Gentlemen of Fortune: Maelstrom

GOF Maelstrom · By ChezJfrey

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Gentlemen of Fortune: Maelstrom community » General Discussion

Some questions and a thank you :-)

A topic by LordAmaury created Jun 29, 2020 Views: 458 Replies: 10

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LordAmaury4 years ago

Hello,

I just bought today the Maelstrom Engine in order to play old Sea Dogs games with mods like GOF ERAS 2 . I must admit that I was a bit sceptical at first as I already bought all sea dogs games and I wasn't sure the engine improvement was worth it...I was clearly wrong, after viewing some youtube videos from "GrumpyScamp" I finally decided to give it a try and I don't regret that at all, it's brilliant !

I wanted to write here a big thank you for this impressive work. I already tried ERAS 2, Caribbean Tales and City Of Abandonned Ships mods and everything seems to work just fine !

I have two questions to ask :-)

The first one is regarding general UI scaling. Is there a way for me to increase the size of UI elements a bit ? I'm talking about elements that are displayed top right and left of the screen (player/ship icon and island information/compass). I'm playing windowed 2560 x 1440 (my native screen resolution) and it's a bit too small to read (Worldmap locations are hard to read too). I tried lower resolution with fullscreenmode enabled but for some reason game screen borders are a bit truncated so it's not good either. I can play in both cases but I think I can improve that a bit, I tried this mod here without Maelstrom engine and it worked quite well with Carribean Tales (Larger Text) so I guess it's a matter of values : http://www.piratesahoy.net/threads/dialog-camera-quests-fix-larger-text-time-fix...

Second one is regarding language :-). I am French and even if I'm not too bad in English it would be really more immersive for me to play the mod in my own language. I would like to know how difficult it would be to translate ERAS 2 (At least UI and menus) as COAS is already fully translated in French. I searched a bit in the files and I suppose it can be done by adding/editing both "/RESSOURCES/INI/Texts" and "Program/Text" folders. Maybe I can do it by myself too ?

Again I would like to thank you for your work, it is a real pleasure for me to play Sea Dogs again !

I wish you the best Fortune !

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ChezJfrey4 years ago

Thank you for the kind words. I understand the skepticism, because we do seem to be relatively unknown for this work, but we do have a fair number of satisfied Maelstrom users, but they are somewhat "quiet" on the internet.

Fortunately, we have done some work in ERAS to automatically scale the UI for just the elements you refer, but looking at the code, I now see that we only resize them smaller for resolutions less than 1080 height, so that the full amount will fit inside the smaller screen. We don't do the reverse of that and make them larger for screen heights larger than 1080, but rather keep them at a "maximum" size of their original sizes. I agree that we should enable them to go both ways and that is a simple thing to do since we already have the code built into the ERAS scripts to resize them; we just have to eliminate the restriction that allows them to go bigger than defined.

If you would like to try it yourself, prior to an update, there are 3 files you can alter in ERAS Program\battle_interface folder:

BattleInterface.c (Sea)
LandInterface.c (Land)
WmInterface.c (World Map)

In each of those files, search for all instances of this code:

if(fHtRatio < 0.99) {

To enable it to always resize, no matter if the screen height is smaller or larger than 1080, just change all of them to always true, as an experiment:

if(true) { //if(fHtRatio < 0.99) {

The // means to ignore the rest of the line, so we leave the original code there in case you don't like the result, you can see what the script code used to be and revert back to its original form if you like. If you would like to try this and report back that it resized properly, I will change ERAS to always resize. I can also apply this change to COAS and GOF 1.2 as well, but I don't believe any resizing exists in those mods yet.

Translations take considerable work, but as you note, much of the dialog, menu, quest logs have already been done in COAS, so copying those pieces to ERAS is relatively simple. Though, we have changed/added some dialogs to some of the original files that will not be accounted for in COAS and would have to be carefully monitored in the dialog text .h files because they contain a size number at the top that has to match ERAS, not COAS. I believe the main menu was borrowed from Caribbean Tales for GOF/ERAS, so we can take those textures for the menu selections from CT (CT's RESOURCE\Textures\MainMenu\French). The most work then would be translating the Hero descriptions, Items (cargo and weapons) and Ship descriptions (RESOURCE\INI\texts\...\ ItemsDescribe.txt, HeroDescribe.txt, ShipsDescribe.txt), because those are completely different than COAS.

However, we can't do this ourselves, because none of us speak/read/write French. For a better understanding of the work involved, we just had a player (known to us as BinaryKommando) fully translate ERAS into Portuguese and gave us his resources/changes to distribute. You are welcome to Discord and you can ask him any questions you may have about his experience performing a full translation on his own and I'm sure he can offer plenty of guidance or things to look for: https://discord.gg/5S7sr5q

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LordAmaury4 years ago

Hello again,

thank you for your answer and your precise tips. I registered on Discord and I hope to share soon my adventures and my translation questions. I also tried to edit the files the way you told me but unfortunately the interface seems to remain almost the same as before. Here is for exemple a pic of land screen after editing and on my resolution (2160 x 1440) :

I am currently trying to edit the "Land" file first by adding a ui scaling factor of 2.0 and the results are quite good (I'm still adjusting values for the top right icon size and position).

I also changed the dialog box text size a bit by editing dialog.ini file because I wasn't able to read the name of the people I was talking to, here are some pics too :

Base config :

After edit :

I hope to complete this soon and then I will humbly try to translate at least some part of the mod in French starting with menus and general UI. By the way I found a very small mistake with a French tavern name in Guadeloupe Port (I think it was there). The name was "LA VIEUX CANON", in French the world "canon" is masculine, so it should be written "LE VIEUX CANON".

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ChezJfrey4 years ago

After reviewing your screenshots and description I tried myself. Since I do not have a monitor that size, I changed the threshold to 540 instead of 1080 for experiment and I see that the resizing work we did is certainly incomplete; it only changes the size of the character icons (land UI), but does not reposition some of the menu elements (which you noticed and circled the icon on the right and modified the left menu portion in your second screenshot) or resize other necessary fonts. So I will make some changes so that this will be more automatic, across land/sea/worldmap UI, without need for script modifications by a user.

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LordAmaury4 years ago

Thank you very much for your answer.

It's almost working for my particular usage. If it can help below is a link to the files I edited, I've done nothing more than creating a "ui_scaling" variable in LogInterface.c with my own value (2.0 as a base for working). Then I just edited interface files with some copy / paste of your own code or just by adding ui_scaling multiples to scales and sizes. The result is really good but I only tested it on my own monitor with my resolution, it certainly must be adjusted to support any resolution.

Files here : Link to the files

I did it this way because I don't precisely know what is the value returned by this line :

float fHtRatio = stf(Render.screen_y) / 1080.0; (I assumed it was 1.33 with my resolution (1440 / 1080) wich was still too small)

After working a bit on that I think it should be possible to detect a proper ui_scaling factor depending the user resolution as a base like you already started with fHtRatio variable. It should even be possible to add a simple menu for the user to let him choose what UI scale he wants to use if the base scaling isn't satisfying (x0.50, x0.75, x1.0, x1.25, x1.5, x1.75, x2.0), and this for any mods supported by the Maelstrom Engine.

Below are some pics with the UI almost done for Land and Sea, tomorrow I'll edit WmInterface.c.

Land :

Sea :

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ChezJfrey4 years ago (1 edit)

We probably duplicated some work here, LOL. I did something similar for the Land, Sea and WorldMap and if you want to try the files, they are here: https://mega.nz/file/j1EXzYhC#l_msNecCG42iah5cHdLK5wDIEBauMoxbu2w8CuUwY-M

However, given you were not satisfied with 1080, my version will still be too small, but I centralized the number for the ratio calculation, so it only needs to be changed in one spot.

Near the top of the BattleInterface.c file:

#define BI_COMPARE_HEIGHT 1080.0

Change that number to maybe 800.0 or 900.0? Let me know which number you think looks better and I will probably just use your preference in the upcoming update. Later, I will add an option to allow adjustment on the options screen.

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LordAmaury4 years ago (1 edit)

Hello again,

you are right about the duplicated work but it's not a problem, you are the real dev here :-). The new version you produced works almost fine for everything. There are still some things to adjust :

Land : Battle damages and ennemies health bar doesn't scale properly
Sea (Very minor) : Hour is a bit truncated (depending of the month I think), adjusting H position a bit will solve it.
WordMap : The top right interface doesn't scale properly
WordMap : Location names are too small, as you will see in screens I can't read the name of Bridgetown and Barbados is just enought big to be readable but a bit bigger would be better.

I did a bunch of screenshots with different values for BI_COMPARE_HEIGHT : 800 / 900 / 1080 so you can see the difference. I also did it with a resolution of 3840x2160 for people playing with a 4K monitor. According to my personal taste, I think 800 is the better, it looks almost the same as my previous tweak 2.0 factor wich is achieved with a value of 700.

Here are the Screens

I guess the bigger is the resolution the lower should be BI_COMPARE_HEIGHT. I also edited dialog.ini file for the dialog box as I wasn't able to read people names. It might be a bit more difficult but I also think it should be possible to dynamicly adjust values used depending of the resolution.

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ChezJfrey4 years ago

I did notice the one point you brought up with the upper right on the World Map and I have already addressed that one. It required a modification to the Maelstrom Engine so it will now accept a "resizing factor" for that part. You won't be able to see that until I update Itch with a new engine and there is one additional small change to the worldmap.c that will then solve that problem, when combined with the updated Maelstrom.

I suspect the other points might require similar engine modifications as I don't believe any of these things were meant to scale like we want. I will further investigate the battle damage and health bar and World Map location names.

I also agree that sometimes the concatenated string for the date/time is sometimes too long, so we should probably move that H position.

The reason I chose the comparison method is so that we can alleviate a user need to adjust this scaling, if we find a good baseline measurement. However, I will probably still add an option for people that still might want a different result; I found during this process that I actually prefer things a little smaller and it would be nice to still allow some sort of manual tweaking, without touching script code.

Since the dialog size is in a .ini file, this is going to be a little trickier and might also require some magic inside the engine to handle as well, but I haven't yet settled on a good way to deal with that yet, because it's handled so differently than these relatively easy changes we've been working on, but I will keep it on my list to figure out.

Thanks for your help and input about suitable measurements.

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LordAmaury4 years ago

You are welcome, if I can help you in any way I will.

Thank you for your kind help with this, I'm looking for your next update then.

I hope that you will extend this tweak to all mods while it will be complete, they will all benefit from it I think as I encountered the same issue with Carribean Tales and City of Abandonned Ships.

I have other "technical" ideas to try / suggest like AZERTY keyboard detection and Controler Support but one thing after another. Also as you have already ported the engine to DirectX 9 do you also think to somehow continue and port it to newer DirectX versions ?

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ChezJfrey4 years ago (1 edit)

All of our current tasks, including the battle damage/health bars are now scaled.

I did apply the rescaling to COAS, GOF 1.2, GOF 2.0, GOF 2.5 and ERAS 2. I have not yet done POTC or CT, though I will probably do them soon.

Awhile back, I did merge together some of the XBOX controller code that I found into both the ERAS scripts and the Maelstrom Engine. I did some brief testing and if you are playing ERAS, and it detects an XBOX controller, on the options page, you can toggle an option to use the controller. However, it is only partially supported right now, in a "testing" phase. I wanted the ERAS original dev and my collaborator, known as MK to test it, but he has not yet done so. Right now, if the XBOX controller option is enabled, only some of the Sea commands are mapped and so far, they look like they work; I wanted MK to decide what controller buttons/triggers should map to the available Land, Sea, WorldMap commands. So right now, it only partially works. If you want to take charge of making those decisions, that would be great...there are just too many available commands, so only a smaller subset of the controller buttons/triggers can be used and the rest of them would still have to remain on the keyboard. For instance, the "hotkeys" for player loading balls/grapes/knippels/bombs are 1,2,3,4 and all fleet ships loading the same are 5,6,7,8, plus all the navigation, plus all the sail commands, launching battle interface menu, telescope/spyglass, camera movement/rotation, etc....just too many for the few controller buttons. The way I envision this can happen is only if keyboard, mouse and controller are used together, with the controller being mapped to the most common controls. So that is how the current dev for XBOX controllers works right now where it can respond to the keyboard, mouse and XBOX inputs all at the same time. Not sure if this is desirable, so it remains a tentative development until I get feedback from someone that tries it and suggests/recommends modifications to make it workable.

Edit to add: It does not work with PS4 controllers (they have completely different input)...I downloaded an opensource C++ library for converting PS4 input to act like XBOX input, because the original engine was designed only for XBOX, but I have not yet tried it or figured out how to incorporate it yet.

As for DirectX upgrades...I wanted to port to DX11 at the least, but I am not a graphics programmer; I know C++, but I do business integration/accounting type programming. When I first started this, I read through upgrade instructions for porting DX8 to DX9 and it was relatively simple because DX8 and DX9 are so similar that you didn't really need much understanding of the graphic principles. However, when DX10 was introduced, they removed "flexible vertex format" (FVF) idea from their library and also removed "vertex lock/update". The engine heavily uses both of those concepts and they would have to all be changed to a newer method and that requires understanding better how it all works and also requires writing individual shaders for all the current parts that use FVF "pipeline" during the replacement; I don't understand enough about the graphics to do this and I also don't have the time necessary because I do this solo and have a regular job. So it is very unlikely I will ever be able to upgrade past DX9 by myself.

At this point, it might be best if you start engaging on Discord because it is a little easier for me to respond because the Itch forum format does not always notify me of new replies and it also not a very intuitive format for keeping track of current discussions...I saw your name briefly over there, but you want AWOL when I was about to PM you :)

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ChezJfrey4 years ago(+1)

Update: All is fixed except Land battle damage/healthbar.

Sea date is moved to avoid truncation.
World map labels/icons are scaled now.
World map upper right wind gauge and food/rum display now scaled.

I will proceed to track down the damage/health code.

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Gentlemen of Fortune: Maelstrom

Some questions and a thank you :-)