Relive Wing Commander Saga In Six EPIC Screenshots (April 1, 2014)

April Fool's joke aside, this seems like a discussion worth having...

Pardon my bluntness, but all WC graphics engines suck big time visually, compared to modern engines, and the tools to work with them and script things suck even more.
The FSO engine was the graphically best and most accessible space game engine at that time, so it was used. There is a good reason nobody outside the WC community uses any WC engine. You have to be a WC-religious zealot to use them. And it is the same zealots that say a game cannot be WC-ish if it doesn't use a WC engine. I don't mind if someone thinks like that, but they have to accept that most people don't think like that, and still can be WC fans and enjoy the game.
Well, I'm more than happy to agree that any WC engine is outdated - as is to be expected after a decade and a half. And I'm also more than happy to agree that the FS2 engine is minimally less outdated, and has become even less outdated through the source code project. The only caveat that I would point out is that if the age of the engine was the only consideration, then both of these would have been left by the wayside a decade ago: immediately after the release of StarLancer, to be precise, long before the FS2 source code was even released.

The catch, however, is that even with the source code available for FS2 and a full decade of development, nobody has produced anything truly Wing Commander-like on the FS2 engine. That's always been one of the big criticisms of Saga, right? Ultimately, its combat just doesn't feel like Wing Commander - and not for the lack of trying on their part. I mean, they really turned the game inside out in many ways, but still failed. Now, in theory, there's nothing stopping someone from taking the FS2 engine and reproducing the exact gameplay of any particular WC game, whether it be WC3, WCP, or even Privateer. But Saga's example demonstrates that it really is a very, very tough thing to do. Wing Commander games have always had a specific feel to them, and by the time WCP came along, this feel was the outcome of eight years of steady refinements on a particular concept. This was similarly the case for the Star Wars games - again, by the time Alliance came along, you had years of building on top of a specific "anti-Wing Commander" concept. And it was equally the case for the Freespace series, which, being the youngest of the three, was designed specifically to be different to both of the others - with great success, I might add. Play any of the final games of these series for three minutes - Secret Ops, FS2, Alliance - and you'll have no trouble recognising which one it is you're playing, not based on the graphics you see, but on the feel of the gameplay.

So, when Saga set out to turn Freespace 2 into Wing Commander - and remember, their initial effort was more like a total conversion, with no significant engine alternations initially - they had their work cut out for them. In many ways, it's impressive they got it as close to WC as they did, even if I don't feel it was very close at all.

The point I'm getting at is that even if the engine to Wing Commander Prophecy was also available in source code form, and people were enhancing the daylight out of it, whether somebody would choose to use the engine or not would (or should) still depend on the experience they're trying to produce. I'm not at all surprised that people aren't using the WC engine for anything, because I don't see anyone out there really trying to do Wing Commander. You can be certain that if I were making any old space sim right now, I certainly would not choose the WC engine either. But, at the same time, if I were to produce another WC mod - well, here we are, sixteen years since Secret Ops, the engine has aged like crazy, and you know what? It's still my first choice. Not because I'm familiar with it (using an engine is just like riding a bicycle... that is to say, no matter what people tell you, you actually do forget :) ), but because it's still got that Wing Commander feel that nothing else out there has. Why would I want to waste my time turning FS2 into WC, when Saga has shown us all how challenging that really is?
 
Well, I guess it is obvious that I disagree with you concerning the feel of gameplay. For me one reason to join the Saga team (in, dunno, 2005 or so?) was that for me their early version felt so WC3ish, and not like FS2, even back then. And it only got better when it was tweaked a bit.
Some people say that the WC3 flight model feels strange when you are used to WC1 and WC2 (and it does), so I guess it is still a matter of personal taste. WCS mimics WC3s gameplay quite well I think (of course not everybody agrees with me). Tolwyn's decision to use some features the FS2 engine offered but WC3 didn't have in that form (explosion shockwaves for example) feels right to me, because if you have a cool feature, why not use it?
For me that's a problem many fan projects in many communities have. They limit themselves too much to the style, technology, and look and feel of the original. One of the reasons why I like Klavs' and Howard Day's space ship renders or NinjaLA's drawings is that they go beyond what the people behind the original WC styles could do (or wanted to do).
Now that I think about it (and yeah, I know I'm going to skate on thin ice now) I think it is much like with religion: You are more orthodox than I am, and Standoff is more orthodox than Saga, and so there are things I find appealing for the same reasons why you find them appalling and vice versa. (I waited ages to finally use those two words in the same sentence, so yay for this thread! :D )
 
Eh, it sort of plays like WC3, but not quite. Saga Medium plays reasonably like WC3 Nightmare, in that it's essentially impossible to tail anything lighter than a Vaktoth and pretty difficult to hit anything other than a Paktahn, which is probably not the line-up of difficulties you were aiming for. There's some distinct differences, all of which make Saga far harder than WC3 (I am, of course, more used to WC3, especially after Let's Playing it, but if your contention was accurate that wouldn't matter):

Afterburner shake - You can't use quick tap burners in Saga the way I do in literally every other Wing Commander game because if you do your gun platform is so unstable you have no chance of hitting anything.
AI Afterburner usage - On WC3 Ace, the only AI that's allowed heavy use of burners are Vaktoths and Aces. Saga Medium AI uses burners extensively.
Turret accuracy - Actually this one's interesting. In Saga all turret gunners are crackshots; that's only true of the Thunderbolt and Paktahn gunners in WC3. This actually makes the Sorthak a challenging opponent which it kind of isn't in WC3, but it also makes Vaktoths far more dangerous than they are supposed to be (especially since the WC3 Vaktoth turret has a blind spot that Saga didn't replicate).
Difficulty Scale - I'm not quite sure about this one, but my impressions are that FS2/FSOpen primarily scales difficulty by giving penalties/bonuses to the player, whereas WC3 scales difficulty by boosting opposition AI, burner fuel, missiles etc (and on Nightmare by blatant cheating such as IR missiles suddenly becoming all-aspect). However it's done, the actual effects of difficulty settings seem very different in Saga.

Of course, the biggest thing that makes Saga not-WC3 (and also gridingly tedious unless you play on Easy which removes the need to repeat most missions) is telling the story during the missions, though I appreciate how you didn't have the budget for the FMV....
 
Of course, the biggest thing that makes Saga not-WC3 (and also gridingly tedious unless you play on Easy which removes the need to repeat most missions) is telling the story during the missions, though I appreciate how you didn't have the budget for the FMV....

I was always pretty impressed that Saga did a brief live action trailer at one point. While the CGI green screen might have been the most technically advanced and immersive part, the most impressive thing to me was that someone had a pair of uniforms made! Speaking from experience, I know it's a bear to get custom patches and find someone to bring it all together well. And after looking it up, I'm pretty shocked it was done in 2005: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2005/10/06/wc-saga-unveils-new-website-and-trailer As development continued on for a number of years, technology improved and access to materials increased on the internet, I expected a follow-up or someone else to do something similar at some point. I'm still surprised that hasn't materialized yet.
 
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It's just a ****load of work. I guess that's the main reason nobody has done something like that again.
Also live action means you have to actually bring the actors together, so lots of organization required (well, maybe with even more work you could film each actor individually and then stitch it together or something...)
CGI and video editing is also a lot of work, but compared to the live filming it is much less of a problem.
I also remember being completely blown away by that trailer.
 
Aginor did manage to put his finger dead set on the biggest problem facing fan projects: Lack of high-quality editing tools.

I begged the vegastrike programming team for at least 6 years for a decent mission editor/star system editor. They never made it (always too obsessed with engine features and adding more options), I even tried to write tools myself and taught myself programming in opengl and C but the task was too difficult for me and I gave up and stopped working on the project because of it. Not everyone is a programmer and wants to write scripts to create missions. Freespace 2 still has the best space level editor in existence. Something which Star Citizen will hopefully surpass. Better tools = more content created = more fan projects. The work HCL and Co have done to reverse engineer the WC games is amazing, but without usable tools to edit levels and missions. Noone is going to create more content.

It's a huge problem and I think it's the number 1 problem affecting open source games. The saddest thing is, there was a 3d WC: Prophecy level editor floating around at one point, I remember seeing screenshots of it. But I think they stopped making it. Sad, because I would have looked more seriously at using WCP to make a game had it been available. I'd like to see an engine made with Wing Commander in mind, with a level editor that treats each star system as a level. Allows you to set the nav points, jump points etc, or designate a jump point as a nav point, and load jump points from a universe/system definition file. And has a nice graphical scripting system like Freespace 2. A mission should be able to refer to multiple star systems. So you can have a player takeoff, do a sweep, jump, sweep more navs, jump, land on carrier. It is possible to make a tool that does this so a level designer never has to write code. I am tempted to write a mission editor that does this. The only issue will be it will spit out a text file that contains all the mission information, and it will be upto someone else to implement an engine that can make it into the game.
 
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