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Both ERAS and GOF 2.5 started with GOF 1.2 as the basis and GOF derives from COAS.  ERAS has been continually updated through 2023 and would be the latest, most current mod based on COAS right now.

ERAS removed much of the fantasy and historically inaccurate ships from GOF, but added many more other ships and characters, one new Pirate colony and other features that don't exist in any other COAS mod.  GOF 2.5 removed many ships and much of the AI and other improvements from GOF in an attempt to fix bugs they thought were created by the GOF mod itself.  However, the bugs were mostly due to a buggy original engine, so both 2.0 and 2.5 remain a shadow of what the original GOF provided and I believe actually still have their own bugs; I do not update GOF 2.0 or 2.5 and leave them as they stood, but offer them because for some reason, people still want them.

In my opinion, if you want to try GOF, version 1.2 is the best, and 2.0 and 2.5 removed too much of what made GOF "good."  But to answer your question, ERAS would be considered the latest and solid COAS mod right now.

Ah, I had forgotten that for officers, I had put the new "Exchange" button in the same place and "Equip" never becomes visible.  The quickest way would be to disable "Exchange" and you won't be able to use that feature and would have to exchange equipment the "old" original way by speaking face to face.

In items.c, also disable "Exchange", then you should be able to remove/equip individual pieces for the officers:

else

    {

        SetNodeUsing("EQUIP_BUTTON" , true);
        SetNodeUsing("EXCHANGE_BUTTON" , false); // bExchg);

    }

I think browser downloads can sometimes fail.  I don't deal with that, because that is the Itch platform, that I have no control.  However, I do believe if you use their free client for the download, it does not have the problems that browsers sometimes have.  You don't have to use it to launch the game, but their client my provide a better download experience.  Try that.  If it doesn't download everything properly, you may have to raise a support issue with Itch.

I will check Blaze

There is a formula used for your companions to select their own weapons.  The formula takes into account damage, accuracy, reload speed...several factors and most single barrels will lose out to multi-barreled guns, though not in all cases; there are some single barrels that will "win" and get selected by a character, but they are probably few.

You can disable the characters auto-selecting, and you will need to manually equip them.  Requires both enabling the Equip button and disabling the function the characters will use to select their own.

Program\INTERFACE\items.c, change line 175 to:

SetNodeUsing("EQUIP_BUTTON" , true);

Program\characters\CharacterUtilite.c, change line 3162:

void CharacterCheckEquipAll(ref refCharacter)

{
    return; //Add this line
    if(!CheckAttribute(refCharacter, "id")) return;

...

...

...

MK drives decisions of how ERAS will look/feel, and Mirsaneli makes decisions on the NH mod; they have widely divergent tastes and I highly doubt MK would agree with the sea/ambient changes to make ERAS look/feel like NH.

I also have no intention of trying to document all the differences between ERAS and NH, because I have never played NH and do not intend to devote time to do so just to document how it might differ from ERAS.  ERAS is based on COAS and NH is based on POTC, which are quite different from each other, and that is as far as I'm currently able to describe.

COAS was based on the 2.8 version of the engine, which handled particle effects for cannon smoke much differently than POTC and the 2.0 version of the engine.  I did obtain the 2.0 version of particle effects and allowed NH to keep that older way of doing them.  Similar for the character dialogs, with 2.8 removing the "head animation" vs. the 2.0 dialog which contained a head portrait of the NPC.

It is possible to change anything in ERAS to match NH, but it is not trivial and I can guarantee that ERAS will not be changed by us to match NH; they will remain different.

I apologize for the delay, but I did finally get a chance to check into this and I did eventually discover the problem.  I just uploaded an update for POTC today that should solve the problem.  Please update the POTC mod and you should be able to load a saved game and proximate islands on worldmap should load once you exit to sea.

Included is the COAS manual:  Age_of_Pirates2_-_City_of_Abandoned_Ships-UK_Manual_-PC.pdf

Page 24 describes what is needed on the ship for your crew:  Food, Medicine, Rum, Weapons

Changing the grates on a ship requires altering the model, which requires a modeler.

There is no water displacement in the game; all water clips through ship hulls and land.  For land, the solution is to make sure that land mass models always have a topographical height that stays above the water level.  Some low profile ships will have the water waves become visible above the actual deck because of this, and in the case with a ship that has an actual see-through grate, instead of a fake grate that is just a texture, then you will be able to see water like that.

Yes, I tried a new Pitt game and I see the problem.  I uploaded a fix for Maelstrom just now.

OK, I understand better.

The game was originally designed for 600x800 and some people complained that the stretching and small icons/fonts at newer, wider resolutions was too small to read so I hardcoded a factor into the scripts for the land/sea displays.  For better treatment, I copied an option from ERAS to this version that will allow you to rescale those, separate from the screen resolution where you can choose the scaling factor with a slider.

Update the COAS scripts from the Itch update, load your saved game, go to Options, click HUD button lower right, and slide left to a value closer to 1.0 (you can go lower if you want).  It does not take effect immediately, but if you are at sea, just enter your ship cabin, then exit.

Here is .77

I'm not sure why that happens for you.  Here is what COAS at 1920x1080 looks like on my screen:

I think it is supposed to be random item locator 2.

When you moor at the shore, go left and the spot is the bubble area seen behind the rock, inside the pink/purple sphere you see straight ahead in this image:

If it is the Atill, that is not ERAS, but probably COAS or GOF.

I do not zip the file, but rather upload all the individual files and Itch provides a .zip of the content if downloaded from a browser.  This is a question for Itch support.

The mod for loyalty is included, in program/scripts/officers.c.  You can see all the adjustments compared to stock COAS and there are many.  It depends on several factors, including how loyal they are currently, and "neutral" officers should only adjust their loyalty if the majority of other non-neutral officers react negatively/positively.  And it also depends on whether the reputation of the other officers is similar or differently than yours.  This mod has been used in ERAS since 2017 and is fairly vetted at this point.

I have no intention of adding the rum management to COAS since it involves changing some dialog and adding functions that are not in a single code file, but spread throughout dialog files, text for dialogs with DLG_TEXT_BASE array index matching, companions, food and with COAS, the dialog files for each language would have to be changed, so I would rather not.

Files include:
DIALOGS/...<language>.../MainHero_dialog.c
TEXT\...<language>...\DIALOGS\MainHero_dialog.h
characters/LSC_Q2Utilite.c
scripts/companions.c
scripts/food.c

I figured out a way to get those to display without need to edit the model.  It involves a minor locator addition and a render state change for zero width texture display.  Both Maelstrom and ERAS were updated and that ship type now displays properly.

Always have at least as weapons as total ship crew.  If you have fewer weapons than crew, those crew members above the weapon count automatically die in a boarding action.  Medicine is a bit more forgiving, because then it depends on the luck of whether a crew member needs it due to illness/injury, so you don't always need the exact amount of crew members, but it's better to have as much as you can and it doesn't take much cargo space.

That was an element added to ERAS that will occasionally happen if you've been tangling with waitresses or street encounters...you've got an STD.  If you have Fast Healing Herbs or Pox Healing Herbs in your character's inventory, you should get better faster, each day.

It looks like you've identified all the available locations.  ERAS only added the one on Cayman.  There were plans to add a few more, but I don't know when or if that might occur.

I don't see it.  The Pink is already a valid ship, the Shark is nowhere to be found.  No entry in ships_init and no model.  See below:

I do not see a Shark in ERAS.  Though I do see one in GOF.  As for missing elements, I have no ability to fix models and if a GOF one is messed up, it will likely stay that way.

That is the latest

OK, so it is not actually crashing, but somehow exiting.  I will need to make some special logs to see launch progress that will write to system.log to figure out where this is happening.  Send me an email to chezjfrey@hotmail.com.  I will add that logging to the .exe, then send you a direct message to obtain it and you will run it and send me the system.logs.

OK, let's see if this is an actual crash, or exit.  Launch the game, wait for the disappearance, then check Windows Event Viewer, Application for an error:

Those look fine so far.  First make sure that a file named, "Buccaneer's Reef" with no extension is present in the same directory that Maelstrom.exe is, and also in the root ERAS mod folder, if that is a different directory than where Maelstrom is.

Post system.log, compile.log and if it exists, error.log files

Unfortunately no, they are not compatible.  Every mod has its own set of what they call "global variables" and the engine reads the saved values of those variables when you load the save.  To make New Horizons work with a newer version of the engine, many of the global variables had to be either removed because they no longer work (like for the sea and weather) and replaced with different ones.  So those global variables no longer match the original order or type of value.

However, nothing had to change with COAS or GOF mod, so if someone had old saves, with the original engine, for those games, they are compatible and can be played.  But POTC, Caribbean Tales, and New Horizons were built around a different game, where the weather and sea conformed to an older version of Storm and they had to be altered in that manner of global variables I described.

GOF 1.2 is available.

Only some character models have the necessary animations to support carrying a musket.  Since you claim that the "Equip" button was enabled for your character, but it doesn't work, I checked the scripts and it looks like there may be an error in the function to determine eligibility.  Can you tell me the character you are playing?

Also, it may be better if you can send me a save file with that musket in inventory, because if an officer did equip it, but doesn't show the correct item equipped, that may be bugged too, so I will need to investigate an eligible character too.

In ERAS, once you give equipment to an officer, you don't get to decide whether they unequip it, so if you have a gun or sword or cuirass that you may want to use at some point, do not give it away.  They decide their equipment from their inventory and for guns, they will choose based on weighted factors of accuracy, damage output and reload speed.  If that calculation favors one gun over another, they will equip it and won't unequip unless they get another gun in their inventory that favors a different one.

I will look into how Bribery is supposed to work...I only checked a few like the Grappling one I demonstrated.

Can't say...where's the bottleneck, CPU or GPU?  Also, in order to check the exact circumstance, it would be more helpful if you sent a boarding save for the exact encounter that I could try.

I think we're discussing two different things.

The debugger screen you are talking about is enabled with _mod_on_off.h and the line:

#define MOD_BETTATESTMODE            "On"  // On -DEV version; Test - TST ver; Off

If "On", then F11 will launch the screen you are talking about and debugwindow=1 in start.ini has no effect.

I thought you wanted this screen:

This is enabled with start.ini setting dbgwindow = 1, then hit F5.  I thought that is what you were trying for.

Yes, if you have a script error in Program\debuger.c, it will not launch.

My understanding is that the skill books are only supposed to apply a bonus to the character holding them.  So if you have a navigation book bonus, it applies to you.  But if you appoint a Navigator because that character has a better navigation score than you do, they must also carry the book in their inventory to get a higher bonus, otherwise the bonus only applies to you if it's in your inventory.  So if you have a score of 30, and your appointed Navigator has a score of 50, and you have a +10 book for navigation, the displayed navigation score will not show a bonus unless you give the book to your Navigator.

For ERAS, I loaded a game and demonstrate that it works as intended:

My character has a grappling score of 40, with no grappling skill books/items.  My Bosun has a score of 59, plus several grappling skill items of +10, +10 and +30, stacking to +50 bonus.  On the character screen, under my character, there is a green (+60), indicating that I have a 100 score for grappling because my bosun's score is 100 (59 skill, plus 41 bonus...max score is 100, so the +50 in bonus maxes him out).

Also, there is a mod option to cap bonus item stacking, so make sure that value is off/on, depending on your preference.

There is a big, long explanation for this sort of problem in direct sail...

First, some of the "island locations" are a single island model, and some are the main location model, with several distant islands visible in the distance, but are technically not really valid locations, but just for scenery on the horizon.  In original COAS, if you sailed directly to those distance islands, you could reach them, and even keep sailing beyond them.  But if you reached that island and sailed around the circumference of it, you would never actually see the ports, or any detail, even though it was defined as a real location, until you exit sea, enter world map, then reload back to sea.  Then, you would then get the valid location to load of that once distant island to load it's real model, not the fake distant one you saw from afar.  For those islands that are just a single model, with no distance islands visible, you can sail forever in a direction where you know another location exists, and you will never reach it in COAS, because there is no such thing as "direct sail" ability in the original game.

The modders for GOF added the "direct sail" feature to calculate the distance you sailed from your original location, compare it to the distance from every other island, and if at some point during your sailing, if the distance from any other worldmap location was less than the distance you had sailed from your original location, their modded scripts would force that location's model to load and you would get a loading screen as you transition from that portion of the map to the other.  This usually works except for transitions from certain locations on the western and southern parts of the map.

The reason those western and southern parts of the map are a problem, is that it turns out the original design of COAS is that the worldmap for Cuba and the South American continent on the worldmap, and their respective port locations are actually a different distance scale than all the other portions of the map, so comparing the distances doesn't work well, because if you started sailing at any of the eastern island, then approached Cuba or South America (both west and south on the world map), at some point in the journey, the distance scaling prevents the calculation, because there is no way to account for when the distance scaling needs to change, because that dividing line of distance scaling change is unknown.  In GOF, if you sailed from Hispaniola, toward Cuba, you could reach Cuba shores and nothing would happen, unless you turned north for a ways and eventually you could get the transition.

For ERAS, which is based on the GOF mod, a change was made to help alleviate this problem by using the direction your ship is heading at any given time, and if any of the "problem" ports are forward of your position, it will use a different scaling for calculating your distance to those ports, and the regular distance calculation for ports not on that last of problems, to help eliminate the problem.  It's still imperfect, but it works better for most locations that GOF did.  I have tested that sail from Hispaniola to Cuba in GOF, and you can reach the island without a load, but in ERAS, you get fairly close and can see the low-res fake island, but the transition happens sooner than GOF, before you reach the shore.

This has been a known issue since the early days of COAS and GOF and also a problem in the New Horizons mod when they lifted the South American portion of the worldmap from COAS and put it into POTC.  There are discussions on PiratesAhoy about this very issue, and the attempts to compensate for the scaling differences in the modded scripts.

Modern games probably use asset streaming, background threads and level-of-detail for more efficiency.  However, the way this game was designed, prevents most of that.  First, they made their own custom texture and model formats, that must be processed in engine code, before handing off to the renderer.  Then, the program scripts that allow for easier modding and customization of behaviors also are notified at various points during asset loads so that the scripts can respond and add certain data to its variables that must be done in order of load, so that prevents doing anything in parallel threads and must be handled consecutively in the main thread. 

The main culprit is the design of the program script handler and I am not going to try redesigning the entire game engine.  The point was to take the original code design, but at least rid the prominent crashes and bugs that existed in the original.  Also keep in mind that the "direct sail" was a modification to allow more interactive direct-sail, with encounters and such, but was also never part of the original game either, but was added by script modders.

I also saw your other question about camera movement, and that is also inherent to the original engine's timestep; their original timestep approach does not do well once frames get high.  I had once contemplated using a better timestep resolution and delta approach, but a first pass broke much of the other physics and turned out to require much more work than anticipated, so I let it go.

Use dbgwindow = 1

I don't remember the reason, but I changed the name from debugwindow

Where did you get GOF download from?  The first module errors make it appear you have overwritten them with something from the original game, which is written in DirectX 8 and none of them will work.  The evidence for my guess is that it is attempting to load modules that do not exist in Maelstrom: CameraDialog.dll, net.dll, DX8RENDER.dll, SCRIPT_LIBRIARY.dll; the final tally should only be 44 loaded.  That would also explain all the shader errors too, because DirectX 9 will not be able to compile some of the shaders for DirectX 8.

Also, even if you remove and replace the correct .dll modules/techniques folder, if you are using Program script files from old GOF, Maelstrom will not be able to compile them correctly and will also fail.  You must obtain a clean download from here:  https://chezjfrey.itch.io/gentlemen-of-fortune-12

Do not add or overwrite anything else from another GOF download.

I do not know what all of them do, but I do know some of them.

Don't eat and no rats:  During the daily update, the ship crew will not consume food rations and rats will not consume any ship cargo

Quest Log Show:  If this is turned on, during some of the quest actions, a message will show information upper right screen

Test Ransack Captain: Some sort of testing option for enemy captains used in boarding and spyglass, but I'm not sure what it does, but it's probably for script debugging purposes.

Locator Show:  If turned on, any model locators will show as bright spheres for the radius of the defined locator and they show as different colors depending on locator type

Exp Log Show:  Whenever experience is gained for something, a log message in the upper right screen will display the experience value gained.

P.G.G. Log Show:  Sometimes shows messages upper right when the other wandering "heroes" stay in the tavern, change ships, are respawned, tasks, targets, etc. for script debugging purposes.

Camera enable free:  There is a free camera mode where certain controls will allow the camera to roam away from the character, but I don't remember the controls for movement.

Questline for Nations:  I think it pretends that a nation questline has finished, probably for testing if the nations will then start to send sieges and take other colonies, and change alliances, which only happens after a nation questline has completed.

Beta Test Mode:  Changes a bunch of the script random chances to always be true, probably so that they could be tested without needing to wait for a random chance to actually get lucky.

There has been no change from original COAS.  To obtain a governor meeting to obtain a Letter of Marque, you must perform a bunch of quests for a single town mayor to boost his personal relation, just like COAS; doing the quests for a bunch of different mayors will take longer because the invite is based on the specific relation to a specific mayor.  Such as find ring in the brothel, deal with thugs in the jungle, find nearby pirate and destroy/board, etc.

In COAS, your reputation will decrease if you board ships, even if the enemy.  There was some modification in ERAS so that boarding enemies does not decrease your reputation as much, and it will actually increase your reputation if you have a Letter of Marque and the ship was a "war" type, which COAS did not do; COAS always decreased when boarding, even if patented.  However, with a Letter of Marque in ERAS, if you initiate boarding with a non-war type, you will decrease if the enemy is a merchant and you take/capture (with a LoM in ERAS you should merely plunder merchants, then let them go...there will be no decrease that way.  You are allowed to sink/capture war ships with a LoM and you will actually increase) and you will also decrease if you initiate boarding without a Letter of Marque, regardless of ship type, because you are not authorized to act on behalf of the nation yet.  However, if the enemy initiates boarding, and you win, there is no penalty in ERAS.  There should also be no penalty, but rather an increase if you are flying a nation and the enemy is a pirate in ERAS, whereas in COAS, it did not matter and you would get penalized for boarding pirates.

Also, just like COAS, your reputation will always decrease over time, each day, if you are above neutral and the decrease is higher for higher difficulty levels.