Progress Screenshots

[Pieter Boelen]

So far, the ships included have been made from scratch.

 

[Armada]

As for the camera offset angle, the Build mod does have a feature for that but it is of by default.
Only reason for that is that the offset can place the camera inside surrounding geometry.
Is that the case for Unity as well? Or is some collision detection applied to the camera?

I'm not sure if the dialogue system does any additional checks for camera collision. The way it works in the scenario above is the two characters turn to face each other, so the offset camera is guaranteed not to clip through the player. This is a sequence I defined manually, so a quest writer could do it completely differently for other situations. For instance, the characters don't have to face each other directly, and there are several other predefined camera positions to choose from.
Once we switch to Cinemachine to replace all our current cameras, that has a system that can automatically choose the "best shot" and adapt on-the-fly if something gets in the way. And we can make cutscenes with it.

Is the ships import from the original game or you made it from scratch,if you guys make those from scratch,that's impressive !

All three ships were indeed made from scratch, and are also available in the PotC: New Horizons mod.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'm not sure if the dialogue system does any additional checks for camera collision. The way it works in the scenario above is the two characters turn to face each other, so the offset camera is guaranteed not to clip through the player.

I was thinking about clipping through surrounding buildings and such.
That's what can happen in PotC and that's the reason why that feature is switched off by default.

 

[Armada]

Our player camera currently avoids collisions by zooming in/out, though it may be disabled during dialogue. Cinemachine certainly has that feature as well.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Our player camera currently avoids collisions by zooming in/out, though it may be disabled during dialogue. Cinemachine certainly has that feature as well.

Excellent! I hoped they might have done something like that.

 

[Armada]

I've made some changes to the water colour, reflectivity and light absorption that should make it look slightly more realistic:

In addition, I fixed a strange yellow tint that was affecting the ships, mostly visible during the day. Turns out it was light reflecting off the extra seabed we had placed around the island, since it ignores the water. With a much darker texture, the seabed no longer reflects yellow light, so darker areas on ships are more correctly lit. This makes a noticeable difference to the Indy:

 

[Armada]

The water asset we're using comes with a bow wave emitter, which I've now added to all our ships. It creates physical waves and leaves a foam trail, though I've toned down the foam so the ships don't look they're propeller-driven.

Spoiler: Show images

 

[Hylie Pistof]

That's great! But I don't recall seeing sailing ships leaving anything that big behind. Do you remember that French frigate they built and sailed to America a while back? I don't recall seeing much wake behind her.

 

[Martes]

It seems to be quite weather and speed dependent:

​

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Thanks for the pics. I guess I only saw her while she was just coasting along.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Indeed it doesn't yet look fully true-to-life. But there is SOMETHING THERE, which is great news as far as I'm concerned!

And @Martes is, of course, exactly right.

 

[Homo eructus]

That's great! But I don't recall seeing sailing ships leaving anything that big behind. Do you remember that French frigate they built and sailed to America a while back? I don't recall seeing much wake behind her.

Ah, L'Hermione! I went to visit her in the shipyard at Rochefort when she was barely more than a skeleton, and again last year, when she was all grown up and already back from her American voyage. It was something special to step aboard after seeing her in her infancy. I would have loved to see her sailing though.

 

[Armada]

Recently, I separated the Main Menu from the Pause Menu in the game, which are identical in the NH mod. This has allowed me to redesign them both and cut down on the number of buttons depending on the context.

Here's a redesigned Main Menu using the ship and player character as a backdrop. As well as removing the "Save Game" and "Tips and Tricks" buttons from this menu, I made each button thinner and reduced the gaps between them.

In contrast, here's the new Pause Menu, which takes up a small portion of the screen. The "Save" and "Tips and Tricks" buttons are back, along with a new button to return to the Main Menu. The "New Game" button was removed as this is better suited to the Main Menu, and will eventually include a character/ship selection screen.

Spoiler: Show image

In other news, I've added a teleport option to the Quick Action command (F3) that lets you go to your ship deck without having to load a new scene. This works the same way as before (i.e. walk to the end of the pier and press F3), but your character is simply moved to a different spot in the scene, so you can still see the other ships and any characters in port.

Spoiler: Show images

This is made possible by making the ship a static object as soon as you teleport to it, so it won't roll with the waves while you're on deck. It's exactly the same model, just with some components enabled or disabled as appropriate. When you teleport back to the pier, the ship returns to "dynamic" mode and is affected by the waves again. This is a major advantage for development, as we now only need to maintain one version of each ship, rather than "static" and "dynamic" versions. It also means we can remove the duplicate port scene that contained the old static ship deck. By the time we implement a boarding system, this ability to make ships static on-the-fly could yield some exciting results.

The reason the ship has to be static while you're on deck is mainly for the benefit of AI characters. The AI can't perform pathfinding calculations on a moving platform using Unity's NavMesh system, so we can't allow normal characters to walk around on a moving ship. PotC has a similar limitation, which is why it has a custom pathfinding system for the low-poly crew you see on deck while at sea. We will likely have to do something similar in NHR to achieve the same effect, but without being restricted to the same low-poly crew models.

 

[Mihail]

looks really nice, keep up the good work.

 

[TommyM]

Forging the old game piece by piece and it looks gorgeous so far, you really do an amazing job and I admire your dedication to the game!

 

[POOTIS]

Are you still working on this?

 

[The Nameless Pirate]

The developers have stopped working on it from what I know, due to other commitments.

@Armada works on Buccaneers!, along with the other people from Skyward Digital.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The developers have stopped working on it from what I know, due to other commitments.

Yup.
@Armada was the main brains behind it and he's moved onto bigger and better things in the world of pirate have development.
@Flannery is busy with family life and @Captain Murphy is still recovering from last year's massive hurricane passing right over his house.

Buccaneers! is looking pretty good though if you ask me.
There's really no need to have a parallel project going when there's a professional game already on its way.
Especially one with our very own @Armada on the team.