The Guide...

Dundradal

Dundradal

Frog Blast the Vent Core!
The Standoff Team has come to a proposal for releasing the Standoff player's guide.

What's going to happen in the coming days is that a special area will be created on WCPedia (so I'm actually splitting it into an third section...after just announcing the other two!)

Under the Fan Content area will be created a Standoff guide section. I'm going to start adding stuff in over the next week or so. What I add will be the rough and raw data, so a lot will be wrong, misleading, or outright foolishly wrong. What we want is for wingnuts to continue the torch and finish the guide in this online community form. I'll create the overall layout and users will just need to work on the mission article text.

What we need though is a group of volunteers committed to the project. If you want to help, let me know! I'm going to start the basic stuff today, probably test a few things concerning the layout and then look for some people to help out with adding all the text (it's something like 90 pages I think).

So those who have been asking for the guide for the last 3 or 4 years...the day is at hand!
 
Like I said last night, I'll join in, since I'm building up a supply of maps, comments and video run-throughs anyway they may as well be used for a Guide. My data will have the twin flaws of being tested mostly on Nightmare and only covering the winning path except in Ep5 though. I also should have time to help with text addition given that I'm currently unemployed.
 
If you want I will be on #wingnut this evening working on setting this up. I've got on errand to do for about an hour, but otherwise I'm going to try and get as much of this layout in as possible.

I can help show you the ropes of the wiki and my idea for each Mission's page.
 
I'd love to help out, and am happy to share anything I've already created thus far that would be useful (namely, the mission tree and branching guide that I put together from Dundradal's notes, my own experience, and lot's of bugging of Quarto), and also the general tactical advice I wrote a number of years back that Dundradal asked to steal for the guide.

The problem is, I have a new baby at home, a wife with limited patience for me "wasting" time doing anything video-game related, and a job that's kind of keeping me busy right now, so any help I can give in the next few months is likely to be limited at best...
 
All Standoff missions are listed on that page now. Please make sure the names I have listed are correct guys. For those who want to help enter the rough data I have please PM me and I will email you the rough draft. Serious inquiries only. :D

Farbourne whatever you can contribute when you can is fine by me. If possible it would be great to get a updated and corrected mission tree. PM me your email address and I'll send you the guide.
 
The mission names look all right. I don't think there's a 'winning path' version of the Carrier Charge mission at the end of Episode 2, though.

For the losing path of Episode 3 Sirius, there's mission parallel to the winning path's Marching to Sirius called Charging to Sirius.

Finally, for Episode 5 Losing Path, not sure if Too Much Company is another name for Fresh Company or if it's another mission entirely.
 
Made some corrections. Still need to go through the mission tree threads here to confirm the other ones.

Hopefully Quarto can take a quick peak as well.
 
A question - currently the Losing and Winning path missions are numbered consecutively from the start of Episode 3 and don't restart with each episode. It seems strange to me to refer to Clearing the Path as Episode 4 - Winning Mission 5, given that it's the first mission of Ep4 Winning (though the fifth winning mission overall). Should they be renumbered starting with each episode?
 
No, because the mission numbers are based on the system we used internally for Standoff. Missions are not thought of in terms of what episode they come in, but instead where they are on the Winning/Losing paths.
 
So, i came back to Standoff after hearing that awesome news that Chris Roberts would like to make a new WC game. Since last time i got myself a Projector, so the cockpit is actually larger than life now! Very awesome!!! Sadly since i also upgraded to an ATI 5850 i am missing the HDR/Bloom, but i have a feeling that will work with the next patch, as it works now in WCP/SO with the new patch. Still, it looks and plays very good! I tried out nearly all there is to get my Spacefighting fix, Standoff still nails it best, kudos to you!

But why i am posting here: I encountered a crash at Episode 3 Winning Mission 2 (that Snakir) when ejecting and while trying to reproduce it (wich i could not) i always get picked up by the cats and get a fate worse than death.

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Episode_3_-_Winning_Mission_2_-_Lashing_Out

The guide states i should get rescue, but that never happens for me, regardles of when and where i eject. Is now the guide wrong, or did i found another bug?

And to compliment you again: When you get to the Snakir and those Cats fly at you out of the sun, man, thats a very awesome sight on my wall! Standoff really works great on the big screen!
 
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The guide is full of errors so it's highly likely it's there. Be wary in trusting too much of the text. A lot of it is filler because I was planning on going back and correcting it, but never got to it.

Some of the guide conditions are based off of old mission outlines, so it's likely that the conditions changed in the actual game. Or it could be a bug...probably check the source code to figure out for sure...but I never fully learned how to read that stuff, so maybe Quarto could take a peek...
 
Yeah, if an error jumps out at me when I'm transcribing I correct it (for example, Trigger was frequently listed as a wingman in Episode 1, which I understand was originally the case but isn't any more), but if it doesn't strike me as wrong it makes it through to the next step. Right now the goal is to get the Guide as it is up, then work on correcting it can begin. Speaking of which...
 
How goes the effort?

Ilanin, are you going to embed your videos to the guide pages? Encountered any issues with the wiki or anything?

Does anybody else want a copy of the rough guide to help in the efforts?
 
I've been distracted by real-life issues recently which has slowed the pace of uploading the Guide down. I'm happy to embed my videos, though some of them do slightly silly things to make more entertaining videos so in those cases I might not (in Destroyer Rescue, for example, I hare around at full afterburner killing bombers rather than sensibly intercepting torpedoes). I've also got a large number of tactical map screenshots which I'm intending to upload with commentary and annotation when I get around to making my revisions to the Guide.

The rough guide only goes up to the end of Episode 4 (therefore, there's only 13 pages of Guide left to go), so Episode 5 will have to be written from scratch; I'll be doing videos for all those missions though so I'll have the raw data to do them. Eventually; they'll probably appear at the rate of one every three days, that being about how often I have time to do new videos.
 
It might also be a good idea to search this forum for specific mission threads and the like looking for tips and insider information from someone on the team about the mission's code and design. I know there are quite a few and it would make good text to add onto each mission page.

Nice work overall. I'm glad to see the guide will finally see the light of day and in a form much better than I could have ever done myself. :)
 
You should be able to embed videos already.

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Category:Wing_Commander_Movie

That page has the video embed code in it. Are you trying to embed youtubes or direct files? To be honest we'd rather host the direct files with higher resolution than youtubes.

Looks pretty good so far. I'm glad to see someone taking up this mantle and bringing it forward. The guide deserved better than to rot on my desktop.
 
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I'd be happy to upload my original files rather than using the youtube ones (I record at 1152x864 and encode to h.264/AAAC in an mp4 container), but when I click the "upload files" link on the wiki I'm limited to 12Mb which is about an order of magnitude too small for my videos. Is there something different I should be doing there?
 
Yeah you'll have to talk to Kris about uploading them to the CIC directly. Try logging onto IRC or send an email to staff@wcnews.com explaining what you are trying to do and Kris can set up a space for you to do so most likely.

You can try dropping by IRC and see if he's online. Just /msg him about it.
 
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