Website update, April 10th

PopsiclePete

PopsiclePete

Mission programmer
Friday website update !

Hearing voices

The main progress this week, for a change, is not missions, but voiceovers. Tempest put in a lot of work this last weekend, processing most of our backlog of voiceovers. There's still another 47 voiceovers waiting to be processed, and another 70 still to be recorded (though all the remaining roles have been assigned), but we're very close to being done with voices. Only three characters are still voiceless in this episode :).

Missions were a bit less progressful this week. Pierre's still cleaning up sim missions, and Quarto's still working on the Marine mission - and both are fixing various bugs in other missions as well. Definitely moving forward, though...

Meanwhile, remember how I wrote that I personally no longer have anything to do on Standoff? I was wrong :). Thanks to Pedro's further improvements to the game's renderer, all of a sudden I've got to go over the textures for every single ship in the game :). I've put in a bit of research myself as well, coming up with a new, far better model converter for WCP. Before, converting models was a multi-stage process, with lots of potential bugs at every step of the way - now, it's essentially just one click (well, except for capships, they're as troublesome as ever). So, I'm taking this opportunity to tweak some of the fighter meshes - stuff I normally wouldn't have bothered with because of the annoying conversion process.

We're not going to show any screenshots of these improvements just yet. Until I'm 100% finished, we'll only be posting screenshots without any of these new changes. I think you'll be impressed, though :). Looking at those earliest screenshots from our website, I find it hard to believe how much we've been able to improve the graphics since 2001. The game still doesn't look anything like modern titles (or even the fan-improved version of FS2, for that matter)... but it's way beyond what we started with as well :).
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Sounds exciting. Modern-day standard graphics or not, a new WC experience within an already existing WC game is a great thing indeed.
 
Thank you for your continuing work in this. I am certain it isn't easy and I am so looking forward to playing the entire campaign, (even though it will take me months to finish!)
 
oh man.. I can hardly stand the anticipation. thanks for putting in this level of effort guys!
 
I have been holding off on playing standoff until the project is complete and it's nice to know its getting very close. The screenshots of the gameplay look good and the additions of mission briefings and cutscenes make the experience all the better. Thanks for the effort.
 
DarkOne said:
I have been holding off on playing standoff until the project is complete and it's nice to know its getting very close. The screenshots of the gameplay look good and the additions of mission briefings and cutscenes make the experience all the better. Thanks for the effort.
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My god do I admire your patience. You will surely not be disappointed with the final product.
 
and you will probably beat us WC Saga crowd in the release race.

Anyway, will the turret flak fire effects be modified? Yeah I know, WC2 but still...
couldn't they be at least always there? On my machine, they always appear, disappear, appear again...
 
DarkOne said:
I have been holding off on playing standoff until the project is complete and it's nice to know its getting very close. The screenshots of the gameplay look good and the additions of mission briefings and cutscenes make the experience all the better. Thanks for the effort.
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Ditto for me. Well, kind of. When I first discovered Standoff, Ep 3 had just come out. I immediately played through as far as I could. (winding up on the losing path...still can't figure out what I did wrong on the minelayers mission...) Then, on the eve of the Ep 4 release, my whole harddrive crashed and I lost my savegame. At that point I decided I would wait till Ep 5 was released and play through the whole completed game.

But it's been hard... :)
 
Vidmaster said:
On my machine, they always appear, disappear, appear again...
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I thought that was a deliberate design decision. To simulate the flashing of the flak effects from WC2. Otherwise they'd just look like any other of the gun effects from capital ship turrets.
 
Our goal was to have missile turrets (which go unused in Standoff) act as flak turrets, by making them shoot invisible high damage dumb fire missiles that, at their maximum range, would split into a few very short range invisible missiles with lower damage than their parent (think Standoff's Mace effect). That way, a ship would be hit for a lot of damage if they were in the flak's direct path, and for a lower "area of effect" damage if they were close to the flak's explosion, but managed to avoid the main dumb fire projectile.

However, the AI of the turrets did not like the whole concept - I don't remember what the exact problem was (since this was tested way back when we only had one or two capships converted into the game)... but it was something along the lines of missile turret AI refusing to aim, or having a hard-coded refire rate, or something along those lines, whenever it was loaded with missiles that had the characteristics I described above.

Our current choice - having gun turrets that shoot animated explosions act like flak turrets was the next best thing. It would look much better if the animations matched the projectile's life cycle (ie: every projectile, when spawned into the world, started at frame 0 and animated from there until they de-spawned on the animation's last frame), but they are tied to some global animation cycle instead... which is why EVERY flak projectile looks exactly the same at any given frame, regardless of how many frames have passed since each of them was fired. So this wasn't our first choice, but it is indeed deliberate. If our flak animation never had any empty frames, turrets would just shoot a constant rain of fire, which doesn't look as much like WC2's flak as our "exploding and re-exploding invisible flak shells" do.

It still bothers the hell out of me, so I guess we should all bug Alex and Pierre to do something about it. :p
 
Fascinating insight into the development of that particular addition. I suspected the global animation thing was a limitation of the modification itself and not something you deliberately implemented. It works reasonably well, though of course, if you could improve on that, that would be great.
 
Yeah, the global animation thing is something the game does to every animated texture (to save resources by loading each texture only once).

The fact that every subsequent instance of any given animated mat ends up sync'ed to the first instance that was loaded in that particular session is just a side effect. It must have never had any negative impact on WCP/SO, so they stuck with this method.
 
Dundradal said:
My god do I admire your patience. You will surely not be disappointed with the final product.
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I just can't take it sometimes if is a story style arc of a game to just play to a point and wait. That drives me crazy so least I only go through the waiting once :) I just redid my system at home and put WinXP back on it because Vista always had some issues running WCSO.
 
DarkOne said:
I just can't take it sometimes if is a story style arc of a game to just play to a point and wait. That drives me crazy so least I only go through the waiting once :) I just redid my system at home and put WinXP back on it because Vista always had some issues running WCSO.
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I run mine just fine on vista.
 
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