SP Medieval Battle for Sicily 0.2 -- experimental sea battle added, plus other stuff

[nijis]

A new version of Battle for Sicily is up. It has an experimental sea battle, fixes the castle attack bug, and has a number of new shields, armors, buildings, and other stuff. Comments on historical accuracy, playability etc are all very welcome.

As before, it's still a quick-start mod, so you can board a ship right away from Saracusa (speak to the harbourmaster) and if you want to storm castles right away, take the murabit character, as he comes with a moderately powerful band of followers.

Link is here:
https://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?cid=7&id=251

Recent screenshots (will differ slightly from the current version):
Pirates swarm over the sides:
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l69/nijis/navalscreenshot.jpg

A Saharan murabit (a member of a Muslim fighting order) guards his ribat
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l69/nijis/ribatscreenshot.jpg

Older screenshots:
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l69/nijis/berbercharge.jpg
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l69/nijis/syracuseharbor.jpg

KNOWN BUGS:
In earlier versions, the game crashed during the naval battle, for reasons that I could never figure out (for a while it only crashed when you changed weapons rapidly in the heat of combat). I went back to a version where it didn't crash, and reworked things, and now it doesn't crash, but as I have no idea why it crashed in the first place I can't guarantee that it won't happen again.

In some versions, the ship textures became blurry. This should be fixed, but again as I'm not sure what caused the bug originally, it could recur. Please let me know if either of these two bugs happen, in as much details as you can.

Thanks to:
Khaled Ibn Walid for the Saracen shields and surcoats, and for supplying an incredible wealth of information about medieval Sicily, plus links.
Sahran for the material on which many of the troop outfits were based
Fisheye for the use of the Norman shields in 1066
RR_Raptor for the weapons xpack
Septa Scarabae for his scale armor
Chel for his horses
Yoshi for various nautical items (mostly the rope so far) and for showing how a naval system might work
Ancientwanker for permission to use TLD's dark courser

After this I hope to convert the mod to Python, expand the map (many thanks to Colt for his Sicily satellite-based map), add in an expanded naval system, and start work on the strategic system.

 

[Highblood89]

Holy ****, d\ right now!!! 

 

[nijis]

Just to clarify -- it's a single, set-piece battle, with the boats already in place, but hopefully it will form the basis of something bigger. Moving boats within the scenes I think are still beyond the capacity of the system, although if anyone has any ideas on how to use animation, that's be great.

Also, if you jump overboard, things will get very surreal very quickly. Think of it as stripping away the curtain in the Oz throne room.

 

[Highlander]

wow nice harbour scene - how did you remove the poleam skill?

 

[Sahran]

Wooh! I got a thanks for the concept material. Thanks and downloading now!

 

[BaldwinIV]

The mod is interesting and well made. But if the Byzantines was playable and their soldiers recruitable it will be far better.

 

[Yoshiboy]

nice stuff! Glad to see someone using something of my naval system!

 

[Servitor]

Hello,

Moving boats within the scenes I think are still beyond the capacity of the system, although if anyone has any ideas on how to use animation, that's be great.

Yisiboy's pirates mod has some 'sort' of moving water but strangly it follows the main cahrackter.. Its hard to explain =D You better ask yosiboy.
I would post a screeny if I had pirates instaled right now.

Servitor

 

[Yoshiboy]

What it is basically is a partical effect placed on its side. It shoots out water looking particals to the side which slowly move in one direction creating the illusion of movement. The only problem is that because they are partical effects they turn to face the player all the time.

 

[nijis]

Sahran -- your material was absolutely key for this one. You definitely deserve a credit. Many thanks.

I'd intended the Byzantines to be a playable faction. However, I kind of mucked up instituting a three-faction system in the unofficial editor, so it will have to wait until I convert to Python (my next step).

The Pirates! wakes are really nice. I might try to play around with particle effects a bit, see if I can create a bit of tide or choppy sea.

Also on pirates stuff, is there any way to have separate player icons for a boat in the horse slot, or a horse in the horse slot?

The polearm skill is disabled by entering display_wp_polearms = 0 in module_info. (There's already a display_wp_firearms = 0 in there). I picked that one up from 1066.

 

[Espresso]

I tried it, the naval battle was nice! I haven't tried Yoshiboys Pirate Mod yet, this is the first mod I play, btw. I want to report a couple of small bugs i noticed:
1. In Syracuse, a guy called Eodoseus offers training, like trainer in vanilla Zendar. After the fight I spawned in the building/room, which had too narrow door to pass through. I noticed that I was in Zendar, which was empty (no NPCs). Fortunately Alt+Tab took me outside Syracuse.
2. In Syracuse, when i moved to the edge of the dock and started moving left, I suddenly stopped to some invisible obstacle (near stairs). When I approached that spot from opposite direction, I was able to pass through it normally.

Are the horses ment to be so darn slow and hard to turn? I started with the first option character, which had swayback sumpter horse, I think.. They were not so slow in vanilla.

Anyway, other content seems to be working (so far). A good mod!

 

[Gilrain]

1. In Syracuse, a guy called Eodoseus offers training, like trainer in vanilla Zendar. After the fight I spawned in the building/room, which had too narrow door to pass through. I noticed that I was in Zendar, which was empty (no NPCs). Fortunately Alt+Tab took me outside Syracuse.

Are the horses ment to be so darn slow and hard to turn? I started with the first option character, which had swayback sumpter horse, I think.. They were not so slow in vanilla.

Anyway, other content seems to be working (so far). A good mod!

I've noticed the same with the trainer and the horses.  In addition I crash everytime I speak to the Arabian guy in the inn in Syracuse.  Great mod though.

 

[Yoshiboy]

Sahran -- your material was absolutely key for this one. You definitely deserve a credit. Many thanks.

I'd intended the Byzantines to be a playable faction. However, I kind of mucked up instituting a three-faction system in the unofficial editor, so it will have to wait until I convert to Python (my next step).

The Pirates! wakes are really nice. I might try to play around with particle effects a bit, see if I can create a bit of tide or choppy sea.

Also on pirates stuff, is there any way to have separate player icons for a boat in the horse slot, or a horse in the horse slot?

The polearm skill is disabled by entering display_wp_polearms = 0 in module_info. (There's already a display_wp_firearms = 0 in there). I picked that one up from 1066.

No, sorry. Otherwise we could have ships and horses and stuff...

 

[Gilrain]

The polearm skill is disabled by entering display_wp_polearms = 0 in module_info. (There's already a display_wp_firearms = 0 in there). I picked that one up from 1066.

You can still increase your polearm skill by using a lance(couchable).  My polearm skill (although it can't be seen on the character screen) started at 25, but very quickly increases.

 

[nijis]

Thanks for the comments/bug reports.

Crash when speaking to Arabian guy in the inn in Syracuse -- I'll check that out. Do you mean the exiled king? What sort of message do you get. He's just colour and can easily be removed, but I'm interested to know what causes the problem, as it might bear on other crashes that have appeared in earlier editions.

Horses -- Actually, speed should be up and maneuverability down on most warhorses (a concept that originated with the 1066 mod). This should have the effect of making horseman ship trickier, but also making non-couchable lances more effective.
The sumpter horse however has low speed and maneuverability. The intent was to make them next to useless in combat. This means there should be a big difference between riding into battle on an Arabian and riding into battle on a swaybacked nag.

Polearms -- The proficiency is actually still there under the hood-- but it's only used in couched lancing. Disabling it only prevents the player from sinking points into it thinking that it will help their spearfighting capabilities. Couched lancing should send it rocketing up anyway.

Zendar antechamber -- Oops, I thought I'd fixed that bug. I put it in originally before I figured out how mission triggers worked.

Harbour invisible barrier gaps -- The barrier is supposed to be there, but you're not supposed to be able to get through (largely to stop people from jumping into the water, which the system isn't equipped to handle yet). Thanks for spotting that. I'll try to seal the gap.

 

[Colt]

You probably already know this but people can walk through the green side of the barrier but not th red. Make sure the red side is always facing towards the player. In some instances you'll need to put 2 barriers back to back. Also, try to make an X out of the edges of the barriers so that it's a perfect fit. Any gap at all, even if very small, will be exploited by the AI pathfinding. I had a lot of trouble with town captures where the AI would actually climb up and over a verticle AI barrier that was clear up to their chest.

 

[Gilrain]

Thanks for the comments/bug reports.

Crash when speaking to Arabian guy in the inn in Syracuse -- I'll check that out. Do you mean the exiled king? What sort of message do you get. He's just colour and can easily be removed, but I'm interested to know what causes the problem, as it might bear on other crashes that have appeared in earlier editions.

Hi, I don't know if the Arabian guy is the exiled king, whenever I attempt to speak to him the game just crashes.  I don't get any error message, just the background turns white and the cursor has the 'D2D' above it.  I have to ctrl-alt-dlt to get away from this screen.

 

[nijis]

Hmm. I can't get the computer to crash on the dialogue. There's nothing particularly complicated going on there -- just a vanilla conversation starting sequence. Very odd.

 

[Fuzzlow]

ok this is just to correct spelling errors, i believe "Saracusa" is spelt as either "Syracusa" or "Syracuse" . This is in reference to Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" where the spelling is Syracuse. Im not too sure if its spelt differently in different places/times.

 

[nijis]

Saracusa is the Arabic spelling. English (Syracuse) and Italian (Siracusa) however appear inconsistently in the mod.

I went back on forth on which language to use because Syracuse, like most other cities on the map, was a predominantly Greek-speaking city ruled by an Arabic-speaking elite. However, it would shortly to be conquered by an army led by French-speakers whose foot soldiers spoke a language somewhere on the continuum between vulgar Latin and medieval Italian. (The foot soldiers' language eventually evolved into modern Sicilian, which is either a dialect or a language depending on who you ask).

All the other city names are in Arabic, usually a slightly Arabized version of the Roman or Greek name. Most are the real names lifted from a map that Khalid Ibn Walid sent me, although one or two (Tirwana, for example) are inventions based on the modern Italian city names.

Medieval Sicily was a polyglot place. A tombstone from a few decades later, during the Norman rule, is engraved in Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. (Again, thanks to KIW).