Hearts of Oak: Conquest of the Seas is a non-commercial PC game being developed by PiratesAhoy!, and is to become the historical seafaring game to end them all! Fun, realistic gameplay on land and at sea, set during the Age of Sail, will provide extensive free play, exciting scripted storylines and intense multiplayer scenarios.
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We had some technical issues with last months release, most of the major ones should be fixed with this one! Please let us know if you have issues. To get to the multiple ships and targets, you must complete the demo by tabbing through the tutorial and following instructions after taking command of the ship.
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Hey guys, so I had a little play around. It's starting to look a lot nicer, the ship looks great since the last time I played the demo (July/august).
The ship doesn't seem to fire for me? Not sure if that's in yet but I couldn't get the space bar working, and all pressing f1 and f2 does is highlight the little icons in the corner unfortunately.
But to be fair bashing into the barge with my ship does the job, I saw the barge changed colour I'm guessing that's the start of damage?
My main problem to be honest (and I don't want to criticise too much) is the camera for sailing. The camera for walking around the island doesn't seem to respond, although it does pan around eventually I guess it's still a bit awkward. But the Camera for the ship is my main concern just because it seems quite unimmersive. Now I don't know if you were going to keep it like that, or if you were working up to something a little better, I suppose it's not so bad if it's going to be like potc where the bird's eye camera is for sailing but you can walk around the ship if you like by bringing up the menu and selecting the sea option.
Basically what I'm getting at, probably quite unclearly, is that I was hoping you'd be able to get down and walk around your ship. Whether it's like potc where you can quasi-pause the game and walk into your cabin/the holds/deck etc. or whether you have the option to actually walk around the ship live, as you're sailing I don't have a major preference but I do think it brings a nice quality of immersion to the game either way. Then you could captain it up in your cabin, maybe walk over to a diary and write some notes? Or walk over to a map table and perhaps even draw on the map yourself (or even plot a fix hnggg). You could have it so that you can walk down to the mess deck and sit down and have some food/rum with your crew PURELY for the immersion factor.
I dunno, I know this is a lot and you've just started, really you're getting the basic systems down. Maybe these are things you want yourself as well(?) and will come in time. But I'm worried you'll neglect these things and then it will be an unworkable add-on that will just be easier for you to exclude from the final game.
I'm on windows 10, nvidia gt 750, seems to run fine on low for me although I had a crash on start for fantastic settings, but my computer is finicky anyway after the windows 10 update so I doubt it's the game.
P.s. I think you should have a remote "magic" forest on lands far away somewhere. A deep old forest, blue trees, maybe fireflies, and an ominous atmosphere. Something that captures the feeling that an explorer might have got back in those days, finding untouched lands millions of miles from home.
Thanks for your feedback Stealthy92, it is much appreciated! To be sure, we have a long way to go to get what we want implemented in the game. We do plan on being able to walk around on deck with the crew. There will also be explorable island interiors coming, but those are both in the future. These demos are intended to help everyone follow our progress, so that you know we are progressing. Feedback such as yours really helps us in the development process and will make the game better in the end!
We have actually been in development for several years, but we have had several setbacks and had to change engines a couple of times. Please keep in mind that we are not a development studio. We are just a bunch of volunteers who are tired of waiting for the big game developers to give us the game that we want, so we are making it ourselves!
As for the controls, F1 will turn off Auto-fire, you have to have that turned off to fire the cannon. The F key will fire all cannons, and the space bar should fire each individual cannon. Also, the up and down arrows will raise or lower the cannons trajectory. F2 will turn off Auto-Engage, you should see the check-marks in the little boxes on the bottom left. If your using a laptop, sometimes the keyboard function keys are quite annoying.
As Thagarr said, we do indeed plan to let the player walk around on deck. We hope to have AI crew walking around deck fairly soon, and we may be able to put the player on deck some time after that.
I'm with you on including little details for the sake of immersion, so don't worry about that being neglected! You will, of course, see the core gameplay mechanics being developed more at this stage, though we have lots more planned that we haven't yet talked about.
We also need to carefully consider how to implement new features. For example, by letting the player walk around on deck, we will need to provide different controls for sailing and commanding the ship than you would use in third person ship view. PotC does this in a manner that would seem weird in a modern game, so we'd like to improve on that for HoO.
Thanks again for your feedback, it's very helpful to the team.