Capital Ships - Weapon Placement

Cool!
I'm looking forward to the Nephilim, especially how your rules will deal with the Ray cluster and similar stuff.

But... you don't really think cat-sniffing is as bad as kickstarter, do you?
At least we don't want your money!
 
Aginor said:
Cool!
I'm looking forward to the Nephilim, especially how your rules will deal with the Ray cluster and similar stuff.
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Well, the fighters are already in; they have been for a while, actually. Most of the specialized rules for clusters simply require the GM to keep track of which of the individual ships in the cluster have been hit, and the cluster breaks when one of the craft is destroyed. For the Ray, things work like they do in Prophecy: the Remoras travel with the Ray Node and act as free floating turrets for it, and when the Ray is destroyed they can act autonomously at that point. The Squid interceptor has one of the "other" flaws (i.e. the nasty ones) that makes it more susceptible to damage - particularly Engine damage - if it's hit from behind.

With the capships, I have more than one point of trickiness. First, there's the location and firing arcs of all their weapons; those have been an issue for every capital ship so far and that's supposed to be the focus of this thread. Second is the fact that capital ships in Prophecy don't blow up when they die, and they can only be hurt at certain "weak points" - which is the only game in the series that treats capital ships this way. They'll be the biggest case of "I don't make exceptions for just one" I've had to do with the system so far. In WCRPG, they can be attacked and destroyed conventionally, though I'm thinking about maybe adding a conditional DR to the Nephilim capships in the event that the weak points aren't destroyed first (i.e. you can still destroy them without attacking the weak points first, but it becomes a lot easier to do if they are knocked out).


Aginor said:
But... you don't really think cat-sniffing is as bad as kickstarter, do you?
At least we don't want your money!
Click to expand...

Naw, not really. Kickstarter - or rather people who won't shut up about how you should start up a kickstarter for every last damned thing - is irritating. Cat-sniffing is just.......weird. ;)
 
Where is the not-like button? :D

Anyway, about the capships:
I think the idea is along the lines of the "burnt-out wreckage" in WC3 (that explodes as soon as you look away, which is funny) It just doesn't look like it. The ships just become grey and keep exploding. But they stay static somehow instead of floating around or so.
I remember that I actually liked that in WCP, but I also missed the big explosions and floating wreckage and such things. But having the wrecks float around in WC3 a bit longer would have been awesome.
 
I'd need source material to do those - which I don't have. And since P3 was never published, they'd wind up in the non-canon catalog - which I'll be attending to towards the end of the whole shebang.
 
What exactly is MED, and more to the point, where can I download it (if anywhere)?​
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​
MED is the internal mission building package (Mission EDitor) created by Origin for Wing Commander Prophecy (and then Secret Ops.) You CAN download it (it's on those dev discs that Captain Johnny posted) but my understanding is that it's far clunkier than the more recent fan made stuff (it was never intended for public distribution.)​
 
capi3101 said:
Such as?
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Well, the main tool that fans use is WCPPas. At its heart, WCPPas is intended for scripting missions - you write a mission in a Pascal-like language, which the compiler then turns into IFF files that the game can understand. However, apart from compiling, WCPPas can also decompile an existing IFF file (though not always properly) and recompile. And the thing to realise is that most files in WCP are IFF files, even if they sometimes hide behind different extension names (rom, sec, mis, mat, etc.). Ships? IFF. Missions? IFF. Room files? IFF. Meshes? IFF. Textures? IFF.

(Of course, for textures, decompiling is a lousy way to edit - you'll do better using Texconv to convert them into BMPs and back into MATs)

So, since you can get at most of these files in WCPPas, the tool is useful for most aspects of editing.
 
This is a reasonable collection of Privateer 3 documents: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/06/10/crusader-day-then-what-didn-t-happen

Then there are some additional pitch documents with ships here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/10/11/privateer-3-pitch-document-restored

... and here: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/10/12/the-grand-daddy-of-privateer-3-concepts

Of course, you know, it's all work-in-progress stuff that changed from one day to the next... so there's not necessarily one cohesive picture of what Privateer 3 would have been.

More screenshots not in the first link:

https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/26/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-stations
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/25/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-freighters
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/24/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-capital-ships
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/21/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-maxor
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/20/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-ai-fighters
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/18/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-new-paris
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/16/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-yena
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/14/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-covers
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/15/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-menus
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/17/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-g-tok-iv
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/19/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-theseus
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/22/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-misc
https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/09/23/treasures-of-the-archangel-quadrant-player-ships
 
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Quarto said:
Well, the main tool that fans use is WCPPas.
Click to expand...

Is this something different from WCPPascal? I ask because the download links to WCPPascal seem to have all rotted (at least the ones at CIC have; I haven't tried Google yet).

EDIT: Never mind. There was a good link at WCPedia.
Looking forward to playing around with this...
 
Okay....there are some stats for ships in the P3 pitch document. There might be enough information there to go ahead and try to put something together for the non-canon chapters. Problems I can see are A)I only have one angle of the ship to work with, so any size numbers I come up with will be completely made up, and B) I don't know the specs on all the equipment involved. They'd be a total guesses at best. We are just talking about the two ships, right? The Drayman-III and the Manowar? If there are others, I'm not seeing them.
 
capi3101 said:
Is this something different from WCPPascal? I ask because the download links to WCPPascal seem to have all rotted (at least the ones at CIC have; I haven't tried Google yet).

EDIT: Never mind. There was a good link at WCPedia.
Looking forward to playing around with this...
Click to expand...
Oh, yeah, I guess it is actually called WCP Pascal :). Anyway, glad you found a working link - I'd forgotten that Thomas' website has been offline for years. Keep in mind, it's a powerful tool, but it's not at all easy to use. So take your time, don't try everything at once.
 
I don't want to try to do much...just drop one Nephilim capship in at a time, maybe set it up so they don't shoot back at me, and just kinda fly around and try to figure out where all their guns are.

If this doesn't work, I'll be employing the method I intend to use for the P2 ships - guessing.
 
Okay...looks like I don't have the appropriate run-time environment installed to get WCP Pascal to work. Probably oughta do that before I try again.
 
It's telling me it can't find vcl50.bpl on my system, which is why it won't run. I get the same message on my XP box, so I'm not quite sure what's going on here.
 
I don't recall having any trouble with that, but then again, it may be that I got this file from Thomas back in 2001, and had plenty of time to forget about it. I suspect that if you google around, you'll be able to find the file right away - if you don't, I can try sending it to you.
 
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