Fixed Sea Relations: Behaviour for Recognizing False Flags

[Pieter Boelen]

I hadn't installed that; so far the latest thing I've downloaded and installed, other than @Levis' attempted fix for preprocessing, is the 25th July .7z update.
"Periods.c" does define Portugal as being hostile to England in "Early Explorers". (In fact, it explicitly defines England's relationship to Portugal in each period.)

Ah, that's what I was hoping for. Then most likely that problem is already sorted.

Because Holland is hostile to France (at least when the game obeys "Periods.c" ) which, incidentally, means a Pirate flag might not help them at Tortuga - won't it regard a Pirate flag as a false flag if you fly it while serving Holland? Anyway, if a Dutch privateer then becomes hostile to Pirates as well then he has no friendly ports in "Early Explorers". And since false flags are so easily detected...

Tortuga Fort = OK with pirates. It is pretty much a French/Pirate fort.
If a Privateer becomes hostile to the pirates, you can still get into Tortuga (depending on how I write it, but that is how I intend it).
You can also do business with the pirates if you don't have a LoM or are friendly to them.
So indeed you have to avoid becoming hostile to them if you intend to have a LoM in Early Explorers.

With the rewritten code, you shouldn't be forced to attack many pirate ships.
And even so, you could try the occasional small act of piracy to increase your points with them; that is another possibility.

Easily detected false flags WILL be a thing of the past. Soon.

Other way round. Prior to installing the 25th July update, boarding the animist ships cost me a few points with Pirates but didn't turn me outright hostile. After the 25th July update, boarding the animist ships did turn me hostile to Pirates. Perhaps the Nations update will reverse this.

That should already be fixed. I just can't remember if I posted the fix yet.
If not, it'll be coming to an update near you very soon.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Oh dear, I found more things wrong. For some reason, ships are being hostile to me when I enter 3D sailing mode straight away.
It might appear as if they have recognized my false flag, but they did not as I would have seen a log message about that somewhere.
So somewhere ships are getting the wrong initial relation to me which is completely defeating the purpose of this whole functionality.

There is no way I am going to get this fixed before tomorrow as this is a truly complex matter with stuff affecting other stuff from all over the ruddy, bloody place.
So I'll probably upload whatever I have right now, in whichever half-finished state it might be.
More research required; probably a LOT more to get everything right. Maybe this weekend; maybe after I come back from vacation.
I had expected this to be quite difficult; but not quite THIS difficult!

 

[Levis]

Well at least good to see we are making progress on this.
This might be the best time to tackle this cause now we actually do have some time to test the stuff etc .

 

[lucho1392]

Ok so got the 25th July zip file and game is updated but looks like now i have problems that was not there while using the oldest version.
Some things really annoying such as:
When one ship near me surrender everyone party hards and all become friends (even foes) but thoose foes can attack me and I cannot.
In Scort ship quest when accepted game freezes and theres nothing I can do, just alt+f4 or ctrl+alt+supr
I am using Hornwblower so my ship should have english soldiers while deck view but NOPE, somethimes are traders, normal sailors and even pirates.

 

[Levis]

could you link to the post where you got the zip from?

 

[lucho1392]

Is this one hahaha

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Well at least good to see we are making progress on this.
This might be the best time to tackle this cause now we actually do have some time to test the stuff etc .

Yup, very true. Eventually we'll get it, I'm sure.
I have to convince ships out of sight of the player to actually be initialized as Neutral though.
I might be able to override their hostile state, but I'd rather have it done right from the start.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Is this one hahaha

There's no link there.

So weird stuff happens after ships surrender? I am of course in the middle of rewriting some nation and character relation code so weirdness can be expected for a while.
I seemed to notice some French merchants firing on their surrendered friend as well yesterday.
Will be addressed, but it a complicated system and needs a lot of work.

 

[Jack Rackham]

I am of course in the middle of rewriting some nation and character relation code so weirdness can be expected for a while.

No problem. There are things in the errorlog yes.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

No problem. There are things in the errorlog yes.

On my end, I've got the error logs under control. It's just the behaviour that is still weird.
Game might actually be playable, but false flags still aren't effective because there is something interfering with them and I haven't quite narrowed down what it is.
I suspect one of the many, many SetCharacterRelationBoth lines in PROGRAM\SEA_AI to be the culprit.
Yesterday I set all those lines to RELATION_NEUTRAL regardless of whether that makes any sense or not.
Eventually that did seem to do something. But more research required.

Tonight I will put everything I've got together in a new executable for testing purposes and to get everyone on the same page, regardless of how much sense it makes at the moment.
We can continue with ZIPs afterwards for code corrections, but at least we need the new RESOURCES included because those are too large for ZIP.

 

[lucho1392]

There's no link there.

I mean the one in page 1 of this thread. The 25 july zip file.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I mean the one in page 1 of this thread. The 25 july zip file.

There are some important fixes made after the ZIP was last updated that might be affecting you.
Try again once I posted the new EXE, but don't expect everything to make complete sense yet....

 

[A.H]

Try again once I posted the new EXE, but don't expect everything to make complete sense yet....

The current download, is it the one you uploaded recently or you are still working on it?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The current download, is it the one you uploaded recently or you are still working on it?

The opening post still gives you the last updated date.
Note also the "once I posted" and "Tonight I will put everything I've got together in a new executable for testing purposes" phrases in my posts above.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

A thorough rewrite of the "sea relations" is in progress here, but not completed: http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/build-14-beta-3-5-internal-wip-for-testing.24817
It now includes ALL ships in a group plus forts in the false flag detection.
Additionally, I did some work to do everything more efficiently with less repeated function calls to attempt to improve performance.
(For now, it seems to have made little difference though that I can tell).

The bug of ships being immediately hostile to your false flag upon entering 3D sailing mode still remains,
because it is not actually the false flag mod that is responsible for that and I still need to narrow down the true culprit.
At the moment there are quite a lot of log messages to indicate what is happening with the on-sea relations.
Also, the "some forts friendly to pirates" is temporarily disabled, because I have to include that functionality somewhere else.

More updates to this coming soon.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

It's been a while since I played so decided to play something familiar. That means La Croix. It all went according to plan until I got to the port with the priest. for some reason the forts fired on my ship flying the Spanish flag one time and then went silent.

It's a minor bug but might cause problems with those sailing smaller ships.


PS: It's not such a small bug it turns out. I tried it again and the forts kept firing and sank the ship.

 

[Levis]

It's been a while since I played so decided to play something familiar. That means La Croix. It all went according to plan until I got to the port with the priest. for some reason the forts fired on my ship flying the Spanish flag one time and then went silent.

It's a minor bug but might cause problems with those sailing smaller ships.
View attachment 22153

PS: It's not such a small bug it turns out. I tried it again and the forts kept firing and sank the ship.

I think this is the "false flag detection when going to 3d sailing bug" @Pieter Boelen mentioned earlier?

Altoug with jean Lafitte I also start in a hostile port but the fort didn't recognise me, so maybe you where just unlucky the fort recognised you, did you got any log message or do you still have the compile log file?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

With Jean Lafitte you probably started on a Puerto Rico and he isn't actually hostile to Spain so you don't get fired on.
With La Croix you probably do and false flag detection chance is at the moment 100% which is of course useless for gameplay but is for testing purposes.
Check your compile.log file to see if there is anything in there about you being recognised.
If there is, it isn't technically a bug, just a now unfinished feature.
There is also a real bug which turns ships hostile immediately WITHOUT any compile.log messages.
That is the one that really needs to be fixed otherwise it prevents that whole feature from doing anything useful at all.

 

[Grey Roger]

With Jean Lafitte you probably started on a Puerto Rico and he isn't actually hostile to Spain so you don't get fired on.
With La Croix you probably do and false flag detection chance is at the moment 100% which is of course useless for gameplay but is for testing purposes.

Any chance of reducing that for the rest of us? I'd rather like to be able to check that "Help the Church" and "Strange Things Going On" still work. Or, for that matter, play a proper game over the weekend...

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I am trying a different tack since smuggling does not work for me. I am playing as an honest merchant just hauling cargo for others just to see how this version plays. Wondering when the Dutch will trade with me tho.