Need Help You want to help but can't code?

[Levis]

WIP - Ingame explanation officer system | Page 2 | PiratesAhoy!

Need some help with a very simple task just requires search for a specific place ingame.

 

[Conner]

WIP - Ingame explanation officer system | Page 2 | PiratesAhoy!

Need some help with a very simple task just requires search for a specific place ingame.

Hello Levis,

I am new here, and just about ready to start a game. I also want to help when and where I can then I found this thread. I will go through it more thoroughly later, but thought that since I am starting into the game ....

What specific place are you needing to be found ? And is there any further information you need, or just an "X" on the map, ; )

Conner

 

[Levis]

Hello Levis,

I am new here, and just about ready to start a game. I also want to help when and where I can then I found this thread. I will go through it more thoroughly later, but thought that since I am starting into the game ....

What specific place are you needing to be found ? And is there any further information you need, or just an "X" on the map, ; )

Conner

Found the place already, Still thanks for the offer Conner.
At the moment we mostly need testing. We are almost ready to release the next version publicly. So if you want to help download the most recent version (Mod Release - Build 14 Beta 4 Internal WIP For Testing | PiratesAhoy!) and try to play the different sidequests and try to break the game. If you break it let us know how you did it so we can fix it.
Please try to play as a women and see if any dialog doesnt match up with your gender. if you please let us know.
And let us know if any dialog is weird in general.
Besides that I would like it if you try my new smuggling updates. Download the extra zip I provided (WIP - Enhanced Smuggling | Page 2 | PiratesAhoy!). And try it out to see if anything goes weird.

 

[Conner]

Like I said earlier, I just downloaded and installed the game, and it is the 14 beta 4, and am just trying to get acclimated to the controls and interfaces. In short, total newb to PotC NW. I am willing to play as a woman, do the smuggling missions, and bugshoot the dialog and any other weird.

A couple of questions. I am not that far into the game, so .....

If I start a new game, to get to the smuggling mission ASAP, is there a particular character/ ship/ nationality I should choose ?

If you could just give me a quick, set of parameters to start new, and then get to where I need to be as quickly as I can, I will get right on with the testing.

I read that others are testing too, so ....

I can do smuggling for ANY governor ? Do you have a preference ?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

If I start a new game, to get to the smuggling mission ASAP, is there a particular character/ ship/ nationality I should choose ?

You can do it with any character, but Free Play with Jean Lafitte might be the best one because he starts as a Smuggler already.

I can do smuggling for ANY governor ? Do you have a preference ?

Indeed any governor should be OK. They all use the same code.

 

[Conner]

RGR Jean Lafitte, but Levis specifically asked that I play a female too, checking for dialoge that is sex dependant too I guess.

BTW, sometimes it takes me a bit to respond. I dual boot, and my Windows box NEVER goes online, I have to reboot to linux to check emails, the forums, etc ....

That is why I will also be checking on running these sims from Linux, but that will be just a bit later.

How involved is the online part of this game anyway ? Much participation ?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

RGR Jean Lafitte, but Levis specifically asked that I play a female too, checking for dialoge that is sex dependant too I guess.

You can customize your character in Free Play, so you can make a Female Smuggler character.

How involved is the online part of this game anyway ? Much participation ?

PotC is a single-player offline game.
The only "online part" is everybody posting and developing here on the forum.

 

[Levis]

I've got another nice job which has to be done.
This is the job:

-Get a tool for searching in files. I sugest the free Notepad++
-Open internalsettings.h
-For each define search the PROGRAM folder and note down how often this define occurs (not that if you gor for example the ones DEFAULT_HP and DEFAULT_HP_MAX then the first one will have all the results of the second one too so you can substract that from it to get the total).
- Post these numbers.

The defines look like this:

#define KILLED_PER_DAY                    16        // INT - number of wounded crewmembers that die per day without doctor and medicines

You just search for the captalized part so in this case "KILLED_PER_DAY"

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Do you want to get rid of unused ones?

 

[Levis]

Do you want to get rid of unused ones?

Yes, or the ones only used once. We can tie them with others.
This is mostly for the final Build release. but I figured we could start on it already because it will cause a lot of shit.

 

[Conner]

Ok, I am working on this, stopping long enough to get a bite to eat, but needed to confirm something.

As I am adjusting the numbers of found references in the files, I have been removing extraneous instances, so ...

you do NOT want the references found in

// comments sections

included with the count of instances used in actual code, correct ?

It took 10 minutes just to get through one section to weed out references in the // comment sections.

: )

 

[Levis]

Ah yes ofc. The ones in comments should not count. Thanks for doing this!

 

[Conner]

Just an updates and a question.

This is taking a while, but there is no big rush ? If it takes me a week or so, that is OK ?

 

[Levis]

Just an updates and a question.

This is taking a while, but there is no big rush ? If it takes me a week or so, that is OK ?

Yup, no rush at all.

 

[Levis]

How's it going @Conner ?

 

[Levis]

We still need a lot of stuff tested.
For example this quest:
Needs Testing - Claire Larrouse Issues | Page 3 | PiratesAhoy!

And someone has to play trough Jack Sparrow to see if the relations are set up right trougout the storyline or if they should be changed at points,
Needs Testing - Jack Sparrow - Relations Throughout Storyline (including turning PIRATE!) | Page 3 | PiratesAhoy!

And in the Jack Sparrow storyline we also need checking on this quest:
Needs Testing - Jack Sparrow - Sao Feng -Crimson Blood Capture | PiratesAhoy!

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Really don't know where to put this so will park it here.

I recently met a real programmer and asked him to look at POTC with the idea of giving it true multi core support, which would greatly increase its performance. Here are the salient posts:

Sadly, the real limitation here appears to be the engine itself. Do you have the source for the engine? It could be possible to solve multiple nodes at once, but the game doesn't even seem to run reliably as it stands.



At this point in time, no, sorry. I am working on quite a few projects already and have a bit of a habit of taking on too many at once as it is

In fact, I think I have about eight projects going, LOL!

I was interested in seeing what you had (I often see little things others miss just because I've been doing asynchronous coding since I learned how to code

), but any repairs I'd have in mind would be related to the engine itself.

Most of the code I saw that had the potential of being made parallel would not benefit greatly from it due to needing to control access to the engine's API (from what I can see, it keeps a single active node, so if we call into it from another node we will trash the engine's memory and cause all kinds of problems).

You'd probably be best served running a runtime profiler, and maybe some static code analysis tools, to find out where the most time is being spent.

Best of luck, though!


This means nothing to me but perhaps it means something to @Levis

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Thanks! I would indeed expect stuff like that to require engine access, which we don't have.
At least we now know the game CAN run fine again, so we may not need it.

 

[Levis]

You'd probably be best served running a runtime profiler, and maybe some static code analysis tools, to find out where the most time is being spent.

Best of luck, though!


This means nothing to me but perhaps it means something to @Levis

Tought about doing that but for now I saw more potential in trying to optimize the game code. And it seems to have paid off in some aspects.

We don't have the source of the engine.
The easiest way to get multicore support would be by porting everything to the engine used in coas.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Why? Because we do have the source code for that engine? It is a single thread engine also.

I would like to see everything in POTC ported to COAS but that is a huge job and I couldn't help at all.