Pirates of the Caribbean

[LHookins]

I didn't feel like doing the next island hop in Sea Dogs, so I installed Pirates of the Caribbean.

Dear GAWD we've come a long way.

1. The controls are OK, but feel awkward after getting used to the Sea Dogs controls. The various interfaces are a bit clunky, but usable. We have a lot more information available to us in Sea Dogs.
2. The graphics aren't really bad, but aren't nearly as good as Sea Dogs. Except for the characters, they are a lot simpler, and look somewhat primitive compared to Sea Dogs. The sky was simpler, but reasonably attractive.
3. Sword fighting is really simplified, with the CTRL key to block and one attack done with the space bar.
4. The towns and ports are *enormous*. And they aren't as pretty as in Sea dogs.
5. You'd recognize a few locations. The storekeeper at Redmond is the same as Le Francois pirate colony, for example. The Rocky Shore harbor at Redmond is the same as one of the harbors in Sea Dogs, but is much smaller, and the graphics aren't nearly as good.
6. When you're sailing near an island, you don't see any trees, just the land mass and textures. The land mass for Redmond is interesting, however.
7. Their "realistic" sailing model is better than what we have in Sea Dogs. It's similar to Tactical sailing mode, with turning the ship taking even longer than Tactical, although going to battle sails speeds this up, and your apparent speed is about the same as Tactical for any given speed in knots, and it feels right. You can sail directly into the wind at 30% of the wind speed, but about 45 degrees off the wind you're sailing at about 60% of the wind speed, and sailing within 45 degrees of the direction the wind is blowing you can get up to 75% or more. You'll definitely be sailing faster (at least in knots) than we do in Sea Dogs.
8. The tutorial consists of Malcolm telling you how to play the game, and is actually useful. You start off with a ship. Your first quest is to sail to nearby Redmond island (but without a lot of guidance on how to get there) and notify the English governor that the French have attacked Oxbay. He requires you to sail back to Oxbay to sneak through the jungle to check out the situation. That's as far as I got in about an hour play, with considerable time sailing on the deck of my ship.
9. There is no clock or calendar, and time does not appear to pass unless you go to the world map. I seem to remember from the Community Build Mod that time did pass, but only when you entered a door or went to another area... and even within the town there are different areas that have to load.
10. You can't see nearby islands. You have no idea how much difference that makes.
11. While there's an actual printed manual, I didn't need it. I could figure out the controls from the control settings menu, which is more than I can say for Sea Dogs. The only oddity was that the ESC key didn't bring up a menu, but was only used for backing out of various menus, F1 was the main menu, F2 was most everything else... which I had to figure out for myself. It's probably in the manual.
12. I didn't notice this while playing this time, but you can judge what the wind is doing before going to your ship: if the grass is moving slowly, the wind is low; if the grass is whipping back and forth, the wind it high. This becomes important during one mission to get away from the island past some enemy ships and you keep going back to the tavern until the grass shows high winds... otherwise you're sunk... literally.

Final Verdict:

I'm gonna keep playing Sea Dogs, but I may do a bit of sailing in PotC just because it's fun. I'll eventually install the latest Community Build Mod, as it improves sailing quite a bit, but I don't care to actually play the game. Sea Dogs is just too pretty.

While I understand the Sea Dogs tutorial, and it's not over until you get to the sandbox, I much prefer the way PotC did it. Short, sweet, simple, complete, and you can learn the rest of the game as you play. The Sea Dogs "tutorial" has you doing everything you'll be doing in the rest of the game, all at the beginning so you don't lose much if you have to start over. The only trouble is, I started over at least 5 times before I felt like I had it all figured out. Part of the problem was the lack of documentation, which I hope I corrected for other people with my README guide.

My first time through Sea Dogs, I was 7 hours into the game before I got my ship. I played one hour of PotC and was already at Redmond ready to sail back to Oxbay. A lot of that time was just sailing. Now in Sea Dogs I can get my ship in about 2 hours... but it's still too long.

People talk about how wonderful these older games are, especially with mods, but after playing Sea Dogs for an extended period, I doubt if they'd go back. Let us mod Sea Dogs and we can make that game SING!

Hook

[Raga]

No. The developers only explained the borders that way :P
After the main plot when "thinking aloud" you have an option to sail to Europe... is is as simple as changing ammo for firearms :P

[LHookins]

I played PotC again for a bit a few days ago, and tried Build Mod 14 as well.

There's a major problem on modern computers, and it's even documented at the PiratesAhoy forum: new graphics cards run the game at such a high frame rate that everything slows down, the computations can't keep up with the graphics, so you're moving in slow motion, especially inside a building. They said it can be solved with an external frame rate limiter. Setting VSync didn't help unless the game was in full screen mode. It got bad enough that I had real problems getting my character to turn, and running everywhere in slow motion is a real pain especially in the enormous towns and ports. Setting full screen may help this a bit, and may help more if refresh rate is set lower, but has other problems. There's no option for "always run".

There is no option for wide screen, so the screen is stretched. It's ok, but gets annoying after a while.

Without mods, the direction indicators on the compass are almost impossible to read.

No clock and no calendar makes the game feel odd. Within a town there are several areas that need to load if you move around; at least they load fast.

Dialog text wasn't scaled, so it was always very large, to the point of being annoying.

If you want to talk to someone, you have to press the Enter key and select the dialog option from the icon menu at the bottom left, and most things in the game were like that. Sea Dogs TEHO has streamlined this a lot by allowing the mouse to do most of the work. To go through a door, you have to press the space bar. Everything that involves inventory requires scrolling through a horizontal list of icons.

There were a few things I liked. The tutorial was very good. The sailing model was reasonable and more fun, although using arcade mode doubled your speed or more. At least you generally sailed faster with the wind than against it, and wind direction didn't matter as much as it does in Sea Dogs, which was good because the direction didn't change much and going back to the dock didn't give you a new direction, only the speed of the wind would change. The modders made this a lot better. Land combat was limited to one block (ctrl key) and one attack (space bar), which some people might prefer. Movement during combat was more limited.

I'll try some of the build mod options when I get the new computer, as I couldn't get a download that wasn't corrupt, although some attempts were playable. Hardware issues on a dying computer. The little bit I played, while it had lots of features for starting a new game, was just boring, and I never got to the point where I could test sailing much.

Verdict: stick with Sea Dogs. The nostalgia you feel for PotC isn't really deserved. I suspect AoP will be similar, although I don't intend to steal the game to find out. Videos look better than PotC, I'll give it that, but the Captain Blood storyline leaves us no better off than the Sea Dogs tutorials.

Hook

[SuperCrumpets]

This makes it easier not being able to play it ty :)

I still really want to be able to mod this game though....

[LHookins]

I loaded PotC on the new computer and played a bit. An external frame rate limiter is an absolute must. I think a lot of people use MSI Afterburner and the RivaTuner that's currently included. I found that I only needed to get it set up and then only needed RivaTuner with the frame rate set to 60. I'm sure you can set it much higher if you have a monitor that will handle it. Some people report 144 fps works.

The stock game wasn't any better than I reported above.

I installed the New Horizons, Community Build Mod 14 and have been playing that. They improved the interface controls, which were apparently designed for a console in the stock game but that project was abandoned. The controls are now much more streamlined and not awkward... just different from the Sea Dogs controls.

I played the original story line a bit with the mod, but it wasn't any better that I could tell. I started a new game in Free Play mode, chose 1770 as the year and started off as an American merchant. Easiest difficulty and set the mod options to allow stuff like all classes of ships would be available at the shipyard and high level items would be available at the merchants.

I set the starting ship as a gaff rigged schooner flying an American flag. Just gotta watch out for British, as they're hostile at this time.

You can totally avoid the world map if you wish, but sailing anywhere takes a very long time. Sailing realism is much better, but you lose the ability to sail-to a port where you've never been, although you can sail to nearby ships. You don't have fast travel for a location until you've either visited it or asked a townsperson about it.

Sailing is very different. Wind direction isn't as important as in Sea Dogs, as you can sail at a decent speed in any direction except upwind. If you try to sail too close to the wind, you get a flapping noise from your sails (that was my very first mod for that game) and your speed will decrease. Turning the ship takes forever, much longer than even tactical mode in Sea Dogs.

The islands are much more interesting, and somewhat larger than the ones in Sea Dogs. Land locations are huge compared to Sea Dogs. Unfortunately, you can't see islands in the distance, and there are no trees when you're looking from your ship.

The sun does not move continuously across the sky, but updates at the top of the hour. The sun graphic is not very pretty.

You can improve skills by buying items or books... so far I haven't seen any "magic" items.

Time scale is very different, with one game minute taking 12 seconds, or 12 minutes per game hour. The game advances by one day at the top of the hour, and the hours and half hours are marked by bells. You will gain a few percentage points of sailing skill by sailing, awarded at the hour and half hour.

Sail-to takes considerable time (I did a sail-to to a nearby ship and it took about an hour and a half of game time). Buying or selling cargo takes several hours to load or unload.

Sea Dogs still has a lot going for it... it's prettier, has a good story line (I haven't tried the story lines in PotC yet), and is obviously a much more modern game. PotC seems to have more features, as you'd expect in a game that's been modded as much as this one has. You have a lot of starting options. The tutorial is simple, and you start off with a ship.

I haven't been tempted to mute the music or dialog. It's quite good, and hasn't gotten annoying.

As a side note, in order to get everything else working right, I had to run at my native monitor resolution. This made the HUD (mini map in the upper right) too small. But I quickly found the code that displayed it and enlarged the HUD. I also found out that the code has my fingerprints all over it... look for my initials "LDH" in comments. Having the source code makes a world of difference.

Verdict: Sea Dogs is much better than the stock PotC, but the New Horizons mod improves that game to where it's as good or better than Sea Dogs.

Hook

[LHookins]

And... suddenly it was crashing on every save. It took less time to find and fix the error than to test it.

For the technically inclined, it was a variable allocated on the stack in a function, but on a fast machine, when the function ended it might have de-allocated the variable before it could be used. Seems I remember that I had to some of those 7 years ago. Amateur programming.

Hook

[LHookins]

I really like the sailing model in New Horizons.

At one point I was sailing at 1.9 knots, and I didn't care. Game time passes slowly enough while sailing that time is no longer critical, and you'll spend a day or more loading and unloading cargo anyway.

Something good I realized about the Sea Dogs tutorial is that it gets you used to going through the jungle. People don't realize this until they've encountered a few bad guys in the earlier game, and they'll respawn if you leave an area and return, so you may not be able to just run away. I'm still a bit hesitant about exploring the PotC jungles.

The storekeeper sells personal items such as weapons and books as well as cargo, and pays a slightly higher price than the street merchants do. Everyone sells maps, but they're pretty bad. The maps suck compared to Sea Dogs, but you can buy maps of various dungeons. People will approach you on the street with items to sell, and sometimes they aren't ripping you off.

There's a guy walking the port in Barbados who sells very high level stuff, but he'll insult you several times before offering anything for sale. He's in the stock game as well.

Trading is simplified, with 4 to 8 items on each island that are imports or exports, but I've only made money on a couple of trades. Each island has a few items as contraband as well, probably has more to do with taxes than what the item can be used for.

The mod adds random encounters while sailing, and it can be ships, cargo floating in the water, or dangerous things like mines or floating debris, neither of which you want to hit. You might encounter a lifeboat full of shipwrecked crew.

There are a LOT of ships around islands in the game (I think the game has a limit of 30 ships at the same time), and you can see battles in progress and join in if you wish. The last random convoy I encountered was nine large British military ships. I'm American but flying a Portugese flag, so everyone but the pirates are friendly, otherwise the British would have attacked me as America and Britain are at war during this period. So far I haven't had my false flag detected, so it's not an automatic thing at lower levels like it is in Sea Dogs.

When walking through the ports, there might be random people sword fighting. I remember that if you help one of these guys, he offers a quest. You can even equip "your trusty fists" and get into a fist fight.

There are pickpockets in town, and you can pick other people's pockets if you wish. "You have been enlightened by this encounter." :)

Since sailing is my thing in the game, and the modded PotC is a much better sailing simulator, I'll be playing that for a while. I'll go back to Sea Dogs at some point to compare the two games some more.

It is unfair to compare any heavily modded game to any stock one, as if the stock games are sub-standard somehow. The stock Sea Dogs TEHO is still a very good game, and there's no reason to bash it just because other games exist. If we ever get the ability to mod Sea Dogs (beyond some graphics changes which can be done now), this is going to be one amazing game.

Hook