This is more of a game play question - Is the game primarily about developing your pirate ship and storing loot their or can you setup forts on islands similar to the forts in Blackflag?
just recheck this project seem like everything is go on track, and good job man
Thanks! We try to keep everyone updates as much as possible. 
The game is kind of a mix between survival and online-pvp / rpg. Kind of like Rust in a pirate setting, but in stead of base building you have ships and much more combat oriented gameplay. Base building is not really something we are planning to add to the game unless massively requested. In stead the game will feature advanced ship customization as well as the ability to craft and buy a large array of items. You will be able to acces an “Item menu” which will have two tabs. One is for crafting, the other is for buying. In the crafting menu you will be able to spend resources to create all kinds of elementary / basic items, such as a bow, axe, spear, basic clothes, a raft, camp fire. Basically all the things you would be able to craft with “wood and stones”. The other menu, is where you will be able to spend gold to buy more finished products, such as flintlocks, muskets, a ship, cannons, etc… You will also have a seperate ship menu where you will be able to purchase upgrades, do customization and invite people to your crew. All progress is server-side. Meaning each server you join will be a fresh start, exactly like most survival games. You will however be able to customize the look of your character (hair, beard, tattoos, …) in the menu which will stay the same cross-server. When you first start out on a server you will not have any gold yet and so you will have to gather resources on the islands and craft all the basic stuff you will need to start your journey. As you move and explore other islands, you will find treasures. Killing other players or sinking other ships will grant you gold. Treasures can be sold to npc’s which will spawn all over the map. When you die, you will not lose anything from your inventory except the treasures you carry as well as a percentage of your current gold amount which will be granted to the player that killed you. You only have to buy your ship and items once. When your ship is destroyed you will have to repair it though with resources found on the islands. Repairing with gold will also be available for faster repairs. Weapons will require ammo which also has to be crafted or bought. The game is a lot about exploration and finding treasure and hunting other ships and players. New treasures will constantly respawn on semi-random locations so staying at one place all the time will not be very profitable.
One thing that might change though, something we are still debating and will probably start a poll for is whether we will move the buying menu to npc’s as well. Meaning you will only be able to use the “crafting” menu and have to talk to npc’s to acces the buying menu. We will nonetheless have to do extensive playtesting to make a final decision though.
Small update worth sharing. We added something pretty neat to the game. Something that will open up a bunch of new doors. For example, until now we were planning to avoid ships with lower deck areas which are normally at or below sea level due to the fact our water material would stick through it which would look pretty ugly and not very realistic.
But… that was the past. We have found a rediculously easy solution. How we did not think of this earlier, no clue. But anyway, we thought we’d share it in case any of you want to use it.
The key to fixing this issue was distance fields. Up to now we have used it to generate our foam around objects. We used it to generate a mask to know where our objects intersect with the water and then use that mask in combination with some detail foam masks and a gradient to draw the foam. Now because distance fields can give you a mask which tells you where an object intersects with the material you can also use that mask the other way around, namely to cull the material out, which is exactly what we did. The big plus of using this trick is that you always get a 100% accurate mask of your object which maskes it perfect for our water material. 
Here you can see how it works for this small test ship:
Here you can see me going in a small cargo room which is below sea level. With a minimal amount of work i also managed to exclude the swimming state and underwater post processing effects when inside the culling volume. So as you see this small trick is extremely powerfull.
These are the material steps:
First you use this node to read the distance fields on the material
Then you use it to create a mask. The paramter value should be 1+ if you want a crisp mask. If you want more of a fade, then use a much lower value (0.01 +) (The minus one node is optional, you could also just switch the lerp A and B values)
Then you use the mask as the alpha for a lerp. 0 is where you will have full opacity, the other input would either be 1 or whatever opacity mask you already used before
Then you just plug it all into opacity
Also make sure you have generate mesh distance fields enabled in project settings > rendering
Now you can make submarines, yay! 
Cheers
Looks pretty dope
We are currently working on our combat mechanics. In particular fire arm aiming. As well as a lot of animation updates, camera updates (you can now switch between normal 3rd person camera view and sideview) and a new ship and island. Ah, and we have also added shorelines. No more huge waves on the beach.
And we’ve updated our main menu a bit
Next up will be finishing up our final character model and bringing it in game which should be quite a big update. We will also add some starter clothing.
I love the art style! great project, keep going!
Thanks!
Oh man… Maybe this will finally be the Pirate game we all deserve! I’ve been waiting for a good one for quite some time now, and yours looks excellent!
edit; Sign me up as a tester when you’re ready! I’d love to help play-test!
Awesome thanks!
Hey guys sorry for the long pause in updates. But rest assured we are still working full time on the game. We are just working on some big features right now which take a while to complete. But to give an idea, we are working on advanced ship repairing and localized damage and the ship resource systems (cannon balls, wood, iron, cloth ,…). We’ve also added a torch and did some extensive testing with sub-sea-level ship decks and we are happy to announce it works perfectly. We plan to use this to it’s fullest potential, meaning we are designing each ship as a completely open vehicle. Nothing will be off limits. Every compartment of the ship will be accesible. Multiple decks including the lowest deck which is a crawl space. All of these decks will have hatches and doors that you will be able to open and close. Our damage system works in the way that where your ship get’s hit that’s where the damage will be. So if it’s in a lower part of the ship, you will have to go down through all the compartments to get to the damage and repair it. We have almost everything working and will soon make a small video showcasing everything mentioned in this post.
For now here are some screenshots:
This is an NPC we are also working on. Many small islands will have trader NPC’s which will sell ships, weapons, clothing and resources. They will have a limited quantity of everything though. And their stocks will refresh each in-game day. You can also sell items to these traders. The items you sell will then appear in the trader’s list of items he sells. Meaning that the stuff these NPC’s sell will be largely player driven. If you gather wood and sell it to this NPC, someone else can then buy your wood from him. This will be so with every NPC trader in the world. So their inventories will vary from island to island. Every day they are refreshed with new random items. Sometimes rare and awesome clothing / weapons and even ships will appear in their inventory, but the chance for this will be very rare and you will never know in advance.
Here you can see the ship resource and info window in the top right corner. The way this works is that every ship will have an inventory as well which will be accesible through barrels and crates aboard your ship (there will be slots on your ship where you will be able to install more of these). Every major resource that is required to keep your ship afloat, such as wood, iron, cloth and cannon balls will automatically appear in the info window. When you ship takes damage repairing said damage will decrease the ship’s wood iron and cloth resource for example and when you fire cannons it will deplete your ship’s cannonball resource. So making sure your ship’s containers are always filled with resources will be important. Also if you fill your ships container’s with food you will not have to eat while on board your ship, but the food resource of your ship will slowly deplete per person every 10 minutes instead. If there is no more food in your ship’s inventory the people on board will begin to starve. You can of course still catch fish from on board your ship.
This is below deck on the small sloop. If the ship’s hull gets damaged you will need to go down in it to repair. (small sloop has no textures and details yet, only a block out so far) Everything you see here is below sea level. No water, no swimming. All this works very nicely. Although not that revolutionairy and new, still a very neat feature that we tend to use extensively in our game.
As mentioned you will be able to upgrade your ship in 3 major ways. Speed, which includes turning, acceleration and top speed. Hit points which makes your ship harder to sink and lastly resource capacity in the form of installable barrels and crates all over your ship. Next to that you will of course also be able to fully customize the look of your ship by changing the 3 or more main colors, the sails which include a logo and pattern both of which the colors can also be changed. A custom figurehead, steering wheel and cannon look. And possibly more as we proceed.
A little something about how the sails will work. Every ship will have at least one sail, most of them will have multiple. Each sail can be changed to 3 presets (no sail, half sail and full sail). Each half sail will add to the ship’s total speed. In the top righ corner you will be able to read the knots at which your ship sails. For the sake of simplicity and as to not confuse people we have changed the knot system to fit our game. Normally a ship would sail at +/- 16 to 18 knots. But the way we use the system is by adding 2 knots per half sail (not by reading the ship’s speed with an actual chip log xD). This way people will easily be able to read how fast the ship is going and how many sails are opened. 
Oh and we’ve also added some cool light flare effects that fade in as you move further away from a light source which makes distant light a lot more visible and it looks cool.
Hopefully you like what we are working on and again, apologies for the long silence.
Small update
Worked on sail damage and repairing. Got a cool procedural sail damage material to show: Screen capture - 4811f4d7859425e17f80671f92c8b68f - Gyazo
Also the hull damage system is completely finished. Visually it’s not finished yet, but it’s a good start. Also we updated the NPC to now have gestures and sentences he says and he looks at the player. Basically he feels alive now.
Some quick bandana styles. NPC traders will always sell randomized versions of clothing items. They will have as you see in this example different patterns and colors.
Cheers!
Nice progress Wizx, it really fits the art direction of the game.
May i ask what is the setup of the material, i mean what texture maps are you using.
I want a stylized/handpainted look for my game and i will just use a diffuse. But it is really hard to pull it off.
Anyway,once again great work guys!
Hey man thanks!
We are mostly working with normal maps that we bake from high poly zsculpts onto low poly versions. We first start off with a low poly base mesh, sometimes we will just start sculpting and use pro-optimize in 3dsmax, it depends. A character, trees and weapons which all have a fairly crafted look requires retopping and a clean mesh, but chaotic, natural things, like rocks, this bandana and some other stuff are better off being pro-optimized. Then we throw it into zbrush and add details. Then we unwrap the low poly mesh with 3dcoat, bake the high-to-low normal info with substance painter and then we add some color variations and rough details in substance as well.
We mostly use 2 textures, which is a base color texture and a normal map.
These are the textures used for the character (normal map and defuse). We also have a couple of masks for the facial hair, undie color, skin color and eye color.
This is the material
For the bandana we used only a normal map
The colors and patterns were achieved with a mask as seen in the material here
As you can see we also use a fresnel which is based on the defuse color on every clothing / character item.
Hope this helps you!
Thanks Wizx!
Interesting approach with great results.
Nice trick with the fresnel!
I will use similar workflow. High poly sculpting, low poly retopology, baking ao, cavity, normal map, heightmap etc.
Then all the maps will be used as a reference to hand paint the low poly mesh.
But that is something i need to get much better.
I completely understand what you are going through. This workflow takes a lot of practice to get good at. I’m still very much learning a lot of it myself. But I’ve been at it for about a year now and it really shows compared to my early work. And once you get the hang of zbrush and substance painter you can really do cool stuff in very little time which is in turn very rewarding and keeps you motivated to make more.
Good luck with your project. If you have any more questions, don’t be shy to ask. 
Just a small heads up, we are in the middle of some very awesome play sessions and recording some gameplay. Very soon we will release a gameplay video of what we have so far. We are also currently working on some big features such as inventory, crafting, trading, customization and new weapons / tools.
It’s actually the first time we are testing the game with 5 players + and we are having a blast. I really hope everyone will enjoy it as much as we do. xD
Small sneak peak of the new ship we are working on. Hint hint, it’s a big boy. The biggest ship in the game (for now)