WC Uprez Unity3d Doodle! (Heavy GIF Use, Mobile Users Beware!)

FekLeyrTarg: Well, the Music is good! the SFX are terrible. Sounds like they just stuck some WC3 gun sounds in there. Blech. You know the ones - "Generic laser cannon #47" off the Hollywood SFX CD. I'd probably redo the SFX. The music is great - but I need to find some way of doing dynamic situational blending. :D should be fun!
Pedro: I'm really, honestly not worried about it. Cutscenes...I'm actually halfway to a solution already. I've pinged my buddy Ben Chandler - he's interested in doing some Characters for me. I have a few other character artists interested too - I'm shiiiiiiit at characters. I do already have a voice-controlled 2d puppet unity setup going from my WOSN days. :D I'll try and put together some cinematics to show.
 
FekLeyrTarg: Well, the Music is good! the SFX are terrible. Sounds like they just stuck some WC3 gun sounds in there. Blech. You know the ones - "Generic laser cannon #47" off the Hollywood SFX CD. I'd probably redo the SFX. The music is great - but I need to find some way of doing dynamic situational blending. :D should be fun!
Pedro: I'm really, honestly not worried about it. Cutscenes...I'm actually halfway to a solution already. I've pinged my buddy Ben Chandler - he's interested in doing some Characters for me. I have a few other character artists interested too - I'm shiiiiiiit at characters. I do already have a voice-controlled 2d puppet unity setup going from my WOSN days. :D I'll try and put together some cinematics to show.
I know ben of wadjet eye games, right? I cant wait for technobabylon 2. Also howard will friendly AI be updated at all, i dont think wc1 was as bad as wc2, but i do remember dying a lot...... From friendly fire.


Also i know you keep saying, you dont want to make a whole game, but after rebel galaxy, if you need to start a gofundme for rent. I would be glad to donate to your rent wink wink if you want to keep working on this project. Just saying lol...
 
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That's the Ben! He's a FANTASTIC artist, and a genuinely nice dude. Basically who I wanna be when I grow up. :P So. State of the AI - right now friendly and enemies are using only one single level: Novice. I've been building out 3 additional levels - Skilled, Ace, and Master. Novice level currently doesn't aim that well, has a tendency to ram targets *accidentally* on the first attack run, and will panic as soon as their rear shields are down and they're taking fire from behind. And by panic, I mean, pick a direction and hold the afterburners down!
I figure the next level, Skilled, will lead the target,, mostly, avoid firing at their own buddies, mostly (accidents happen!) Move out of the way if *YOU'RE* shooting through them, evade fire sooner (say 30% shields) in a more interesting pattern (virtually jerking the stick around) That sort of thing. Ace will be dead-eye shots, and all kinds of cagey. Masters... they'll mostly be unstoppable for a single player one-on-one..... :D I will say - Novice AI already plays much better when it comes to friendly fire - both receiving and inflicting. They already try and stay out of your way, and if you shoot them enough, they'll bail and reposition for another pass. I'm also modeling two sub-systems "Impatience" and "Bloodthirst" Impatience is high on a novice - if they cant shoot at you and you're behind them, they will randomly turn away and bail to try and get a shot. elsewhere. This happens enough, they'll hunt someone else. The same thing applies for their gun capacitors - if they're drained and the AI pilot can't get a full shot off, they get more and more frustrated until they pull out and re-charge. Every pilot has different random.range values for their tolerances and preferences when they spawn.This really helps the dogfights feel unique - every time I load it up it's different. One mission be and my wingmen got TROUNCED by 4 Dralthi. Couldn't figure out how. Turns out that 2 of them never left their wingleader, and the other 1 served as distraction. Focus fire from 3 Dralthi is NASTY. None of the AIs were picking up on it because they were too close and in combat lock with the 4th guy. You can bet I took a note of that and put it into the wingman code as a variant! A couple of the recent GIFs are that very scenario being visualized with the Terran side - I've got a Valtar and Hornet as wingmen, just overwhelming them in seconds.

After Rebel Galaxy I need something fun and mindless - Something I don't need to worry about the reception of it, or if it will make enough to put food on the table. As Travis has discussed before - the exclusivity deal we made for RGO with Epic...We'll we're going to be extremely stable for a long time. We're going to be in a similar position to the 3dRaalms Team after Duke 3d. We won't need to release a game for years if we don't want too. We're going to be just fine. :D
 
That's the Ben! He's a FANTASTIC artist, and a genuinely nice dude. Basically who I wanna be when I grow up. :p So. State of the AI - right now friendly and enemies are using only one single level: Novice. I've been building out 3 additional levels - Skilled, Ace, and Master. Novice level currently doesn't aim that well, has a tendency to ram targets *accidentally* on the first attack run, and will panic as soon as their rear shields are down and they're taking fire from behind. And by panic, I mean, pick a direction and hold the afterburners down!
I figure the next level, Skilled, will lead the target,, mostly, avoid firing at their own buddies, mostly (accidents happen!) Move out of the way if *YOU'RE* shooting through them, evade fire sooner (say 30% shields) in a more interesting pattern (virtually jerking the stick around) That sort of thing. Ace will be dead-eye shots, and all kinds of cagey. Masters... they'll mostly be unstoppable for a single player one-on-one..... :D I will say - Novice AI already plays much better when it comes to friendly fire - both receiving and inflicting. They already try and stay out of your way, and if you shoot them enough, they'll bail and reposition for another pass. I'm also modeling two sub-systems "Impatience" and "Bloodthirst" Impatience is high on a novice - if they cant shoot at you and you're behind them, they will randomly turn away and bail to try and get a shot. elsewhere. This happens enough, they'll hunt someone else. The same thing applies for their gun capacitors - if they're drained and the AI pilot can't get a full shot off, they get more and more frustrated until they pull out and re-charge. Every pilot has different random.range values for their tolerances and preferences when they spawn.This really helps the dogfights feel unique - every time I load it up it's different. One mission be and my wingmen got TROUNCED by 4 Dralthi. Couldn't figure out how. Turns out that 2 of them never left their wingleader, and the other 1 served as distraction. Focus fire from 3 Dralthi is NASTY. None of the AIs were picking up on it because they were too close and in combat lock with the 4th guy. You can bet I took a note of that and put it into the wingman code as a variant! A couple of the recent GIFs are that very scenario being visualized with the Terran side - I've got a Valtar and Hornet as wingmen, just overwhelming them in seconds.

After Rebel Galaxy I need something fun and mindless - Something I don't need to worry about the reception of it, or if it will make enough to put food on the table. As Travis has discussed before - the exclusivity deal we made for RGO with Epic...We'll we're going to be extremely stable for a long time. We're going to be in a similar position to the 3dRaalms Team after Duke 3d. We won't need to release a game for years if we don't want too. We're going to be just fine. :D
That is great, im just saying I would pay money for you to release a full on secret mission 3. Also if you ever are just bored i would love to see your interpretation of the takeoff/landing sequence from wc2. Which is my favorite of all time in any game.
 
StartDemo.png
 
great job! the only thing that read better in the original typeface was that the horizontal strokes were thinner than vertical (and therefore allowed for wider vertical gaps)

like, "e" in "Demo" reads better than "a" and "s" and other "e"s right now exactly because the gaps in it are slightly wider (bit of luck with rendering, I guess).
 
Just a thought that I had. Since you are using a still image that shows the ship from different angles. Dosn't that also mean that the 3D model you are using to generate the images can have limitless amounts of polys and the impact on the game would be none as its in the end just an image that allways has the same size.
In short 500 or 500k polys would be reduced to an 5000x5000 pixel image.

If that is right the only limit would be how much RAM the PC has to save the images for the fastes processing.
So you could calculate that RAM / Size of image = amount of ships you can display without performance impact
or RAM / Number of ships you want to have on screen = Size of the images. That way you can calc how high-res you can make the images for more crisp details or increase the number of still to get a more fluent movement.

Speaking of fluent movements. Currently you can see a bit of stuttering that is, I would guess, because you have about 30 stills per movement direction. Lets call it 30 FPS. With more stills per image, could you bring it up to, lets say 60? Have you experimented with it?

The idea is if one could manage to create very high detailed models, create the impression of haveing 60 FPS and yet have next to no hardware demands on the graphical side as the PC would just pull the images from RAM.
Kinda like haveing a StarWars or StarCitizen like battle that can be run on a 10 year old PC ^_^
 
Oh man that is so much going on at the same time in the second frame. I think I spot
- Weapons energy drain
- Speed for Set and relative working
- Shields and armor, including warning light working
- Fuel seams static but its there
- Autopliot (working during combat? ^_^ )
- Radar with blips moveing
- Arm and leg movement
- particle effects from damage + lightning
- debries from one of the friendly fighters?

Did I miss something? Seams like there is allready a lot of working stuff in this few seconds.
 
Auto pilot and Tape are both off in those - they both have little red lights like the lock warning going off next to them.but yeah! basically everything except for the Weapons Display, Damage Display, target display, Comms menu and navigation display are all done and working! ...yeah. Still work to go before this is at pairity with the basic Hornet cockpit. Then I gotta hit cockpit damage...which should be fun!
WCRemake210.gif
 
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Pretty great cockpits, Howard! That made me notice something pretty funny overall: the Wing Commander I cockpits feel a lot more modern than in III and IV, with large screens and small amounts of buttons.
 
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