Progress, Latest Updates for the Pirate Isles Options

[dark_soul]

Here I will post progress reports on what I have done so far, so people know what i'm upto.
Please do not post here, i will be soley posting updates here for people to read.

Overall
What I plan to include:
- Everything from the beta release! (DONE)
- Acquire a pirate ship! (DONE)
- Hire yon dastardly crew! (DONE)
- An island with a piratey town! Bring on the grog wench! (DONE)
- The ability to take your ship and crew and raid the high seas, specifically looting merchant ships and fighting the navy! (DONE)
- 3 Different First Mates to give your orders to (DONE)
- A slightly bizarre adventure related to skooma (DONE)
- Work your pirate fame up and acquire you own upgradeable island hideout. (DONE)
- Some basic pirate classes to choose from, namely the corsair and swashbuckler (DONE)
- A second island town, less piratey. (DONE)
- Work your pirate fame up and new ships will join your fleet. (DONE)
- Capture prisoners on your raids and sell them to slavers. (DONE)
- More pirates hanging out at the hideout. (DONE)
- More types of Captives. (DONE)
- Choose a flag for your ship (DONE)
- Different ships to fight - 3 types of Merchant ships, Fishing Vessels, Navy Warships, Navy Equipment Ships, Smugglers and a rare Treasure Ship, as well as enemy pirate ships! (DONE)
- A small chance to strike it rich on raids by attacking a treasure ship. (DONE)
- More commands available through first mate, including hiring of crew.(DONE - TWEAKING)
- Buried treasure quest (what pirate story would be without it!?) (DONE)
- Morale for your crew, need to pay them every week or mutiny! (DONE - TWEAKING)
- High pirate fame leads to attacks by bounty hunters etc. It will actually give you a reputation (not just a number) (PENDING)
- 2 More first mates, one a wizard (DONE - TWEAKING)
- Governers daughter quest! (what pirate mod could be without one) (IN PROGRESS)
- Major imperial port. (IN PROGRESS)
- A piratey adventure involving curses, an underwater highjink, treasure and wenches! (MINOR WORK DONE)
- More islands and places to explore. (IN PROGRESS)

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Dec 24 2006, 02:18 PM

[dark_soul]

24/9 -
Currently I am fiddling with the forums, and working on a website to upload, as well as fiddling with some new textures for the imperial navy cuirass and shield.

As those who have read the Official Forums topic will know, the pirate crew is now been changed to let you hire a crew consisting of 160 different pirates. You can now have an all one race crew, or all male/female crew, or all male/females of one race. Ie, you could have a crew with all dark elf females, or just all dark elves, male and female, or you could make your crew from a mix of dark elves and high elves.

[dark_soul]

25/9
- Finished the navy equipment
- Finished the ability to purchase a flag, there is now six to choose from.
- Added ship damage, your ship now has 5 states of condition, ranging from fine to severly damaged. At severely damaged you cannot go looting anymore. You can get your ship fixed at any shipwright. Your ship suffers damage when you set sail with less than 6 crew members, this includes returning from battle, if you lose a lot of crew in battle your ship could be damaged returning.

[dark_soul]

26/9
- Added the interior to the ruined fort in Cape Yakudra.
- Added the port to the mainland, its of down from anvil, theres a map marker there so your horse should hang around there when you leave for the pirate isles.
- Forgot to mention in the previous posts i have all but finished the Treasure Quest. Think i might add more traps and puzzles though.
- Restructured the Docks at Blackhorn so the NPCs will stay of your ship, which will stop them falling through when you move it

[dark_soul]

27/9
- Added the clothes created by Aventhorn as well as a few of my own.
- Restructured the script controlling battles to be more dynamic and easier
to customise to different scenarios.
- Finished the mage First mate.

[dark_soul]

29/9
Good news:
- Completely finished the Treasure Quest.
- Fixed a couple of miscellaneous bugs from the beta we missed.
- Thanks to Elhoim, i fixed the tricorn hat haydox created so it sits properly on the head.

Bad news:
- Having severe problems with DeleteFullActorCopy, placeatme, levelled lists and quest items combined. The problem is if you use placeatme you are creating a new reference everytime, so you need to use DeleteFullActorCopy, but if you use that it deletes the base object as well as the reference, unless it is a quest item, but if an NPC is a quest item, their corpse never clears... and so on and so forth. It was working with the crew, but for some reason its not working properly with the enemy crew, with which i'm using levelled lists to ease up on the scripts. I feel it may be tied to the levelled lists... Worse case scenario i'll see how big it makes the saves if you continually create references without deleting them. If its not making the saves too big i will remove the DeleteFullActorCopy, though this is not ideal, and is really only a last resort. Time for some sleep, hopefully i get it sorted tomorrow!
EDIT: Ok removed the lists. I think i will stick with persistant references how i used to have it. The crew workings need an overhaul as the damn thing keeps losing track of the crew. Set backs... oh well!

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Sep 30 2006, 06:07 AM

[dark_soul]

2/10 Good news! (i think)
- Fixed a few more bugs (thanks aventhorn) Found the fight starter at Blackhorn, it was Odgar the smith!
- Fixed the crew! I think... i'll run a few more tests later, and hand it off to Nocturnal18 for more testing.
- Crew now eat in the ship, as well as sleep and wander. Giving the crewmates individual interesting things to do like train etc is just too much complications.

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Oct 2 2006, 07:28 AM

[dark_soul]

- Added crew management options, specifically refilling the ships food and grog supplies (tied in with hideout upgrades). Also you can pay your crew now.
- Added crew morale, calculated each fortnight and effected by looting, paying them and the ships supplies. Made this semi optional by letting the player tell the firstmate to handle it, in which case the cost of paying your crew (the minimum to keep them happy) is auto deducted from the player every 2 weeks, and the morale stays at a set average level. If the morale gets low pirates can leave, and if it gets really low there will be a mutinee, and you will have to defeat your crew.
- Fixed the ship repairs dialogue
- Fixed the battles and the enemy crew, had to remove the slaughterfish as the NPCs kept attacking them over each other. (BUMMER I know! )
- Added chests for the crew and first mate that let you change their equipment.
Everything is going well at the moment, just need to test and ensure the robustness of the new system and then its on to adding the other enemy types!

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Oct 5 2006, 08:24 AM

[dark_soul]

Wow no updates for a while, i've actually been working hard on it though.
- Finally added the fishermen enemies, pirate enemies, treasure ship and prison ship. I still have to finish the cargo manifest management for the new enemy types. That and some more testing needs to be done to make sure i haven't screwed anything up.
- Changed cargo manifests, you no longer have to go get them, you simply recieve them when you finish the fight. If you don't kill all the enemies, and leave the fight early, you don't recieve the manifest.

[dark_soul]

Quick Update
- Mostly combat fixes. Pathnodes etc.
- Fixed Cargo manifests for the new enemy types.
- Added EYEPATCHES!!! Many thanks to Kafied for the meshes and textures.
- Did some more work on one of the mainquest islands.

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Oct 11 2006, 03:23 PM

[dark_soul]

Another Quick Update:
- Finished the morale system, you will lose pirates if the morale falls below 30, and if it gets to less than 10 the crew will attack you (MUTINEE!).
- Added ship upgrades:
- Upgrade the cargo hold, so you can carry 4 manifests worth of loot instead of 2.
- Upgrade the slave cell, so you can hold 5 prisoners instead of only 2
- Upgrade the rigging so your ship travels faster and further, allowing you to raid the more expensive merchant ships, and giving you a chance to catch and Imperial Treasury Ship. Also decreases chance of catching fishermen (which aren't worth much).

And heres a tease of some of the cool pirate gear we have.
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h97/dark...es/clothes4.jpg
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h97/dark...es/clothes3.jpg
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h97/dark...es/clothes2.jpg
http://i62.photobucket.com/albums/h97/dark...es/clothes1.jpg

[dark_soul]

-Touched up the ship upgrades and added the ship hull upgrade, to give your ship more health and make it harder to damage.

- Added Slaves, theres now 8, and after a battle a random chance to get up to 3 captives. They are worth different values ranging from 150 for a khajiit sailor to 400 for the imperial noble.

- Tweaks and fixes as always.

[dark_soul]

Not a lot changed recently, been rather busy the last week. Working on the brewery upgrade quest at the moment, done the island itself, just need to finish filling in the brewery interior, and tying it in with dialogue.

[dark_soul]

Again not much acheived lately, been quite sick. Done more work on the brewery interior, and structuring of the quest. Once i've finished tying all this together for the brewery upgrade its onto the construction phase of the extra worldspaces and interiors needed for the main quest.

[dark_soul]

Righto, the mod has suffered in attention over the last few weeks. A combination of being sick for almost 2 weeks, going on holidays for a week, the purchase of 2 other games and having to practice my C++ skills to get into uni has left me little time to work on it. However the mod is not dead at all As soon as I have my uni entrance exam done next week i'll be getting right into it, hopefully have the final version out pre-christmas. I'm sorry its taking so long, but its a lot of work I thank everyone for bearing with me.

[dark_soul]

Good news, finally fully finished the brewery quest. Now onto finishing the other imperial island off. I'm back on track!

[dark_soul]

Working on the prison interior at the moment, for part of the main quest.
Got the exterior relatively finished, and most of the interior finished, just need to populate it.

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Dec 19 2006, 11:43 AM

[dark_soul]

The prison still needs to be populated with NPCS, but apart from that its finished.

I've started the serious works of the major island of Delargo. Its the major imperial port. The island landscape itself is relatively finished, but barren. There is a larger imperial town there, including a number of buildings and a small castle. At this point i realised that the time it would take me to build and tweak all those interiors would leave you poor people waiting till march or something for a release. So i have taken on another modder, Logam, to complete the interiors. I will be passing what I want to him and he will be creating them for me, and then myself adding the NPCs and final touches before including them in the mod. Rest assured we will do our best to maintain the utmost quality of the mod. With Logam assisting me i believe it will vastly cut down the time taken to do the mod, and free me up to do important scripting, questing and the thing that takes most of my time, tweaking.

This post has been edited by dark_soul: Dec 24 2006, 02:10 PM

[dark_soul]

Good news, after a day of nutting out the region editor, i've filled most of the island with trees, rocks, plants and textures. Its great to see what looks like a brown lump of putty turned into a flourishing island with beaches cliffes and forests. All up theres almost a square kilometre for you to explore, and i haven't even added all the hidden goodies...

Next is the layout of the town, so Logam can start on the interiors. Then i'll fill get onto some more specifics of the island, and the interior of the Imperial Navy Fort of Carradon, situated just offshore of Port Delargo.

Those navy scum will have to go...

[dark_soul]

Done the layout and placement for the town, just need to add a few finishing touches here and there. Working on interiors with Logams help, already finished 2 interiors, about 20 to go and the fort. Then its NPCs and schedules... bringing the town to life.