I think we’ve touched on this in our news posts, but perhaps a little more explanation would be good. As I mentioned in my previous post, our code really started from my early attempts to learn OpenGL. While we did some refactoring as we went, the code is not structured well. For example, when I was starting out and I just wanted to see if I could draw a triangle on the screen or if I could actually load a heightmap, I didn’t create a vector class. That just makes for a lot of ugly and duplicated code. A ship is a class that has a “draw()” method with a bunch of OpenGL code, and a few float members for the position, rotation, and speed. A city is similar. It has a “draw()” method with OpenGL code, and members for position and rotation.
It seems like pushing some of that into something like an “Entity” class would have made sense. Also, the way all the raw OpenGL code in methods worked was pretty ugly. Some objects changed the render state in order to achieve a certain effect. As a result, the order things get drawn is very important. All of that works fine if you just want to see if something will show up on the screen, but all of the interdependencies make it really hard to maintain and add new functionality.
Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that made us decide to rewrite from the ground up. We are writing an engine separately in order to force the separation of game logic from the framework code. A lot of our ideas are driven off of Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry. We are trying to use existing open-source libraries as much as possible. We could just using an existing game engine, but it seems like this approach is a good mix of our desire to get a good game working and our desire to learn and try out some ideas.
We are making progress on the rewrite, and I think our new foundation will be much more manageable than what we have now. Look for more updates as we make further progress.
The game doens’t come with instructions or a readme file or a manual of any sort.
Although the website is long on technical information, it doesn’t help at all in how to play the game.
Please send me a copy of the instructions or direct me as to where to find them online.
Hee haw and merry Christmas.
I don’t know if you might be interested in translating the game, but I’d be willing to give a hand if you are.
In case you didn’t know, there is another open source game that was inspired by Pirates! : http://sourceforge.net/projects/huntforgold/
That’s because there still isn’t much to play exept for sailing around and shooting other ships.
Not as good-looking as Crown and Cutlass, but seems like it’s fun to play, downloading it now
ketch, I’m assuming you are using the windows installer. There is actually a readme file in the directory where you installed Crown and Cutlass. However, you are correct, we have more info on technical stuff than actually playing the game. Just to manage your expectations, we are still very early on in development, and do not have much in the way of a playable game. While you are certainly welcome to come along and help us in the process of developing a game, if you are looking to just play a game you might do better looking elsewhere. “Hunt for Gold” that Hugo linked to looks like a good candidate, alternatively if you can afford it and you have a machine that can run it, the new “Pirates!” game by Sid Meier is definitely worth playing.
Hugo, thanks for the offer. I would like to internationalize Crown and Cutlass. However, at the moment, we are not set up for translations. I suppose if we are going to do it, we should do it as a part of this rewrite, rather than trying to cram it in later. I will talk to Collin about it after I get back from vacation. It might be a little bit, but I’ll let you know when we are ready for a translation. Thanks. I’ve seen “Hunt for Gold” but haven’t ever played it. It appears to be a more faithful recreation of the Pirates! games than we are doing, but it does look promising. I’ll have to check that out.