change of ship design

D

d3r3k

Spaceman
i really like the ship design of wc one and two, both fighter and capital ship. this leads me to ask why does the design changed between two and three? was this due to the storyline or was it simply a developement decision?
 
Primarily, it was due to the changes in technology. WC1/2 (also Academy and Priv/RF) were done as a series of pre-rendered bitmaps of the ships at various angles (why the images would sometimes "stutter", particularly in Priv/RF, as it couldn't decide which of two angles to show the viewer). From Armada and onwards, the ships were rendered on the fly (*ahem*), and for the systems at the time (486/66 was a pretty decent machine, at that point) it was prohibitively expensive, in computational power, to do those renderings on ships with lots of curves, as on the WC1/2 ships, and still have the game play decently, so the ship designs went to simplified, angular shapes that weren't as hard on resources.

(This may be idle speculation, but the 2v2 limit on Armada might have been a decision to keep systems from puking when trying to render the relatively complex curved shapes of the 2 Academy (WC2 style, remember) ships that came over to Armada, the Jrathek and Wraith. That's just semi-educated guesswork on my part, though. I could be wrong.)
 
I would agree with you death, the realspace engine changed how the games would look and rendering the more complex shapes of the early games would have strained the machines. We don't really see ships more reminicint of wc1/2 until WCP when a lot of the nephilim ships are really curvy...
 
I recall playing WC3 on an AST 486/66 DX2 box with 16 megs of system ram and a full meg of actual video ram. At the time it ran fairly well in VGA, and not so well in SVGA. I also ran 3d Studio R2 on that box, so if I had the original meshes converted to 3ds (if Origin didn't use 3d Studio), I could have some small idea as to how long it would take to render out a WC1/2/Priv ship.

On a modern-day system something like that could easily be done.

That would be nice, eh? Maybe Privateer's rendering engine somehow replaced with a DirectX 9-enabled model-based engine. Very unlikely, but we can dream...

...in the meantime, we can play things like Tenebrae Quake and wonder what could be done with the old Wing Commanders' source code if it was released...
 
Or what's being done using WC and the FS2 source code...

Saga's doing a lot of hard work, and it really does feel like WC... most of the time.
 
It was a combination of all of these things - there was also a lot of turnover between the WC2 and WC3 teams... so you had a distinctly different graphic style used for the later games.
 
I was going to say because I could design the Raptor, Rapier, Scimitar and Hornet all using only cubes and a poly count of about 300...well within the confines of the game engine I would think.
 
Yup, compare the art credits for the three games:

Wing Commander:
Keith Berdak
Daniel Bourbonnais
Glen Johnson
Denis R. Loubet
John Watson

Wing Commander II:
Daniel Bourbonnais
Jeff Dee
Larry Dixon
Chris Douglas
Glen Johnson
Bruce Lemons
Denis R. Loubet
Jake Rodgers
Gary Washington
John Watson

Wing Commander III:
Jeffrey Combs
Chris Douglas
Craig Halverson
James Lee
Thomas Lee
Chris Olivia
Alan Perez
Steve Pietzsch
Mark Vearrier

4/5ths of the WC1 art team went on to do WC2... but of all the WC2 artists, only Chris Douglas worked on WC3.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top