WC4 Remastered ?

[Maze59077]

Hello dear wingmen. I just wanted to ask the remaster team about the current status. The demo is very promising. And the complete game
would be the best Wing Commander of all time - if it's finished.
any new Infos for idiots like me ? I can well imagine how time-consuming and complex that must be.
please do not be angry about the question

Greetings from Germany

 

[Pedro]

Hello dear wingmen. I just wanted to ask the remaster team about the current status. The demo is very promising. And the complete game
would be the best Wing Commander of all time - if it's finished.
any new Infos for idiots like me ? I can well imagine how time-consuming and complex that must be.
please do not be angry about the question

Greetings from Germany

I meant to do a post about this but ODVS has been really busy which is a blocker on a lot of 2D artwork etc. Also now that the missions are getting so easy to support 3D artwork has become our bottleneck and so Defiances time is precious.

But there’s still loads for me to do, especially on Terrain, and I know it’s not the news anyone wants to hear but I’ve had some trouble finding the time and motivation lately; the day job is working towards release and so I’m doing longer hours and after family time I don’t really have any me time. Hopefully AllTinker will be helping out with the AI which I am super excited about.
With a bit of luck people will have a lot more time in a few months. It’s just sadly been a perfect storm of real world issues and no time over the last few months.

 

[AllTinker]

Yeah I'm chipping away at revised/expanded AI systems - I also showed off prototype TrackIR support in the thread a little while back. I think many of us are battling day-job and general life stuff at present. Progress also isn't always easy to show off, especially on the coding side of things...

 

[Vidmaster]

WC4 Remastered? I say: WC4 Remastered!

AllTinker is doing code-work here too? I was not aware. Pedro was looking for help with the AI for such a long time, it is great that someone came forward 👍 .

Progress also isn't always easy to show off, especially on the coding side of things...

Ah yes, the usual problem. And those projects which prioritze the stuff you can see over anything else, well, they end up being a mess.
Let me quote Ron Hodge, designer on Klingon Academy, at Interplay back in the day:

One symptom of Interplay's chronic mismanagement is the inability of Brain Fargo and those he placed in positions of power to recognize any progress other than the visual. Basically, unless you could show them something that visually looked finished, they didn't recognize that progress had been made. If you had a fully functional starship with working weapons, fully functioning AI, and all the other core gameplay systems implemented, but the 3D engine was using flat shaded cubes for the ships and 2D line draws for the beam weapons and flat polys for the torpedoes and showed that to them, they would’ve jumped down your throat for lack of progress even though the underlying engine jumped from pre-alpha to almost beta. Given this, Raphael made a fateful decision, a decision that in hindsight cause far more damage to the careers of the dev team, the reputation of KA as a game, and to Interplay in general than anybody would have recognized. He decided to keep the focus on the graphics, forgoing gameplay system implementation.

In my day job, I am a weird hybrid between the company's sole software architect and a middle manager, plus I have some internal consultant and stakeholder duties... ...and face similar issues.
Sometimes one just has to invest (time/money/resources) into things that are invisible, because the only alternative is the death of your product. Sometimes by a thousand cuts, sometimes by a single big axe. But if you are in an environment that tries to ignore every flesh wound until it is infected, that axe sometimes come awefully close.

I therefore say: Let the talented coders here do their thing and cheer them on whereever possible 😊.

 

[Bob McDob]

Progress also isn't always easy to show off, especially on the coding side of things...

Eh, is it? I spend a fair bit of time reading articles and looking at videos that are mostly lines of code. Maybe I'm just weird or it's because I do it for practical purposes to help with my hobby, but look at it another way: other people do, too. A lot more people are doing programming and especially game programming than they were ten years ago. Videos on the subject have become extremely popular, for one. Of course for that a certain amount of minimal presentation is needed and I wouldn't want it to take away effort from this project or Originator.

I'd also like to know more about how the terrain is going to work on a technical level. It's a subject I've been interested in myself.

 

[AllTinker]

I only said it isn't always easy.

You summed up a big part of it yourself, but also case in point, you might be interested in the terrain technicalities - something very visual - but would you be interested in hearing exactly how I'm refactoring the mux container/decoder layer in Originator (or rather its base library) to better abstract the demuxed stream packets and properly centralise synchronisation for arbitrary codec support? Or (for another project) how I went about a full review of my memory manager to ensure my contiguous block splits were optimal and weren't causing excess fragmentation or cache-thrashing on ancient CPUs? Maybe! But those are easily the least boring things I've been working on recently, and doing a write-up would take a lot of time and effort for a very niche audience...

Anyway, frustrations aside - I totally get your point, and speaking for myself I'll happily get into the technicals for things which are interesting and/or complete enough to talk about; especially if anyone asks directly... It's nice to know some folks are actually interested, which has rarely been the case over the decades of doing this for my day job.

On a related note I'm planning on doing a big write-up at some point for WCAT (probably once it hits 1.0), since it's been such an involved and quite unusual process. It's a while away, but I hope some folks will find it interesting!

 

[Bob McDob]

You summed up a big part of it yourself, but also case in point, you might be interested in the terrain technicalities - something very visual - but would you be interested in hearing exactly how I'm refactoring the mux container/decoder layer in Originator (or rather its base library) to better abstract the demuxed stream packets and properly centralise synchronisation for arbitrary codec support? Or (for another project) how I went about a full review of my memory manager to ensure my contiguous block splits were optimal and weren't causing excess fragmentation or cache-thrashing on ancient CPUs?

I am fairly certain I have sat through more obscure technical lectures. Like does this fifty-minute video about the architecture of the F-14 flight computer with 1.1 million views count as technical enough? We live in an era where there are entire game developers dedicated to making assembly language simulations and building circuitry.

Also, and coming back to the point, I think you have the wrong idea － I'm not interested in the terrain out of curiosity, but because I'm working on the same thing and want to know the best way to go about it. Everything that I've learned has been because someone else took the time to document what they were doing. Whether you can find the time is another matter (I know that recording it gets in the way of actually doing it), but somebody, somewhere will probably find it useful. And it also serves as a record of what you're doing!

 

[AllTinker]

I think you have the wrong idea － I'm not interested in the terrain out of curiosity

I never assumed anything about why you wanted to know - I'm honestly not sure what difference it makes. I even implied that maybe you are personally interested in highly obscure technical topics - or to my final point there, general programming drudgery. And as much as you try to soften the blow, I don't appreciate the guilt-tripping that I don't just "take the time" to help others, I really don't.

 

[Bob McDob]

I never assumed anything about why you wanted to know - I'm honestly not sure what difference it makes. I even implied that maybe you are personally interested in highly obscure technical topics - or to my final point there, general programming drudgery. And as much as you try to soften the blow, I don't appreciate the guilt-tripping that I don't just "take the time" to help others, I really don't.

I'm not, though? I don't think you or anyone have the the obligation to document their work because it takes time away from actually doing the work in the first place and I'd much rather that work be done. I can think of a number of projects that have suffered because of that. And doing it properly is a horribly painstaking and time-consuming process equivalent to a full-time job. But if it were somehow possible to do that, if there was some way to record the process of making things: that'd be great. I guess that already exists to an extent with Github and similar things? I've certainly learned as much or more from that than from any formal presentations, which maybe undermines my point about it being necessary in the first place.

I don't think it's necessary (and I'm not asking you, or anyone else) to painstakingly document what work is being done. My worry is that people with technical knowledge believe that other people aren't interested in what they do, which I don't think is true, or at least is less true now than it was several years ago. I feel (maybe wrongly) that there's a tendency towards insularity and I wish that there was more conversation, both for the benefit of other people and because it might generate other ideas.