What this thread is for:
Bug reporting, suggestions, and related development discussion: they are mixed in one thread because I've found that most people are not very good at recognising the difference between "bugs" and "suggestions" or "feature requests", so one thread makes it easier. Discussion is allowed if it is directly related to suggestions or bugs, giving your testing results, opinions, or experiences; but try to make sure it is relevant for the basic PW mod as a whole, not specific to how one scene is designed or how a server is administrated.
Known issues which are probably not fixable:
- Death messages will appear green when you kill anyone and red for all other players, like deathmatch; this is due to working around the hard coded restriction on the number of teams.
- Projectile items disappear when fired or thrown under the terrain level, like when inside some interiors.
- In DirectX7 mode, the outer sea mesh doesn't stay at sea level, sloping upwards and looking ugly - it works fine with DirectX9.
- When you connect to the game, shields already equipped by other players might be brown rather than the correct faction banner: this is probably because the agent and equipment data are sent by the game engine before the module sends the faction data.
Known issues which will possibly be fixed:
- The animation of the ships might be quite jerky and glitchy looking, possibly depending on your FPS.
- The ship ramp doesn't match the ground level very well.
- The colored lamellar vest is partially transparent; I can't figure out why.
Some commonly suggested features under consideration (or possibly development):
- Knock out instead of death, with systems for taking prisoners.
- Dynamic weather that changes automatically while the game is being played, according to scene or server settings.
- Siege equipment - this will depend on what is possible, practical, and doesn't use too much server resources.
- More medical or poison related effects.
So if your suggestion is related to anything on this list, try to make sure your idea is new and unique, or that you give specific implementation details that don't seem obvious. I still have a massive list of ideas, so I'm not running out of things to do in my development time.
Some of the things this thread is not for:
- Asking when the next release date will be.
- Asking for teasers or sneak previews of features in development.
- Asking for help getting the mod installed - though if you are pretty sure you've found a bug that stops the mod from running on your system, feel free to post.
A common suggestion that I have no interest in or plans to add to the mod is using an external web server and database to save player stats and items forever; as the "Persistent
World" title hints at, the main focus of this mod is to make a small part of a world with castles, resources, and player stats that are all inter-related, and can be affected by player actions, as opposed to having a generic static game world with players that have little connection with the current environment, since they keep progressing to be richer or more powerful regardless of how many times they die or what they did in that time - which I think leads to hoarding, "grinding", and a general lack of team play or meaningful interaction with other players. There are many other more traditional MMORPGs with that sort of design, and many players who enjoy playing them, but I dislike most of the aspects of it and want to make something more competitive, more in the spirit of native Mount & Blade and Warband.
Another common suggestion is to add a lot of new armor or weapon meshes from various other mods or "open source packs", but this is not planned for multiple reasons: the mod download size should be kept low so I can upload new versions often enough without going over internet data caps, and the amount of new textures and meshes should be kept limited for better performance on slower computers; added items should be from the approximate historical period of native warband, in a similar visual style, and suited to the game mechanics, to avoid the need for dramatically rebalancing the combat system; I am not primarily an artist and would have trouble making or adjusting things to fit in with the existing warband resources; preferably all the resources used should be from native or given to PW to avoid extra restrictions on how the overall mod is used. Many mods "die" because the ideas involved are too grand and far reaching, meaning that the developers get stuck in a huge complicated mess trying to do too many things at once, losing the initial enjoyment or motivation; I want to avoid that trap as much as possible.
However, if you are a moderately skilled artist and want to contribute some meshes or textures, feel free to suggest them here: you should at least get a reply about whether they are wanted or to an acceptable standard. Bear in mind that new texture sheets are a major cause of increased mod size and load times, so you should always use as many textures from native warband as possible.