New Models!

[Martes]

Rebuilt the Belle Poule.

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It may be hard to spot the differences, but the hull is greatly refined (I dropped the french reconstruction drawings as they were full of discrepancies between themselves, let alone the British lines, so I stayed with the plan from NMM), and some details are added to the head.

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[Martes]

A new variant of the Endymion, this time with a separate model, features higher head giving it post-war Victorian appearance.

compare newer (left) to older head (right)​

The paintings and drawings, though, show that both Liffey class and their Russian counterparts sported both versions of heads either on different ships or during different repairs, so I am going to retain them both.

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I desperately wanted to joke that Victorian paint scheme should come in three distinct colors - white, white and white, but found that history is objects to this, since at least in Navarino there were both ships with white and yellow stripes.

 

[Martes]

Added a skin for Napoleonic style Virginie, based on very similar La Didon:

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The only difference is slightly modified curve of the stripe and the addition of bridle port. I could make a separate model without the roundhouse, I hope. Sometimes.

On the other hand here is something I wanted to show off for a long time.
It's our old friend the Egyptienne, but not quite.
I tried to recreate how a British frigate could look if built to her lines - the same way Endymion evolved from the Pomone. Historically they found it to be uneconomical at the moment, and in the time of war of 1812 the project was quite forgotten, but if?
So I straightened the sheer, replaced the stern with the British gallery, and added two different heads - for older, Napoleonic, and newer, Victorian styles.
The result is a large, long, heavy frigate, with a rig of a 74, that wouldn't look out of place for well until the 1850's:

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Napoleonic variant:

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And Victorian:

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[Martes]

Small additions to the Colossus - rounder quarter galleries (they were initially straight):

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And various details at the head with lowered figurehead in more correct position:

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[Martes]

...and modified the stern texture a little, enclosing quarter-gallery aft windows

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[Martes]

Made some corrections to the Colossus - more accurate beakhead, cathead supports, curve of the deck and roundhouse door partitions on the quarterdeck. And made the intersections between deck details coincide, so there is no face overlapping.

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[Martes]

Rescaled the rig for 32-gunners, now having separate sets for 40-gun frigates/64-gun ships, 38/36-gun frigates/50-gun ships and 32-gun frigates/possibly 44-gun ships if I ever make any.

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[Martes]

Moved the spritsail yard (unused anyway) from the edge to the middle of the bowsprit (on most of the rigging sets):

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[Martes]

A small reminder - why I began doing this in the first place:

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[Martes]

I am absolutely exhausted - this ship ate my mind for almost half a year - to present the completed Christian VII:

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It wouldn't even be possible without the fortunate high-resolution drawings being available at the Danish archive and a photo of a contemporary model provided by @Bava (and tons, literally tons of other reference materials, really), since the stern is hellishly unusually built, but... here she is.

It's the most complex model I did for now, and I am very delighted that at around 8k triangles the game can still handle her.

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[Martes]

...and some more technical views:

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[Pieter Boelen]

It's the most complex model I did for now, and I am very delighted that at around 8k triangle

Congrats!

 

[Martes]

Made a small adjustment to the roundhouse of Christian VII to denote the border between the poop deck and upper quarter galleries that actually form a single structure and covered with bulwarks from outside. It's not really final form, but seems closer to original than simple deck covering from board to board.

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Blows my mind each time I look at it.

And two shots under sail:

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[Martes]

Some close-ups from lower camera angles.

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[Martes]

Minor tweaks here and there.

Rescaled the rig for Christian VII (and all future 80-gunners):

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And made a quick skin for the Colossus of later modification of the class (Bombay/Aboukir):

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[Martes]

Found a way to make it possible to shoot the bowsprit out of a ship (yes, it was invincible in vanilla game).

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[Pieter Boelen]

Just for a second there, I was imagining a rocket-propelled bow sprit firing at an enemy ship.

 

[Martes]

Not that far, no
(I think it's the phrase "shoot them out of the water" stuck to me, anyway).

But the bowsprit was the only part of the rigging to be indestructible, and that was definitely a bug.
And that means, it may be possible (only very, very tedious) to separate the masts to at least two parts (the mast itself and a combination of topmast-topgallant), but I don't exactly see a way to prevent a possibility of lower part to be destroyed before the upper, so I am not going to dig too far in the direction as well.

 

[RPearson]

Martes, I started a reply a short while ago on something else but firing off bowsprits is an interesting topic. There are no bowsprit strength and damage values that users can work with. But there may have been something coded and broken or not used. There's a few things like that in AOS2. Some like the weather as in rain, snow, fog and lightning; the whole scenario editor and formation settings - these were fixed in PB. They were in early AOS2 demo release but not final as I recall.

I suspect that if the bowsprit mesh were included with the foremast mesh it would work like your pic shows. Maybe you should increase the strength of the foremast in the ship data to account for the total damage the foremast/bowsprit can incur following this approach. If separate they would have individual strengths that would sum to more than the foremast alone.

I'm just starting to get some tools together to try working with the cff files for terrain generation mainly. Have you been able to get models out of a program like Blender and convert them into cff format? I can probably extract vertex and face data from the cff files with some scripts but going the other way is not going happen for me. I need an easier way to export or convert them.

 

[Martes]

I suspect that if the bowsprit mesh were included with the foremast mesh it would work like your pic shows. Maybe you should increase the strength of the foremast in the ship data to account for the total damage the foremast/bowsprit can incur following this approach. If separate they would have individual strengths that would sum to more than the foremast alone.

Very close, but not exactly. The meshes are still separate, but I edited the configuration file (.shp), and assigned the bowsprit as an additional foremast. From the tests I ran I think it has the same amount of hitpoints as assigned to foremast (the picture above when the firing ship was positioned at the front and very close, so the foremast fell together with the bowsprit, but it doesn't happen every time. I seen them fall together, fall separately, fall to different sides...)

Before:
masts {

bowsprit( bowsprit, "74_gShip_m3.cff", 0.000000, 0.03430, 0.22206)
foremast( foremast, "74_gShip_m2.cff", 0.000000, 0.04117, 0.17319)
mainmast( mainmast, "74_gShip_m1.cff", 0.000000, 0.03563, -0.04574)
mizzenmast( mizzenmast, "74_gShip_m0.cff", 0.000000, 0.04942, -0.19734)
}

After:
masts {

bowsprit( foremast, "74_gShip_m3.cff", 0.000000, 0.03430, 0.22206)
foremast( foremast, "74_gShip_m2.cff", 0.000000, 0.04117, 0.17319)
mainmast( mainmast, "74_gShip_m1.cff", 0.000000, 0.03563, -0.04574)
mizzenmast( mizzenmast, "74_gShip_m0.cff", 0.000000, 0.04942, -0.19734)
}

The difficult part was to reassign the jibs so that when the bowsprit is destoyed, they would go down with it, and I got it solved by reassigning them as staysails:

Before:
jib_1( foremast, jib, 0.000000, 0.204644, 0.180789,
"74_gShip_s6_d0_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d0_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d0_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d1_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d1_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d1_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d2_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d2_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d2_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d3_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d3_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d3_m2.cff")
jib_2( foremast, jib, 0.000000, 0.195395, 0.117430,
"74_gShip_s7_d0_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d0_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d0_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d1_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d1_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d1_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d2_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d2_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d2_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d3_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d3_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d3_m2.cff")

After:
staysail( bowsprit, stay, 0.000000, 0.204644, 0.130789,
"74_gShip_s6_d0_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d0_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d0_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d1_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d1_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d1_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d2_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d2_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d2_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s6_d3_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d3_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s6_d3_m2.cff")
staysail( bowsprit, stay, 0.000000, 0.195395, 0.067430,
"74_gShip_s7_d0_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d0_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d0_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d1_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d1_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d1_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d2_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d2_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d2_m2.cff",
"74_gShip_s7_d3_m0.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d3_m1.cff", "74_gShip_s7_d3_m2.cff")

Note that the third coordinate (they go as X, Z, Y) has changed, as those coordinates are relative to parent object.