Hi,

Do you have other 3D games that you play successfully? I'm curious because I noticed in your DXdiag that you're on an AGP port, and I'm wondering if you have that set up correctly. Specifically, on some PCs, I've had to have a specific driver for the AGP port, and sometimes I've had to go into the bios to set a different size for it. Either of these things could result in you a) running slowly or b) crashing unduly.

Hi Chris,

When you type type /addmetric general in the chat box, what happens?

First, I'm sorry you're having these problems, because it sucks to lose a ship when it's not your fault. Second, we don't expect you to fix these problems for us. What we hope for is to work through the issues to find where the problem is, and then address it. So:

1) Have you logged a support ticket for this? And if so, what's the number?
2) When you were playing in the closed beta, were you on this same setup? What I'm trying to figure out is if you were on this exact same setup, and nothing changed but Pirates, then that would indicate it's a change we made.

Boy, trust me, we'd like it to just work as well. Requiring a customer to configure their router is pretty much the last way that we want to introduce you to the game.

Without being the engineer who came up with how this works, I can only give you the 10,000 foot view of why we did it this way.

First, TCP is good at surviving lost packets, but not so good at being timely. Nevertheless, this is all games were able to use, so they used it. And depending on your route to the server, it kind of sucks for latency dependent games.

UDP is much better for real time data transmission, though it has its own set of weaknesses. Nevertheless, it's better for games like us.

Where the problem arises is from the constant attacks going on in the internet, which means router manufacturers lock down the routers as much as possible. If you're superhuge (Xbox Live, WoW, Counterstrike) they'll sometimes open those ports by default. But otherwise, they require you (the user) to open them.

I know that at one time, our UDP ports were a bit irregular. We did some research, and came up with a different range that was the same as some other popular games/applications, the idea being that more routers might already have those ranges open. I wasn't around for that process, so I don't know why we came up with the range we did, but that was the thought process behind it.

So, the reason we ask that you open these ports, is that we can give you a more responsive game. I look forward to the day when routers could be intelligent, and automatically open ranges based upon user input, much like firewalls do, but that's a ways off. Heck, I'm just looking forward to the day when a router doesn't break by simply throwing half the packets away (a situation we've actually run into).

Ok, I've sent this onto our sound designer. She'll have a talk with the auctioneer and settle him down.

Hi Killcount,

Hopefully, nobody else is getting that kind of load time, because that's insane! Please log a bug with our support group and we'll take a look at it.

Thoughts in the meantime:

When we're loading between instances, we're mostly just hitting your hard drive. I've had experiences with hard drives that were dying where they'd still work, but would have to retry, which meant the data read rate was terrible. You should try some diagnostics on your hard drive to make sure that's not the culprit because you don't want that to go out without a backup.

I think the other piece of it is that we try to treat everyone like adults. Once people find out they don't need to shout to be heard, everything gets a lot better.

Darn it! Now I do remember the Count of the Fishermen! Stop the presses! We need to re-evaluate!

Your graphics chipset (x3100) should run the game, but apparently Parallels is hiding its capabilities from us. Odds are that its also hiding the real functionality of the card as well.

You can try skipping the caps check by creating pirates_local.ini in the game directory containing But do so at your own risk. I doubt that it will work.

I'm going to second Capn Mal's recommendation to run with BootCamp instead of Parallels.

Moved from the Shipwright Discussion forum, which is about creating new 3D models for ships as distinct from speccing out ships in the game itself.