WCS Cockpit ??

Maze59077

Ensign
Hi Guys .. just wanted to ask .. is there a cockpit option or a mod for the wonderful WCS ? I think it would look great ..
Is it possible to create a mod for the cockpit view


this Looks amazing but is many years old
 

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No, the feature was never finished and was dropped from the release, especially after team members started to drop out.

I do not recall the exact details since I left years before the eventual release (worked mostly on missions, including all the Multiplayer Maps) but there was a lot of friction regarding the codebase. WCS is based on an OpenSource Freespace 2 Engine (see here) and at some point the devs were implementing features left and right for total conversions like WCS before that slowed down for some reason.
I was not involved in the actual decision making there but I vaguely remember a lot of complaining from both sides. WCS eventually branched off and did its own thing but that code base then stagnated. This is why the release of WCS ran on an outdated engine-version compared to what OpenFS was on at that time.
Whole features were dropped later, like Multiplayer, which was both unstable and not-performant enough (an issue only recently tackled by the engine) and features that the WCS team was hoping to obtain never materialized. TA lot of WC3-style things were planned, including cockpits and taunting, but fell victim to those difficulties.

Kudos to the (two?) brave final members of the WCS team who pushed this thing over the finish line. Yes, the release certainly had problems and a few missions were borderline ridiculous but they managed to release a really big, totally free, fully voice-acted video game and that deserves respect.
 
No, the feature was never finished and was dropped from the release, especially after team members started to drop out.

I do not recall the exact details since I left years before the eventual release (worked mostly on missions, including all the Multiplayer Maps) but there was a lot of friction regarding the codebase. WCS is based on an OpenSource Freespace 2 Engine (see here) and at some point the devs were implementing features left and right for total conversions like WCS before that slowed down for some reason.
I was not involved in the actual decision making there but I vaguely remember a lot of complaining from both sides. WCS eventually branched off and did its own thing but that code base then stagnated. This is why the release of WCS ran on an outdated engine-version compared to what OpenFS was on at that time.
Whole features were dropped later, like Multiplayer, which was both unstable and not-performant enough (an issue only recently tackled by the engine) and features that the WCS team was hoping to obtain never materialized. TA lot of WC3-style things were planned, including cockpits and taunting, but fell victim to those difficulties.

Kudos to the (two?) brave final members of the WCS team who pushed this thing over the finish line. Yes, the release certainly had problems and a few missions were borderline ridiculous but they managed to release a really big, totally free, fully voice-acted video game and that deserves respect.
Respect definitely deserves this Ultimate Project .. and it is one of the best Wing Commander games ever .. I can well imagine that the development was not easy .. it is not really bad with the cockpit .. I just thought it was one hidden option that i didn't find
 
The good news is that WCS has been ported over to "mainstream" FreeSpace Open, even though it's still in a beta state.
So implementing working cockpits is possible now.

Regarding multiplayer:
FS2's netcode isn't the best and still needs to be overhauled so multiplayer FSO actually becomes a good experience, especially with mods.
 
Regarding multiplayer:
FS2's netcode isn't the best and still needs to be overhauled so multiplayer FSO actually becomes a good experience, especially with mods.
If the netcode is working correctly, would WCS then work as it should, or does it need to be modded on it's own again too?
 
I do not think the multiplayer missions ever shipped with the game and I have no access to the SVN. But whipping something together for a test should be doable for everybody with a little bit of FRED knowledge.

The missions designed by yours truely about half a life time ago where meant exclusively for DM and TDM so no story-based coop. Although I also had created some Gauntlets but those were pretty boring and needed more work.

Each PvP confrontation took place between a fleet/swarm of (friendly and invincible) capital vessels, with the killer-feature being the fact that the environment was not entirely static. Every minute or so, new ships arrived or a ship departed, all semi-randomized. This created interesting opportunities for evasion. All the maps I build played with some variation of this concept, we even had one with endlessly firing capships in various duels, creating crossfire zones.

I have fond memories of afterburning through the long hangar of a Blackmane-style base in an Arrow, slipping through the two or three pieces of debris I placed inside while user gevatter_lars raced behind me, achieving missile lock but no clear line of sight. It was pretty fun but super-laggy, even in 3P tests.

Looking back with way more experience, one design element that was missing was some incentive to stay inside the "interesting" part of space.
Today, I would probably add some sort of death timer that you could reset by being within 1000m of the map center (jump node?), a variation of what games like FlatOut2 or this one were doing. Experiments would be needed to determine what is interesting, one could e.g. allow players to re-gain missiles there too or even repair them or something. Maybe a quick stop would be needed, and so on...
 
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I do not think the multiplayer missions ever shipped with the game and I have no access to the SVN. But whipping something together for a test should be doable for everybody with a little bit of FRED knowledge.

The missions designed by yours truely about half a life time ago where meant exclusively for DM and TDM so no story-based coop. Although I also had created some Gauntlets but those were pretty boring and needed more work.
Gauntlets get boring fast, even team deathmatch or battle royale. You are done with it after a while. However, multiplayer co-op is something only a few games in the genre have, and there are others, do not know how large the group is, but for me, that is what I want. A playable co-op campaign. In the "unnamed hero pilot" setting this should not really affect the story(maybe killroster or medals?)
 
To my knowledge, nobody ever worked on that while the game was in development, single player always the priority and pretty much everybody, including myself, was behind that.
 
I have no idea how to create mods .. but can someone from the community create a cockpit mod ? .. that would be great ..Wing Commander Saga next Level 👍 👍
 
To my knowledge, nobody ever worked on that while the game was in development, single player always the priority and pretty much everybody, including myself, was behind that.
now that the game was ported to Knossos FS2O, it would be interesting to see if MP could work, even for deathmatch.

I have no idea how to create mods .. but can someone from the community create a cockpit mod ? .. that would be great ..Wing Commander Saga next Level 👍 👍
@crazycanuck is working on it but a slow pace due to irl stuff, check his thread, his mod is neat!
 
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