Mod Release Open Sea Mod and Realism Settings

[Hylie Pistof]

Now that I'm retired and no longer have to be concerned about the constant drug testing at work, Pieter Hein has me thinking about the good old days.



Jeff: It looks like the distortion is worse on your 4:3 than on my 16:9. If I knew coding I would try to disable one of those files Armada mentioned above, specifically the one set at a 45 degree angle. That should give you a perfectly round moon and me a slightly flattened moon.

My last monitor was a 19" 4:3 flatscreen. Before that it was a 22" NEC crt that was so big and heavy that I had to put a brace under the desk to keep it from sagging under the load. The thing with crt's is that over time the picture gets fuzzy. Yours still seems to be ok tho.

 

[stljeffbb]

Now that I'm retired and no longer have to be concerned about the constant drug testing at work, Pieter Hein has me thinking about the good old days.

Ya Ya, we can always count on Pieter P. Hein to bring us some fun! His prose reminds me a bit of the language of Jack Sparrow....perhaps PPH is Johnny Depp! :j1

Jeff: It looks like the distortion is worse on your 4:3 than on my 16:9. If I knew coding I would try to disable one of those files Armada mentioned above, specifically the one set at a 45 degree angle. That should give you a perfectly round moon and me a slightly flattened moon.

My last monitor was a 19" 4:3 flatscreen. Before that it was a 22" NEC crt that was so big and heavy that I had to put a brace under the desk to keep it from sagging under the load. The thing with crt's is that over time the picture gets fuzzy. Yours still seems to be ok tho.

Yes, I do not know code terribly well either....however, when I actually play I will be using the 16:9 aspect so it probably will not matter to me...nonetheless, my hunch is we do have some friends who will end up playing on a 4:3 aspect.....

Yes, this 20" CRT is also large and heavy....the red guns (?) are starting to go, and it also "stutters" every now and then....but the above mentioned issues are still uncommon...I still enjoy my older Win95/98 games on this monitor/computer combo!

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Armada]

....also, it seems to be just a bit oval looking, or perhaps it is more how it stands out against the background glow....maybe making it just a bit more white, but that is just my opinion....

Sorry, I should have mentioned sooner: I uploaded a 'Standard' version of the hi-res Moon texture, which doesn't have aspect compensation for widescreen.
It should hopefully look better on your 4:3 monitor: http://www.pyratesah...oon_Standard.7z
Still, thanks for testing it! Glad to hear at least someone still has a good old CRT monitor in this day and age.

As for how the Moon looks on the horizon, I don't think we can do much about that. It's probably because the Moon can't go 'behind' the horizon, as such.
I don't know whether that's because the sea goes on forever, or the Moon is positioned too close the player, or both. :wacko:

....looks like Armada made the file twice as large (from 256x256 to 512x512)? Interesting....i tried to get the highest res pic possible and shrink it...I never thought to make the entire pic larger!

That's funny; I assumed your file was that size because it wouldn't work in-game if it were any larger. At least that isn't the case!
It's also quite possible that Akella did exactly what you did, shrinking a real photo of the Moon. Trouble is, it's almost impossible to tell with the resolution they chose. :

BTW, all these night time screenshots look pretty good, considering they're meant mostly for testing!

 

[stljeffbb]

....also, it seems to be just a bit oval looking, or perhaps it is more how it stands out against the background glow....maybe making it just a bit more white, but that is just my opinion....

Sorry, I should have mentioned sooner: I uploaded a 'Standard' version of the hi-res Moon texture, which doesn't have aspect compensation for widescreen.
It should hopefully look better on your 4:3 monitor: http://www.pyratesah...oon_Standard.7z
Still, thanks for testing it! Glad to hear at least someone still has a good old CRT monitor in this day and age.

As for how the Moon looks on the horizon, I don't think we can do much about that. It's probably because the Moon can't go 'behind' the horizon, as such.
I don't know whether that's because the sea goes on forever, or the Moon is positioned too close the player, or both. :wacko:

....looks like Armada made the file twice as large (from 256x256 to 512x512)? Interesting....i tried to get the highest res pic possible and shrink it...I never thought to make the entire pic larger!

That's funny; I assumed your file was that size because it wouldn't work in-game if it were any larger. At least that isn't the case!
It's also quite possible that Akella did exactly what you did, shrinking a real photo of the Moon. Trouble is, it's almost impossible to tell with the resolution they chose. :

BTW, all these night time screenshots look pretty good, considering they're meant mostly for testing!

Hello again Armada....yes, I use the old Howies Screen Capture program that allows for many different resolution sizes...I never did warm up to what windows offered for screen capture options....I should have made those pics into attachments to avoid what some browsers seem to run into making the pics larger than the screen resolution allows and forcing sideways scrolling...oops ops

Concerning the moon....I found the highest res pic possible (it was enormous, like 10k x 10k if memory serves), shrunk it down to size and whitened it a bit....

Me thinks I will spend some serious time this weekend and clean a few things up with Open Sea....my son is now a month old and things are moderating a bit....hopefully my sleep and my IQ will go back up, lol

Regards,

Jeff

 

[stljeffbb]

Now that I'm retired and no longer have to be concerned about the constant drug testing at work, Pieter Hein has me thinking about the good old days. ...

I have another twenty eight years to go, lol

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Hylie Pistof]

After sailing this open sea mod until the install died, and then sailing the direct sail mod for a while, methinks I like the open sea mod best.

It has a higher frustration factor because every island seems to have a band of bad air around it.But when one finally breaks through all is well.

The biggest advantage is battle. The ships spawn far away from each other and this makes for an interesting time. One has the time to see what you are up against, weather permitting, and then the maneuvering starts.

The wind will shift and this ship stops dead and that ship takes off at full speed. But I always seem to end up facing directly into the wind........

 

[stljeffbb]

After sailing this open sea mod until the install died, and then sailing the direct sail mod for a while, methinks I like the open sea mod best.

It has a higher frustration factor because every island seems to have a band of bad air around it.But when one finally breaks through all is well.

The biggest advantage is battle. The ships spawn far away from each other and this makes for an interesting time. One has the time to see what you are up against, weather permitting, and then the maneuvering starts.

The wind will shift and this ship stops dead and that ship takes off at full speed. But I always seem to end up facing directly into the wind........

Hello again Hylie Pistoff.....I'm happy that you "like the open sea mod" the best! With that said....I must ALWAYS pay homage to CCC, Screwface, and others who made the Directsail mod....all I did was tweak things a bit, and it is on top of their mod that it was done....

I did make some minor changes/fixes and started testing, but real life has been kicking me in the pants....and of course, the relatives who never came by to visit me (and wife and stepsons)....well, now that I have a son of my own (and a new relative for them), they are visiting in droves!!

I also figure that we do have a bit of time in that (I assume) we are quite a ways off to exit from the beta stage of Build 14, so I will release my tweaks sometime soon, but there will need to be some major work done in the areas of:

1) Making some code to create the option button in the "Iron Man" area for Open Sea
2) Figuring out the graphics glitches that plague long voyages in Open Sea
3) I'm still thinking about getting multiple nations ships at ship encounters....
4) Other smaller issues that are likely easier to fix....

Keep on playing!

Regards,

Jeff

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Your #1 is easy enough. Edit PROGRAM\BuildSettings.h , PROGRAM\INTERFACE\option_sl.c and RESOURCE\INI\TEXTS\ENGLISH\SettingsDescribe.txt .
I think those are all the files involved.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

SHIPS\SIB_STUFF COPY.TGA.tx
SHIPS\50DB.TGA.tx
SHIPS\50DI.TGA.tx
SHIPS\BOUSOLLE.TGA.tx
SHIPS\BORTOUTFRIGAT45.TGA.tx
SHIPS\BLACK.TGA.tx
SHIPS\RSD_1.TGA.tx
SHIPS\RNDC.TGA.tx

We need to know what ship models refer to these files so we can fix them properly. Most of them are deliberately removed and should no longer be used.

I'm doing a new install and want to take care of these tga's, but do not remember what happened or where. Does anyone remember what happened?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I still had this old post of mine:

SIB_STUFF COPY.TGA: put in from Textures folder - might want to rename and HEX edit to remove the space, but maybe not required
Bousolle.tga: apparently not required, so doesn't need to be there. Could put in a small blank texture to prevent error messages
RSD_1.tga: apparently not required, so doesn't need to be there. Could put in a small blank texture to prevent error messages
black.tga: apparently not required, so doesn't need to be there. Could put in a small blank texture to prevent error messages
bortoutfrigat45.tga HEX edit to bortoutfrigat47.tga
50DB.tga and 50DI.tga HEX edit to deck.tga

Galeoth1_deck is annoyingly textured: either the anchors are wrong or the barrels are when swapping between deck.tga and desk.tga

Thanks a lot for looking into this, Hylie! Less errors is always good.

Does that make any sort of sense?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yes it does! It jogged my memory. I had worked on those ships and forgotten about it. Then when I made this new install I was wondering why I didn't get those messages. It was because I had copied the ships folder over from the dead install.

On another note, I was getting bad graphics of the ships at sea with the new install. On a hunch I opened up the config.exe which I had not touched and set it to the highest resolution it has. Then went into the engine.ini and set it to my resolution and the bad graphics was gone.

I think the config/exe was setting the game to display in 16 bits instead of 32 bits.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

After sailing this open sea mod until the install died, and then sailing the direct sail mod for a while, methinks I like the open sea mod best.

It has a higher frustration factor because every island seems to have a band of bad air around it.But when one finally breaks through all is well.

The biggest advantage is battle. The ships spawn far away from each other and this makes for an interesting time. One has the time to see what you are up against, weather permitting, and then the maneuvering starts.

The wind will shift and this ship stops dead and that ship takes off at full speed. But I always seem to end up facing directly into the wind........

Hello again Hylie Pistoff.....I'm happy that you "like the open sea mod" the best!

With that said....I must ALWAYS pay homage to CCC, Screwface, and others who made the Directsail mod....all I did was tweak things a bit, and it is on top of their mod that it was done....

I did make some minor changes/fixes and started testing, but real life has been kicking me in the pants....and of course, the relatives who never came by to visit me (and wife and stepsons)....well, now that I have a son of my own (and a new relative for them), they are visiting in droves!!

I also figure that we do have a bit of time in that (I assume) we are quite a ways off to exit from the beta stage of Build 14, so I will release my tweaks sometime soon, but there will need to be some major work done in the areas of:

1) Making some code to create the option button in the "Iron Man" area for Open Sea
2) Figuring out the graphics glitches that plague long voyages in Open Sea
3) I'm still thinking about getting multiple nations ships at ship encounters....
4) Other smaller issues that are likely easier to fix....

Keep on playing!

Regards,

Jeff

Jeff: Your mod does not seem to be available anymore.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/76702168/Open%20Sea%20mod%20v02.zip

This is my copy and hopefully it works with Dropbox.

 

[stljeffbb]

Hello HP.....wow! It was removed because of a "violation of terms of service"....guess they figured out I'm a pirate! That really kind-of-sucks....I can't imagine what I could have "violated"....anyhow....thanks for hosting this HP! I will change my sig accordingly with your address for the file (if you don't mind of course)

Regards,

Jeff

P.S. Cool new forum engine!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Yeah, that is a strange thing to consider a violation, considering it is a mod of a mod. And no I don't mind you linking to it. It is your intellectual property in a public location.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Looking forward to including this in the next update. Please point me to the latest version.

As for the moon texture: I suppose we should make an option in the installer file for "widescreen textures"?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ahoy Pieter! Did you get lost? Look at err uh Jeff's signature for the last version. I don't consider it finished, but it is workable and I prefer it to the standard version. It does make the game take longer.

The moon textures aren't quite finished but are better than before. The moon is still oval for me but not as much. There are two versions. One for wide screen and one for 4:3 screens.

 

[Armada]

What's unfinished about the Moon textures? I thought I was more or less done with them.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Lost? Maybe a little bit. Caught up for four months in work that was getting more and more busy up to and far beyond the part of sheer lunacy (to keep the lunar theme going)!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The moon is still oval for me, just not as bad as it was.

 

[Armada]

Ah, I thought it might be that. It works fine on my 1440x900 screen, but I haven't been able to test a proper 16:9 widescreen version.
At least for now we have a good compromise. I will try to sort out a 16:9 version soon.