Tolwyn

For this week's update, the Wing Commander Saga team would like to showcase one of our in-game cutscenes.

The following series of screenshots illustrates the "fleet jumping" cutscenes that are familiar to Wing Commander fans and that will play a transitional role in Saga's story, as well.

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

Vinman

Neat!

GreyViper

Good stuff any updates on upcoming episodes?

__________________
Man has killed man from the beginning of time, and each new frontier has brought new ways and new places to die. Why should the future be different?

Col. Corazon Santiago
"Planet: A Survivalist's Guide"

Houkiboshi

Will you post a video of this scene?

__________________
"Humans say Hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Do they think there's a shortage of bad ones?"

Karm'Luk P'an Ku

Dundradal

Yeah, granted this makes a great flipbook could we see it in motion?

__________________
"To you, we are deeply grateful, and release what little hold we might, as Durandal, have had on your soul.
Go."
- Final Terminal Message Marathon Infinity

Tolwyn

It is still a question how we will release the game. Right now 20 out of 40 missions have been created, most of them have been outfitted with the new autopilot. You have to understand, that we have to script autopilot flyby scenes for each mission individually due to some cutscene code bugs we've run into. Plus we could use a few more voice actors...

We are also working on a Prologue update, which will add
- autopilot flyby
- proper enviroment mapping support
- multiplayer

I'll see what I can come up with.

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

Houkiboshi

Thanks... By the way, the episode mode release wouldn't be a bad idea...

I wouldn't mind de waiting on this, just for the quality of the game you're making; but everybody would agree with me in the fact that we would love to get our hand on this ASAP

__________________
"Humans say Hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Do they think there's a shortage of bad ones?"

Karm'Luk P'an Ku

Tolwyn

Download

I've recorded the sequence, the encoding quality isn't the best though

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

BrynS

Looking good, guys!

The encoding quality doesn't seem too bad. I know you guys mentioned using Theora (VP3+Ogg) for the cutscenes before releasing the prologue. Is Theora better supported within FS2 than say, the open source XviD? Just wondering, as although I haven't been keeping up with its development, I always assumed that XviD was a more mature (and thus more efficient) codec than Theora and I know that you can mux Ogg with XviD, but perhaps the resulting streams within the .avi container do not integrate well within FS2?

Anyway, no problem as Theora seems to be doing a decent job for Saga's cutscenes so far.

Cheers,

Bryn

__________________
"Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good." - Samuel Johnson

Tolwyn

I've encoded the cutscene with xvid actually

Theora codec is actually more efficient than xvid, but FS2 has several limitations including max resolution of 640*480.

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

Tolwyn

just to clear up some misunderstanding with the news update on the front page: this is not a cgi clip, but ingame footage, where game engine sets several limitations

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

Zelvik

Just nitpicking on WC continuity. Aint WC ships supposed to jump independently and keep some distance while doing it to not risk beeing a anihalated if exiting in the same spot.

But apart from that it just looks great

Tolwyn

More like not exceeding certain velocity (overshooting jump node or being annihilated during the jump sequence)

__________________
Wing Commander Saga | WingCenter

Magnum

That's how it is in the books to make dramatic points, but as far as I remember all of the in-game cutscenes showed the whole fleet jumping at the same time. Continuity? Who needs that...