Pieter - Team Leader is fine.
I have edited you last tome somewhat to hopefully be easier to read on the assumption that is will pass through a translator first.
So, I have put certain points on a separate line to gain more emphasis.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Dear Mr. Zaitsev,
It was a surprise and pleasure to have made contact with you, via Peter Willemoes, and we would be most interested in exploring the possibilities of taking the matter further.
In this respect we have laid out below some information about us, our modpack and community, and in return we would be pleased to receive similar information regarding yourselves.
This email has been compiled with the agreement of our community with the aim that any collaboration that may be achieved be to our mutual advantage.
As such we have laid out below an outline of our situation.
About our modpack
The Build modpack is being developed by the PiratesAhoy! modding team.
It has been worked on ever since the release of Pirates of the Caribbean in 2003 and is still going strong. The modding team members have changed over time, but the goals have remained pretty much the same.
What we have done
The last modpack version we have made is Build 13. This is available for download from our ModDB Profile and Pieter's Pirate Page.
Public opinion on the modpack is very positive.
We have had some media coverage recently in the November issue in the Dutch gaming magazine PC Gameplay. See here.
It is also known that some people have bought the game simply to be able to play our modpack.
The modpack contains many new features. Among these are many retextures of ships, locations and characters, new quests, improved interfaces, access to ship decks, improved cannon fire graphics, new islands and locations, random villagers in towns, treasure search quests, random events, such as mutinies, exploding powder magazines, ships surrending, parlay with enemy captains and much, much more.
What we are doing
Right now we are working on creating Build 14, which we want to release as Pirates of the Caribbean: New Horizons in due time.
Mods currently being worked on, and nearing completion, are:
Capture Colony, - allowing the player to give towns to different nations after the capture or control of the town himself.
Free Walk On Ship, - allowing the player to walk around the interior of the ship freely.
DirectSail mod, - allowing people to sail from one island to another without using the worldmap.
These mods, and others still in the works, have been requested for a very long time and are in testing, nearing the point of final release.
Several of our members are great fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, so we're trying to add more movie tie-ins.
We have added proper models of the Black Pearl, Wicked Wench, Flying Dutchman and Endeavour in our game and currently the Interceptor is being worked on. Also we are rewriting and expanding the original main quest to work as a prequel to the PotC films.
We also have the Curse of the Black Pearl film quest finished for the most part.
What we want to do
Our goal is to make a game that is fun, realistic and interesting for both beginning and advanced players.
We are currently experimenting with facial expressions and spoken text for the dialogs, different ships for different nations, camera viewpoints and adding maps to the game.
We have thoughts on adding much more interesting player-officer, player-crew and player-NPC interaction to the game to the point of giving all important random characters, such as officers, villagers and other captains, in the game an actual personality.
Our dream would be to combine the best of all pirate games together and make the best pirate game that has ever been made.
About the Community
Our community has an unconventional way of working, which we find produces the best results. All modders work on the game in their own specialty area. Usually on things that have been suggested, or requested, by the community and sometimes on their own initiative with ideas they believe will be of benefit to the game experience. These mods are then submitted to the modpack compilers who put all of the mods together into one modpack and this is then alpha tested by other volunteers to check the implementation in the game, prior to release.
Our community is completely open to anyone who wants to join, at whatever level of ability in code, textures, models or other subjects. Anyone wishing to help with the modding is welcome and we are always happy to help new and old members alike. The community also functions very democratically. All important issues are open for discussion to everyone and anyone and we try to decide the proper course of action based on the most important points being brought up by the various members.
What we can offer you
Being such a diverse community with many different members, each member has a different opinion on cooperation. Some people are fine with their creative work being used commercially, some people would want to get some compensation and some people do not want their work used commercially at all. This means that there is some of our content we would consider you could use in Corsairs: City of Abandoned Ships, should it be of interest. We would need to know what content you would like to use and we need to ask the members who made that content what they think of their content being used.
What we would like
First of all, we would be interested in access to your modding tools, but we do appreciate your need to obtain approval first.
Have any approaches been made at your end as yet to obtain this approval?
We are limited when it comes to making completely new ships as we cannot generate the proper collision data, and the lighting on completely new ships as well as on ships that we have modified, is reversed, so tools for use in these areas would be greatly appreciated. We can modify existing characters and locations, but we simply cannot create new locations and characters from scratch, so again tools for these purposes would be most useful.
Secondly, quite frequently in our modding work, we run into limitations put onto us by the game engine. A lot of the code is open for modification, but also a lot is hidden away in the MODULES files so we cannot change it. An example would be when we tried to make a Different Flag mod that would allow the player to hoist a lot of different flags. All flags are in one file flagall.tga.tx and because of the TX Converter, this texture's width is not unlimited. Therefore the amount of different flags we can add into the game is also limited. We would very much like to have these files opened up to us so that we would have a lot more freedom in what we can do.
Thirdly, in order to understand its capabilities, we would like to be able to play our own game on the Storm 2.5 engine instead of the Storm 2.0 engine. This way we can evaluate the graphics, performance and additional options provided by that engine.
As of the moment, we are not really aware of any advantages to the Storm 2.5 engine as opposed to the Storm 2.0 engine apart from the better graphics though, so some more information on that would be welcome. If you could provide us with a PotC-compatible version of the Storm 2.5, that would be great. We have tried running our game on the AoP engine in the past, but so far have been unsuccessful.
The culmination of our wishes is simply to make the best pirate game in existance, preferrably by joining together the best things of PotC, AoP and all the modding work done on both games.
We hope that this provides some insight into this community, it’s aims and abilities, but feel free to ask if you have any further questions. Also we would be most interested in learning more about your community and modding work.
We look forward to your reply and a fruitful and mutually beneficial collaboration.
With kind regards,
The PiratesAhoy! Modding Community
- Pieter Boelen, Team leader
- Pirate_KK, Lead Modpack Compiler
- Peter Willemoes, Public Relations
- Community Members<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
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