I got CoAS in my mailbox a couple of days ago. Its a great game. Compared to AoP, it has more of everything - but thats all.
Although not playing much yet (some great fencing it has!) I looked into the libraries:
-The game is about 7 GB when installed.
-It is build directly on top of AoP and is just as messy - you can see a lot of files doublets everywhere
-They texture standard in AoP was pretty high, they added some great ones into CoAS too!
If we are ever to build the world to include Europe, how would we do it? I need help from modders here:
1) We could link to the cities of europe, southamerica and northern america in the caribbean borders and add sailing time going forth and back
2) We could reset the map and fill it with europe and link to eastern and southern ports - maybe someday be able to switch between east and western worldmap.
If we choose the first, we would keep the Caribbean world and only have to build the new cities. Only thing is, the incredible mess of various mods will still be there - and their respective bugs, too.
If we choose the second, a lot of sailing time would be required to go from, say London to Brest if one is not to use the worldmap. Would we ever be able to add enough content to coastline in order to make it interesting ? Maybe it will end up only as navigational points and quest-harbours, you think? And if the worldmap is used, what would be the purpose of building the hundreds of km/miles of coastline for discovery anyway?
These are two opposites needed to be solved before anybody goes headwards into building anything.
If we can solve this and many other issues from this, so it gets as interesting for the player - and easy for us - as possible, it would be great! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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Also, I am right now city-planning for Venice, but would also like to do St.Petersbourgh, Lübeck, Copenhagen, London, Brest, Porto and an Arabian harbour. In addition, I believe there is enough quest-material and locations for any demanding adventure-player for the next ten years in this new world <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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But every city, especially northern-european harbours like Amsterdam and London, have developed dramatically through the years. For this, we should keep an architectural uniformity in style, not to mess it all up.
Important buildings like admiralty, shipyards, regencies, warehouses have been built very early in history in almost every city, so I suggest we use a certain year or period and make the cities from this period. This could be the renaissance (1530 to 1650), baroque (-1740), rokoko (-1770) or the classicism (-1860). I think, PotC is styled rokoko but remember, the size of the european cities were smaller in early periods and huge in, say, in the classicism period.
And the subquestion is also, how realistic would we want these cities to be? Up to de facto standard, realistic in shape and size but to the limits of the cities in the Caribbean or only build the cities containg the most important buildings and the rest out from fantasy?
Here, I would go for the latter - building realism to every detail must be fun to experience, but not to build <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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Also, this would take every member to go around in his city and take photos for textures, because every city and culture has its own style. Look at Lübeck, it is very far from looking like Amsterdam, as the overall reckognizable buildings are mostly build from clay and wood. In Amsterdam, these are mostly build of stone, London is a mix and Copenhagen burned so many times, that most of the wood-clay houses have disappeared.
What, and most importantly why, should we do about those questions - they've grown too big for me <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
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" border="0" alt="wink.gif" /><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->I'm sorry; what exactly were you referring to here...? <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" />
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