Ripped off: nah

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Mirage

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I think you wered ripped off...

I just saw the news that you got honorable mention but not runner up for Fan Project of the Year. I am sorry to hear that. I am currently playing your remake, and am enjoying it greatly. I find it hard to justify giving runner up to a project that isn't even released yet. All we've seen is a trailer, and that was admittedly overdue.

At any rate I wanted you to know that I appreciate the work and talent displayed in Privateer the Remake, I think it's great.
 
I'm really happy you enjoyed it...
that's really what counts.

But all the CIC did was probably tally up the votes...and compared to the other (as of yet unreleased) project... Privateer Remake is the new kid on the block-- people haven't even heard of it much less tried it.
It's just an artifact of the breakneck speed of open source development--the game is finished before people know it's there...
kinda like a stealth attack ;-)
We can always hope for the 2005 fan project of the year


But most importantly keep playin it and testin' it and findin any problems with it...
and let us know before 1.0

and when 1.0 comes out...play that one even more ;-)
 
Yeah, Saga and Standoff both got a good deal more votes than the Priv Remake. Priv got an honorable mention because it got quite a few more votes than the other nominees, but Saga was the clear runner up.
 
People probably appreciate the huge amount of difficulty the Standoff team has faced just to keep true to Wing Commander -- making your own game or modding a popular game are good for the community, but doing what they did to the Vision engine is above and beyond any of that.
 
Doing it open source is actually the most valuable to the community.
But don't take that to mean that hacking the vision engine isn't damn cool...it is...

but having a flight sim engine be open source under the GPL license does orders of magnitude more for the software development community. Being able to fix bugs (i.e. windows 2000 random crashes) and harder yet make it work natively on linux and mac is something that can never be done with the vision engine without rewriting it or stealing the source from somewhere. Making Vision engine 64 bit compatible will just never happen...

And finally you can never just place the vision engine under the GPL....if only for the simple physical reason that we don't even have the source....

but writing an engine from scratch that can do everything including all of what a previous engine could do is actually quite special.

Luckily both projects are great and have substantially different goals...but don't underestimate Open Source and simply "discount" it as making your own game...it's not my game nor anyone's...it's a gift to the community under the GPL... People can take it right from the Vega Strike site and sell it, modify it, and make sure it works on all future architectures from the IBM Cell processor to the Xbox2.
 
Eh, that's great for the world and all, but it isn't overly special for Wing Commander -- Standoff worked extra hard specifically to maintain the connection to the look and feel of the classic games.

I don't think anyone is voting for Standoff because they think it represents some kind of amazing world changing ideal... but as devotion to Wing Commander fandom goes, their team is second to none.
 
Standoff team got their game out of the Vision engine... simply amazing
Saga team got their game out of the Freespace 2 engine... simply amazing
Privateer remake team got their game out of the Vega Strike engine... amazing too but not as much so.

The Vega Strike engine was really made for things like this. The first two engines were not. Flight Commander and Vega Strike are both very mod friendly. The vision engine and the Freespace 2 engine are not.

Of course now the Freespace 2 engine is opensourced, but we're still seeing an original Wing Commander fan production out of it. Privateer remake is... a remake of Privateer. It was fun for retro appeal but I don't find myself returning to it. I find the Vega Strike engine pretty overly bloated and unnecessarily thorough anyway but I digress.
 
Let me assure you...writing Vega Strike was not trivial...it has over 100,000 lines of source code, about 80,000 of which were written on my old (and now deceased) microsoft keyboard.

What's bloated about my engine... please be more specific so we can fix it here...
is the framerate bad? for if it's bad it's more likely to do with model complexity and artwork

*sigh* Kids these days...they assume if it's handed to them on a silver platter it was easy to make...

And Freespace is not open source... it just has available source code under a very restrictive license that does not even allow you to sell mods made with it. I might add it has a license so restrictive that if any vega strike developers look at the code they could get "tainted" and be unable to develop open source space sim software any more.
 
Privateer remake is like... taking an old muscle car, dropping a new engine in it and giving it a new coat of paint. Sure it looks better than it did before and has more potential than it did before, but for the most part it's the same car.

As far as Vega Strike goes, your average gamer does not enjoy having to fiddle with so many graphics and audio settings just to get the game to work. You'll find that in most commercial games, less is more, and a lot of games nowadays have the advanced options pretty much hidden from the user unless one goes looking for them. And a number of games also scan the system and choose a set of optimal settings based on that...

The first time I played Vega Strike, I was rather overwhelmed with the amount of options thrown to me at the very beginning. I didn't want to try to guess as to what would work best on my system... I just wanted to see this engine that a lot of people were talking about.

Anyway I don't see anyone calling Vega Strike trivial. If anything, it's a little bit *too* good. As much as I support open source (running Slackware on 5 personal computers and actively spreading projects such as Firefox and Thunderbird), I don't think the majority of people like to be initially overwhelmed.
 
Making a mod for vegastrike such as privateer not only exposes bugs in the orignal vegastrike and thus improves it, it also adds new features to the engine. This means that vegastrike can be used in the future for zillions of games.

Yeah, vegastrikre is way complicated. But not that much. Ever try Battle Cruiser 3000?! The more features vegastrike has, the better it can be modded.

I'm just amazed that there is this great game that works flawlessly on linux. Kudos to the developers!
 
I'm curious...
Where may I find the work of the Standoff Team? And the work of the Saga Team?
::eek:
Sun-tzu said: "Know yourself and know your enemy: thus you'll always win."
(Or something like that!)
 
i wouldn't call vegastrike complicated in respect to options.

of course you can go underneath and tweak it.

ever tweaked quake? there are a book's worth of commands you can adjust.

but you only really need to deal with the basic options if you're not interested in details.

similarly, in vegastrike (priv remake), the setup gives you a few basic options.

resolution, windowed, 16/32 bit, font type, render mode, a few more. basically the same setup that any other game has in the basic options.

and the defaults are good to go for anyone. so you don't even have to run setup at all. you can just go and play from the get go.

-scheherazade
 
I have to agree with scheherazade.

It was only that I had non standard, and really off the wall stuff that forced me to tinker with the config files in the first place.

As for standard and advanced user options, I've played a few of the more popular RPGs out there -- most notably being Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind III The Elder Scrolls -- and I have to say that, while the verbiage could have been tweaked in the pull down menus, the manual describes them well AND creatively. AND the options are actually LESS involved and less complex than those two games, while the graphics are certainly much more breath-taking. The advanced options have to be done in a text editor and you have to have an inkling about what you're doing. That IS a rather daunting task if you are unfamilliar with the process. I'll grant you that.

More involved? Complex? I don't think so. I think it's rather straight forward. Coudos to the developers on that. If you have a more common video and audio set-up there's no reason it won't run fine "out of the box," as it were.

And as for putting down a remake of a game that's already out there, it IS a fan project and naver made any bones about that. Isn't that what a fan project is? A remake? Or are you disappointed because it didn't take the game in a new direction as much fan fiction does?

The game bills itself as a fan remake of the old. Nothing more. It was a rather successful attempt to bring a rather nice game to new users and old. It IS a complete overhaul, bringing an old DOS game into the modern world of computing. It IS bringing a game that was enjoyed by many to quite a few new players and a host of old enthusiasts. What's wrong with that? It isn't all new from the ground up? It's following the old plot? Isn't that what a remake is all about? Bringing YOUR vision of the project into a new age while essentially keeping things the same with a few new twists of your own?

It IS trying -- RATHER SUCCESSFULLY -- to cross platforms usning a language other than someting that is doze reliant.

It sounds odd to hear it condemned for trying to be like the old game. I fear I don't understand why you find it so distasteful, though I'd like to understand. Feel free to e-mail me, wendy atsign kimem dot net and I would be happy to discuss it so that I can better understand what it is you dislike so much about any remake, though this one in particular, as I like it so very much. I'm really curious. I don't want a flame war, I wish for understanding.
 
Nobody said that Privateer Remake was distasteful. The only flame wars that could start would be the result of people putting words in other people's mouths.

One of the loudest complaints in the console market today is the constant rehashing of games that were already released in years past. SNES games rereleased on GBA, NES games redone and rereleased on GBA, Dreamcast games rereleased on Gamecube, Xbox and PS2. It doesn't make the games any less fun, it just really doesn't give the gamer anything new that they've never done before. You won't see much complaining about the games themselves (obviously they were good enough to warrant rereleases).

Personally I play Privateer cross-platform using dosbox, and that is the solution I would give people who already have the original Privateer CD.

Privateer Remake *isn't* a bad game, but in the face of Standoff and Saga, who are actually trying hard to contribute to the fandom of the Wing Commander universe, the community at large didn't feel it to be the best Wing Commander fan project of 2004.

You can be offended, surprised, toot your own horn, or whatever, but that isn't going to make me come back to this game more than I have already. Obviously there are a number of people who like to play Privateer Remake. Hooray, keep playing it. Privateer is a fun game and if one doesn't have the original game or is interested in seeing what the Vega Strike engine is capable of, then this is a good project for that. However, as one who has the original Privateer and is rather quite negatively fond of Vega Strike, I won't play it too much.

My statements are personal opinions.
 
Nomad Terror said:
One of the loudest complaints in the console market today is the constant rehashing of games that were already released in years past. SNES games rereleased on GBA, NES games redone and rereleased on GBA, Dreamcast games rereleased on Gamecube, Xbox and PS2. It doesn't make the games any less fun, it just really doesn't give the gamer anything new that they've never done before. You won't see much complaining about the games themselves (obviously they were good enough to warrant rereleases).

My statements are personal opinions.
Click to expand...

If "rehashed" games weren't selling initially, Nintendo wouldn't be rushing them out for their nextgen handheld systems. Frankly, I'd rather play almost any 8-bit game over the crap thats come out in the last 3 years (Exceptions exist, of course)

(And don't state something in a "factual" tone and then add a disclaimer saying that claim was a personal opinion. It just makes you look silly.)
 
Mirage said:
I just saw the news that you got honorable mention but not runner up for Fan Project of the Year. I am sorry to hear that. I am currently playing your remake, and am enjoying it greatly. I find it hard to justify giving runner up to a project that isn't even released yet. All we've seen is a trailer, and that was admittedly overdue.

At any rate I wanted you to know that I appreciate the work and talent displayed in Privateer the Remake, I think it's great.
Click to expand...

That's democracy, get used to it.

I had the impression that the Priv Remake didn't really knew what to make out of the contest. Us and Standoff were churning out screenshots like crazy and doing all sorts of PR stunts while the Priv Team didn't, with the proper effort things could've gone different.

Originally posted by Ilricca

I'm curious...
Where may I find the work of the Standoff Team? And the work of the Saga Team?
::eek:
Sun-tzu said: "Know yourself and know your enemy: thus you'll always win."
(Or something like that!)
Click to expand...

I don't see any of the other mod teams as the enemy, and neither should you. Sure, there's a competition between all of our projects, but we all try to add something to the community. For example we work togehter with the Standoff team in some aspects and therefore achieved things that weren't really possible otherwise, and we contributed to Standoff too. So think before you type. It's neither hard nor painful I assure you.

Originally posted by Nomad Terror

The Vega Strike engine was really made for things like this. The first two engines were not. Flight Commander and Vega Strike are both very mod friendly. The vision engine and the Freespace 2 engine are not.
Click to expand...

Correction. The FS2 engine is very easily modable, that's one of the reasons why we chose it. with the source modifications it's already very close to WC(we have autopilot, a WC style HUD nears completition, various improvements that aren't visible on screenshots). From the screenshots you might think that the improvments are only visually, but the list of gameplay and technical improvements is far longer.
By the time the Main Campaign gets released we might very well have WCSaga as a complete Wing Commander, featurewise.

Originally posted by HellcatV

Let me assure you...writing Vega Strike was not trivial...it has over 100,000 lines of source code, about 80,000 of which were written on my old (and now deceased) microsoft keyboard.

What's bloated about my engine... please be more specific so we can fix it here...
is the framerate bad? for if it's bad it's more likely to do with model complexity and artwork
Click to expand...

It can't be as bad as the FS2 code. Even daveb, a FS2 developer assured the SCP coders that the original FS coding work is a mess. :p
 
And as for putting down a remake of a game that's already out there, it IS a fan project and naver made any bones about that. Isn't that what a fan project is? A remake? Or are you disappointed because it didn't take the game in a new direction as much fan fiction does?
Click to expand...

Banned for trolling. No one is saying anything remotely like this.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Banned for trolling. No one is saying anything remotely like this.
Click to expand...

Banned for trolling?
I was seeking understanding.

Thanks for telling me. I'll leave, with my head up.
Sorry I irritated you.

Wendy
 
You were trying to make a perfectly reasonable discussion into some kind of offense aimed at your project. That's pretty much as far from trying to understand something as possible.

Posting as unregistered while banned is also against the rules.
 
I think you're way off base for banning Wendy, LOAF. He wasn't trolling at all. We all know you don't think much of the Privateer remake project, you've made that pretty clear.
 
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