paths, because they depend on the direction of the wind for sure, because it influence the speed of the boat. But I don't think this will be a big issue. We could use something similar to a fast marching algorithm (what is done in the GPS for cars) to compute the shortest paths in therm of "minimum effort" paths.

Wedori said:
2. Sails need to be animate for open and resting position
3. Setup dynamics for flag and sailanimation (wind interaction)
4. Gun setup at a ship. Setup locater for its positions and work out useable animations for them
5. Gap animation, maybe bonebased, bring out the gun - animations, and gun resting animation
Click to expand...

I think there are already many people here working on animations, and Hammie was (correct me if I'm wrong) working on finding a good way to place them on the boat (e.g. firing cannons etc). In fact, the animations could be programmed in a way that allows the game to run also if they are not finished. When the boats do specific actions, some specific functions, or methods, will be called. I think boats should be programmed as high level classes, which include the definitions of the animations, (but also the boat model, etc) to be used with as properties. If these properties point to void the animations are simply not called, but the boat can still navigate. Or something similar...
 
Can we please continue the discussion about the last point via PM or in the right thread? I would like to know more about your enginesetup in UDK.The CryEngine works something other like the UDK, so Im interested to know when you get things work.
There we need to store the animation in the modell. Later in the game a locater tells the engine where to place the gun. BUT the gun always will stand plane and not in the shape of the deck. Many other things around this theme too.

Here, i think it fits good:
http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/technical-requirements-of-models-textures.19787/
 
Hi,

Count me in for the usual....models, animation & texturing.

Cheers
damski.
 
Damski! Good to see you mate. :cheers
Thanks for offering your help, it will be greatly appreciated.
 
Ahoy! I would like to offer myself as a Quest writing and creative ideas support . I cannot programme or anything like that but I am a creative writer mainly writing short stories. I am also fanatical about pirates so the two should go hand in hand to write up some quests. I love that the majority will be keeping to realism with this game as it will make for a fascinating game rather than merely a GTA with sails.
Hope to be part of the team :cheers
 
I've added both of you to the relevant groups. :doff
Please note the QC Testers group will stay empty until we actually have some content to test.
 
OK i would like to work on terrain, don't know how to use the engine but i can learn quickly. I would also when the time comes like to do quest writing, thanks.
 
Added! :onya
 
Put me down for 2D textures please. I took ages to decide but at least this way I will be able to help, hopefully. But in reality if my work isn't quite right, just tell me and I'll try to improve it or move to something less visible.
 
Oh, sorry about that, seems I did miss your request. I've added you to the 2D Artists group now. :doff
 
Hello every body. I was reading a little about Artificial Intelligence in video games and I have a question:
is there anybody working on that? I ask the question because it will for sure be VERY IMPORTANT in many aspects of the game:
- economics (my stuff :) )
- NPC players (ok, UDK provides classes for that)
- NPC boats (and characters on board)
- bind all together

I have found a couple of very interesting topics reading this: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

Good night everybody
:ahoy
 
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