Hello folks, some time ago, I got a hang of the idea showing off the evolution the wing-commander universe has gone through, not at least because of this mod here. This should give you all a better insight in what you can expect when WC-Saga will finally be done. (The view-angle of WC3 and WC4 will sometimes be a little different than the other, that is because they are ripped away from original game-screenshots). I'm now starting to release some pictures of the most common WC ship-models. Since this mod was born (even before the time I become a member of this team, which I really enjoyed being part of the last two years) we also collect much experience for ourself, which is why I show you now always a early WC-Saga-stage of the model, which is also a good explanation (and excuse) why this mod takes it's time to be completed So here is the first one (more to come by time) , the terran-confederation heavy cruiser, the tallahassee-class.
heh? You should take a look at the model geometry... it is weird, to say the least. Like the hole in the TCS Lexington in-game model Btw, the WC4 mesh was the first one to be incorporated into the FS2 engine. This was almost three years ago!
Yeah, but those Wing 4 ship textures were pretty atrocious. Where's the damn PAINT? Oi. But man, WCSaga has come a long way in just a year, really. WTG guys.
Yeah, Wing III is certainly my favorite. I talked to one of the Wing IV artists about the textures -- apparently the problem was that they were designed for a much higher resolution... in the FMV versions of the ships you can see all sorts of details taken directly from the team's trip to the USS Lexington. Unfortunately all the individual rivets and hull plating details didn't downconvert as well as they thought it would -- and they were left with 'jumbled' looking ships because they didn't have time to redo anything.
Oh jeez, no wonder they look so bad... they were trying to texture for something like a modern game in 1996. Gotta wonder what they could do with WC4 today...
Hm, I thought that evolution-shot was exactly going to show that, only difference is, this one isn't created by origin.
I actually meant with the original textures they made for WCIV But yeah, you guys are about as close to carrying the torch as anyone is.
Very nice, I wonder what happened to all the higher res/poly cutscene models though. Some of those might run in more modern games without too much hassle.
As far as I know the CGI models where the same as the ingame models...just with bumpmaps to make them look a little better.
Almost...IIRC the CGI models had more detailed subobjects like turrets and antennaes and high res textures; but the main model had a similar detail level to the game one. And BTW bump maps may be one of the next things that the SCP guys might implement...I remember some of the programmers being quite excited about it.
Your map-quality is already very near to a bumpmap , so I don't expect much improvement from this (rather the contrary, just one more bug-thing). I'm still for another code-freeze, and then they should do a few of our request (which are also usuable for other mods).
Well, to be honest, the main model, in most cases, was just a set of really big flat surfaces. I don't think they had the possibility to add much more detail to the main hull of the cutscenes' ships except via spec maps, bump maps, and adding the smaller objects attached to the hull (turrets, antennae, windows, etc) as true 3D subobjects instead of making them just textured-on like in the ingame models.
Since HLP is down, I can't get my hand on the screenshots Viper took for me. But I think, my next one will either be the ranger-class or the banthkara (depends on the pictures I get from WC3 and WC4, the rest is on my hard-disk ) Stay tuned and keep watching the forum
