A Few Points...

Wedge009

Rogue Leader
I want to offer my very belated thanks to the UE team for their persistence in making such a great add-on. :) Just a few points/questions I want to make:

  • Why is the loss of the Intrepid implied in the cutscene? Was it for dramatic effect, or were there technical limitations? I notice in the next mission that a 'destroyed' Intrepid model is used, so was there anything stopping us from seeing the explosion? I thought it was a bit silly having the camera turn away...
  • I was a bit worried at first at the lack of capship strike missions, and I was a bit disappointed with the lack of player participation in the strike cutscene. But that was before I played the last mission - wow, that was a capship-killing-fest! :) I suppose in a sense, the capships play the part of 'boss' at the end of UE's series of 'levels', and also, it keeps things a little more realistic where a single carrier can't just keep blowing up capships left, right and centre (this idea is reinforced in the fiction).
  • Speaking of the fiction, I like how everyone on the flight deck gapes in awe of the Vampire. And how the fleet updates show how hard a time the Border Worlds are having against the Nephilim. Although it would have been nice to play in some of those other actions, especially the final cutscene (I understand the need to have UE released this millennium :)), I guess it also shows how small a role the player character actually has in the grand scheme of things (unlike Blair/Casey being the centre of attention).
  • BTW, why couldn't Task Force Alpha send reinforcements to help the Dauntless? I can only guess that they really needed everyone available for the liberation of Tyr... but that was an obscene number of fighters on the Princeton's flight deck! :/
  • That was a nice touch showing Diligent tankers in the final movie.
  • Factions! How cool was it to see the Border Worlds, the Confederation, the Kilrathi, and the Nephilim all in one game? :)
  • How does the number of turrets on the Dauntless compare with the Midway? I don't think I've seen turrets shoot down incoming torpedoes with such accuracy in WCP/SO before! :) I remember reading a while back that if the Dauntless had as many turrets as listed for the Tiger's Claw in Claw Marks, it'd be nearly invincible, at least with the number of bombers that we see in UE...
  • I must confess that I had to make a search of the UE forums to find the Rapier IV Easter egg. Turned out that I had already activated the trigger in the Prelude, but I didn't think of re-playing the sim missions, since I usually just play them first, then only play the main campaign afterwards.

Finally, how do I get to Mission 7B, and are there any others I'm missing? In my mission history, I have listed:
  • Prelude
  • Mission 1
  • Mission 2A/B
  • Mission 3A/B
  • Mission 4
  • Mission 5A/B
  • Mission 6
  • Mission 7A
  • Mission 8A/B
  • Mission 9A/B
  • Mission 10A/B
  • Cutscene - Close Encounters
  • Cutscene - Reap the Whirlwind
  • Cutscene - No One Can Hear You... (I have two of these! :confused: )
  • Endgame 1A/B/C

I'm normally good at finding losing track missions, but I don't have the time right now to search any more. I can only assume it has something to do with Mission 5, because I haven't used the passwords for the losing track versions of the fiction for Mission 6 and 7 yet. Oh yeah, I don't recall seeing any mention of the Zu'Baka's destruction in the losing track fiction. Are the crew of the Dauntless really so callous to the loss of their allies?!
 
There are only two triggers for loosing missions:
* Beaufort station - if you loose it you are on th eloosing track
* Your Kilrathi Allies - once you loose their capship you are on the 'B' track of the normal campain. So - not having my nots here right now - I assume you should make sure to loose that capship in mission 6. to get 7B.
 
Wedge009 said:
Why is the loss of the Intrepid implied in the cutscene? Was it for dramatic effect, or were there technical limitations? I notice in the next mission that a 'destroyed' Intrepid model is used, so was there anything stopping us from seeing the explosion? I thought it was a bit silly having the camera turn away...
Two reasons - firstly, I really think it feels better if you turn away rather than show the explosion, since capships in WCP don't explode all that well. Secondly, technical limitations - the Intrepid model shown in the next mission is not the destroyed version of this Intrepid, it's a separate model with changed textures. Indeed, originally I had wanted to have the destroyed Intrepid be as mangled up as that Fralthi II in WCP (but this ended up causing too many collision tree problems) - as such, the difference between the destroyed version of the ordinary Intrepid and the special destroyed Intrepid model would have been too noticeable.

I was a bit worried at first at the lack of capship strike missions, and I was a bit disappointed with the lack of player participation in the strike cutscene.
Well, strictly speaking, the player should have been able to destroy the Orca in the previous mission (since viper cannons can do that). However, this would have had to be taken into account in the fiction, so instead of just having winning and losing fiction, we would have had to have winning A, winning B, losing A and losing B. So I ended up making the Orca unkillable.

BTW, why couldn't Task Force Alpha send reinforcements to help the Dauntless? I can only guess that they really needed everyone available for the liberation of Tyr... but that was an obscene number of fighters on the Princeton's flight deck! :/
Well, getting from Nephele to Kurasawa takes a bit of time - by the time they would have arrived, the action would have been finished. It's also got to do with Admiral Morheim, whose preferred strategy is to seek out the enemy forces and engage them in decisive fleet battles, which obviously requires the concentration of friendly forces as well.

That was a nice touch showing Diligent tankers in the final movie.
Yes, it was. To be fair, though, we had nothing to do with it - we just told Hadrian we wanted a shot of the fleet, and he's the one who decided what would be in that shot. Very glad he did have a Dilligent model, though ;).

How does the number of turrets on the Dauntless compare with the Midway? I don't think I've seen turrets shoot down incoming torpedoes with such accuracy in WCP/SO before! :) I remember reading a while back that if the Dauntless had as many turrets as listed for the Tiger's Claw in Claw Marks, it'd be nearly invincible, at least with the number of bombers that we see in UE...
Yes, that's right - originally, the Dauntless had every single turret that you can see on the Tiger's Claw schematics in Claw Marks, and the result was quite incredible. Even with the reduced turrets, however, the Dauntless' firepower is probably more noticeable than the Midway's, because while they have about the same number of turrets (uh, I think), the Dauntless is much smaller, so they're more concentrated.

]Cutscene - No One Can Hear You... (I have two of these! :confused: )
Yep, that's normal. Because the cutscenes include gameflow, they must include the list of pilots to be shown on the killboard. At this point, there are some slight differences between the winning and middle paths - on one, Edge disappears and Vaqi appears, while on the other, Edge is still there. So, even though the cutscene is identical on both paths, we needed to have two separate versions to take the killboard into account.

Oh yeah, I don't recall seeing any mention of the Zu'Baka's destruction in the losing track fiction. Are the crew of the Dauntless really so callous to the loss of their allies?!
Well, blame the branching again :p. It is possible to get onto the losing track with or without the Zu'Baka, but there is no more branching once you get onto the losing track. So, had we mentioned the Zu'Baka, we would have needed 5a, 5b, and 5c. Not an especially big deal, but by the time the question came up, we very much preferred solutions that didn't add extra work ;).

And, as Karl says, to get onto 7b, you have to lose (or not capture) the Zu'Baka. Since the Zu'Baka is absent in 4, 5 and 6, you have to lose it before or during mission 3.
 
Quarto said:
So I ended up making the Orca unkillable.
I noticed that. Kill the shield emitters... hey, the bridge and engines are still blue on the HUD! :/

Quarto said:
Well, getting from Nephele to Kurasawa takes a bit of time - by the time they would have arrived, the action would have been finished.
Okay. I didn't really keep track of the date and time in the fiction, but the impression I have is that the whole UE campaign occurs within a few days. No wonder everyone was so exhausted!

Quarto said:
To be fair, though, we had nothing to do with it - we just told Hadrian we wanted a shot of the fleet, and he's the one who decided what would be in that shot.
Yeah, I know Hadrian did the movies. I still have his video clip where the Concordia and a number of escort destroyers and transports fly by which was posted a (long) while back.

Quarto said:
Even with the reduced turrets, however, the Dauntless' firepower is probably more noticeable than the Midway's, because while they have about the same number of turrets (uh, I think), the Dauntless is much smaller, so they're more concentrated.
I noticed the concentration of turrets, especially on the Ralari bridge. So the Midway has the same number of turrets? Seems a bit odd, given that the Midway is so much larger. It's hard to reconcile statistics - the Kilrathi dreadnought only has a few dozen turrets for its 22 kilometres, IIRC.

Quarto said:
Since the Zu'Baka is absent in 4, 5 and 6, you have to lose it before or during mission 3.
I managed to find Mission 7B and the last two fiction passwords. Initially I let the Zu'Baka die during the Strategic Relocation (Mission 7A?), so of course I couldn't get Mission 7B that way.

Oh, there was a small bug introduced with UEMiss.tre v1.02b which I'm sure wasn't present before: In Mission 9A/B, the player is not returned to the cockpit after the cutscene where Zulu 1 jumps out/in. It's a simple matter to press F1 to fix the problem, but it's something casual players might not know about.

A few more points I wanted to add:

  • Some of the scripted flying in the cutscenes were a bit too simplistic. I find it odd that pilots would fly straight waiting for a dumbfire to run up their tailpipe, but I can imagine cutscene scripting to be quite painful and complicated, so the end result is still very good.
  • I find the landing sequences are a tad too long, and the lack of auto-pilot for a quick return to the Dauntless is annoying when I'm in a hurry, although it is reminiscent of returning to the Tiger's Claw while facing its stern, and having to fly around to the front to land.
  • Why was the colour of enemy capships on the HUD changed to purple? I know the Barracuda had to be redone because it was back-to-front before...
  • I like seeing the Ray scanning messages in standard green instead of white, but just out of curiosity - why was the fiction password for Mission 10B flashed on the screen in yellow instead of being shown after the mission debriefing screen as usual?
  • I find it slightly troubling that the player is dropped out of auto-pilot very close to enemies (less than 8000 klicks), although I can understand if it's to do with the difficulty of mission design/scripting.
  • Sometimes, in Mission 3B, sometimes I wind up landing at Beaufort Station and completing the mission instead of returning to the Dauntless for a final round of combat.
  • The Banshee textures look a little odd (to me at least) around the cockpit area, especially noticeable in landing sequences. Was it taken straight from WC4?
  • I blame UE for my recent lack of sleep and constructive time use. :) I hope now that I've finished what I want to do with it for now, I can convince myself to get back to work.
 
Wedge009 said:
[*]I like seeing the Ray scanning messages in standard green instead of white, but just out of curiosity - why was the fiction password for Mission 10B flashed on the screen in yellow instead of being shown after the mission debriefing screen as usual?

Technical limitation. So can only have a maximum number of password screens. UE has one password too much. If I remember correctly it originally crashed because of that so we used this mechanism instead.

Wedge009 said:
[*]Sometimes, in Mission 3B, sometimes I wind up landing at Beaufort Station and completing the mission instead of returning to the Dauntless for a final round of combat.

That one is still in there? Damn. While it was never clear WHY it happened this bug was considered to have been fixed. As it is highly inreproducable its hard to test if you nailed it of course.
 
Wedge009 said:
So the Midway has the same number of turrets? Seems a bit odd, given that the Midway is so much larger.
Well, I don't know... I'd guess that it has a similar amount, but I couldn't be bothered checking ;). But, one explanation is that not all of the Midway's turrets appear in the game - we certainly never see any of those ion turrets mentioned in the manual.

Oh, there was a small bug introduced with UEMiss.tre v1.02b which I'm sure wasn't present before: In Mission 9A/B, the player is not returned to the cockpit after the cutscene where Zulu 1 jumps out/in.
Hmm, does this happen every time?

Some of the scripted flying in the cutscenes were a bit too simplistic. I find it odd that pilots would fly straight waiting for a dumbfire to run up their tailpipe, but I can imagine cutscene scripting to be quite painful and complicated, so the end result is still very good.
Yeah, the amount of control you have over ship motion is rather limited, especially if you want one ship to shoot down another.

I find the landing sequences are a tad too long, and the lack of auto-pilot for a quick return to the Dauntless is annoying when I'm in a hurry.
Standoff will allow autopilot landings. It's just that the pre-programmed landing sequences (a pre-requisite for autopilot) don't work with the Dauntless, because they're designed to only work with ships that have rear-facing hangars.

]Why was the colour of enemy capships on the HUD changed to purple? I know the Barracuda had to be redone because it was back-to-front before...
Just something we felt like doing :). Confed and BW are blue, Kilrathi are orange, and bugs are purple. Makes no difference whatsoever, but looks a bit more colourful ;).

Why was the fiction password for Mission 10B flashed on the screen in yellow instead of being shown after the mission debriefing screen as usual?
What Karl said. Secret Ops has all sorts of stuff hardcoded for no reason whatsoever, and the number of splash screens happens to be one such thing.

]I find it slightly troubling that the player is dropped out of auto-pilot very close to enemies (less than 8000 klicks), although I can understand if it's to do with the difficulty of mission design/scripting.
Well, mostly we just couldn't be bothered positioning the ships properly... although, IIRC, in some situations I even intentionally reduced the distance, simply because it made mission testing faster.

Sometimes, in Mission 3B, sometimes I wind up landing at Beaufort Station and completing the mission instead of returning to the Dauntless for a final round of combat.
Damn, one of these days I'd really love to find out what causes that one.

The Banshee textures look a little odd (to me at least) around the cockpit area, especially noticeable in landing sequences. Was it taken straight from WC4?
Yep, although IIRC it was slightly modified to remove transparent areas. That may account fro the strangeness you're seeing.
 
HEY!! Do you mean that there is fiction after mission 10, I am missing out! Quick pm me that password--this is very important!
 
No, there is no fiction after mission 10 - Wedge was referring to the fiction for mission 10.
 
cff said:
While it was never clear WHY it happened this bug [landing at Beaufort] was considered to have been fixed. As it is highly inreproducable its hard to test if you nailed it of course.
It's very hard to reproduce. Sometime it happens, sometimes it doesn't. IIRC, it usually happens very shortly after the last of the enemies are defeated and I afterburn in for a re-fuel.

Quarto said:
Hmm, does this happen every time?
For the couple of times that I played, yes. In both Mission 9A and 9B, I kept having to press F1 to return to combat.
 
Well, I'll check that M9 bug. I didn't change anything in 1.02b, but then again you had no way of testing it with 1.02a (where I did make some changes), so I guess I must have put it in then. And I'll check out M3 again... though I've long abandoned hope of actually finding that bug :(.
 
Yeah, I realised that afterwards. Since I used 1.01 for Mission 8A and afterwards, I guess the bug could have been in 1.02a as well.

I don't think the Mission 3B bug is too big a deal. I was just happy to get the mission over and done with quickly (since I had already played it before) to find the 'B' win-lose track.
 
Ok, I think I've probably fixed the M9 bug, but I won't release 1.02c just yet.

About M3. After looking at the code, I remembered that we had put in a failsafe mechanism which exits the game if the refuel sequence takes more than 35 seconds - this must be what you're experiencing. Now, given that the refuel scene normally takes less than 35 seconds, this should not happen (and the scene is bug-free, to my knowledge). I have a hunch, however - when you play, do you alter your energy settings, to reduce the engine power? Such a reduction just might result in the scene taking too long. But if this is the case, then fixing the problem will also be dead easy - I just have to increase the failsafe's waiting time.
 
not again!!

Let people test M9 before you release a 2c.

I would be willing to test it. Just toss the .iff over in an e-mail.
 
Quarto said:
After looking at the code, I remembered that we had put in a failsafe mechanism which exits the game if the refuel sequence takes more than 35 seconds - this must be what you're experiencing.
Um, I don't think so. I sometimes found the re-fuelling sequences a bit annoying when I wanted to get through a mission quickly, but I'm very certain they didn't take more than 25 seconds, let alone 35.

Quarto said:
I have a hunch, however - when you play, do you alter your energy settings, to reduce the engine power? Such a reduction just might result in the scene taking too long. But if this is the case, then fixing the problem will also be dead easy - I just have to increase the failsafe's waiting time.
I have played around with the power settings before, but I don't recall any lengthening in cutscene time. I'll try to keep in mind what's going on the next time I mistakenly land at Beaufort.

To me, it sounds like a really obscure bug that's not worth the immense time and patience it would take to fix it - if it can be fixed at all - so I suggest that you don't burn yourself out trying to work out what's wrong. :)

PS You seem to have the impression that I re-fuel before landing. I don't - IIRC, I land as soon as approach the station. No re-fuelling whatsoever.
 
Wedge009 said:
Um, I don't think so. I sometimes found the re-fuelling sequences a bit annoying when I wanted to get through a mission quickly, but I'm very certain they didn't take more than 25 seconds, let alone 35.
PS You seem to have the impression that I re-fuel before landing. I don't - IIRC, I land as soon as approach the station. No re-fuelling whatsoever.

Ditto for both. In all cases I ever saw the bug, which wasn't for a LOOONG time.
 
I suffered from that particualr Bug myself but only the once. It seems that it's not really that important.

Either way, fantastic mod, and when I get my graphics card I'm going to play it with every single one of those lovely pretty effects. You managed to pack a lot into 10 missions and create, arguably, the most challenging WC game ever.
 
Wedge009 said:
To me, it sounds like a really obscure bug that's not worth the immense time and patience it would take to fix it - if it can be fixed at all - so I suggest that you don't burn yourself out trying to work out what's wrong. :)
Eh, these days I don't even bother running the game to test the changes I make, so it's only a matter of a few minutes to fix such bugs (and potentially create new ones ;)).

PS You seem to have the impression that I re-fuel before landing. I don't - IIRC, I land as soon as approach the station. No re-fuelling whatsoever.
Hmm, so the cutscene doesn't even begin? In that case, it might be some kind of issue with the variables. I'll see.
 
maybe you can fix the engame problem with it freezing in software mode.
 
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