Prologue Released!

@Tolwyn and Starman:

About the cutscenes freezing in the last second, would I need to update the drivers on the graphics card? I forgot to mention earlier that I have a Geforce 6 Go graphics card and I don't think its been updated in quite a while. Or is it just a question of RAM?

Pls try to update, it can never hurt. Unfortnately we haven't been able to reproduce this problem yet. Though I really fear it's a matter of RAM. Your CPU is quite fast, and having so less RAM is a little bad combination.

I remember when Freespace 2 came out, it runned slow on my machine which had only 256 MB to that time. Upgrading to 512 was a difference like between day and night.
 
:confused:
Tolwyn, how long did it take to make the three jaw-droppingly awesome cutscenes (especially the second and third ones), not counting voice acting? Just curious.

Difficult to say: outro was made within a couple of days (not counting music, voice acting and post production), intro took a couple of weeks (2-3 months). It really depends how much time you are willing to spent per day on a particular scene.
 
Difficult to say: outro was made within a couple of days (not counting music, voice acting and post production), intro took a couple of weeks (2-3 months). It really depends how much time you are willing to spent per day on a particular scene.

Thanks for the info. I did think making these cutscenes had to be 'slightly' time-consuming :p. The into cutscene reminded me a lot of Wing Commander 3, except that the graphics were even more beautiful.
 
Mostly it depends on how much time is availble. By the time the Outro was done I had a lot of time...during the intro nearly none so it has taken much longer.
That is the case with most of our stuff ^_^

At this point I just want to say that I am very happy that all of you seams to like what we have done. Its good to see that all this time wasn't for nothing and I hope that you will enjoy the next release as much as the Prologue.
 
Outstanding

Amazing. What you've done to the already excellent engine of Freespace2 is simply impressive!

I'm looking foward for the complete game.
Thanks
 
@Tolwyn: Thanks :) True to form, shortly after ranting, I reentered the mission and slowed it down (mentally). I recalled, from WC2, that you should gain early lock and then ram the torpedo in from relatively close range. I gained lock at like 2300, and then AB'd in to around 800 and let her fly at the engine subsystem. It worked and I had lots of AB fuel and no damage!

As for the graphics issues, don't sweat it..after turning down the options, the asteroids actually appeared and the game speed was fine.

I'm actually running this on a bit of an anachronistic hunk of parts (2.4ghz P4 with the *wait for it* SiS651 integrated chipset for video, 1GB of PC2100 ram)...

I can now see how pathetic my hardware is... when Mission 4 ends and you can see the interesting details on the flightdeck... several of the animated "things" showed up as pulsating rectangular solids L-O-L! I'm guessing they were fires!

That last mission just kicked my butt at bedtime last night! I was at 19% hull strength with no AB fuel left...and then we come face to face with....a whole LOT of bad guys. First pass a darket nailed me with a missile (I even managed to "evade" the missile, but without AB, the blast got me). I'll try again!
 
Got around to flying the Arrow gauntlet using a ps2 controller. I'm very impressed with the game thusfar. My fiance commented on the quasi-professionalism of the cutscenes. Great work so far

@LeHah: Don't take this the wrong way, but how's that crow taste so far?
 
I have seen something like that before from someone here on the HLP forums though. No matter what they did, installing/uninstalling, making sure the old 1.0 dlls were gone, etc., would get it working for them. The only suggestion I had left was to recommend that they copy the openal32.dll and wrap_oal.dll files from their system32 directory directly into the game directory. And that worked. That is probably the next fix I can offer, but it should always be considered a last resort.

That proceedure isn't recommended in general, since you miss out on better OpenAL drivers which sound card makers can put out (particularly Creative, they have full hardware acceleration for their popular cards). But, it's something particular to some systems, and I don't really know what that is.
But the problem is that I can't find them in my system32 directory. I'll try looking again though.
 
:confused:

You can't be that bad a pilot if you designed UE and Standoff. ;)

Designing a game (or, more accurately, helping modify a game designed and created by someone else; the core of UE and Standoff was already there, to be later modified by the teams for the respective fan mods) doesn't necessarily make one good at playing it.
 
Designing a game (or, more accurately, helping modify a game designed and created by someone else; the core of UE and Standoff was already there, to be later modified by the teams for the respective fan mods) doesn't necessarily make one good at playing it.

Well, you should be able to finish your own missions unless you want to be a terrible designer.

For example, UE was *hard*, and you are not making me believe that Quarto never finished his own missions. ;)
EDIT : And thus, anybody who can finish UE/Standoff isn't that bad a pilot. I agree that designing UE and Standoff doesn't make him a Sternenwind, but he can't be that bad a pilot.
 
WOOOOAAAHHH!!!!

That was AWESOME!!!! Very enjoyable missions and the feel of it was so new...keeping your eye out for your wingleader, the banter, the way the missions worked. I mean it felt like I was a rookie pilot...loved the way the autopilot worked.

I do have a question about that, though, is the autopilot susposed to be considered taking a long time and this is just compressed or is the autopilot susposed to be ramscoops closed and you are moving really fast? I would think it would be the former, but I am just curious.

The story was great and interesting getting to see a facet not seen (that of a new rookie who has even finished training yet).

umm....I am curious, how do you get a debriefing if both cruisers (or one cruiser) dies?

Oh and I LOVE THE MUSIC THEME!! :D

Again, amazing job and can't wait for the next one.
 
banter is one thing, but is there any reason that I have to sit through 10 minutes of it just to kill a few pirates in the second tutorial... I get so bored on the escort mission that I keep failing for not flying in formation... even after the pirates show up on radar!
 
Hey guys, I just thought of something that could really help streamline the game.

As I see it, the autopilot is nice, but kind of gets old after awhile (especially when multiple attempts are needed to beat the mission). I imagine that in the full release AP would get downright boring pretty quickly. I also couldn't help but think that some of the comm chatter seemed a little bit... out of place... almost as if it was somewhat awkwardly stopping the action.

Now, what if you moved a bunch of the com chatter into the time flying between navpoints? The way I see it, that would kill two birds with one stone, and would also make sense. I think that pilots would mainly chat during the long, dreary parts of the missions anyway.
 
Wow. Looks awesome. :)

I'm having a little problem in mission 2, however. When Baws tells me to form on his wing, I seem to lose the mission no matter what I do. Am I an idiot? Is there a special button to keep formation with my wingleader? Did I miss something?

Though my lousy antique computer won't let me join in the fun by actually playing the game, I do seem to remember him explaining how to match speed with his fighter as I was banging my head into the keyboard in desperate frustration.
 
Congrats to Saga for the great work.

So, on to the good and the bad:

Good:

Great engine and models all around.
Tough fights and lots of patience to learn.
Kilrathi and pirates kick my ass during missions.
I hate flying... that means I'm going to waste several hours learning to fly according to Saga's rules to get it right - I did it with the other mods and WC games so it's not new but a nostalgic feeling.

Bad:

Dialog feels robotic and forced.
Chatter doesn't make sense in some scenes.
Autopilot gets tedious after a while. I do miss watching the ship flyby, but lets see what Saga can do.

Overall this kicks ass and I'm very pleased with the end product (we've seen nothing yet till the main campaign I believe).
 
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