Has anyone thought of upgrading wc3 and wc4 to the prophecy engine?

G

gavinfoxx

Rear Admiral
It seems fairly obvious to me... update, trim down, combine the media from the various versions of, say, wing commander 3, to play in the prophecy engine with better graphics, keeping the same basic mission structure, maybe with tweaks here and there... I've been playing Standoff, and have been thinking, "I would really like to see WC3 done in this style, with the better quality movies, and everything."... has anyone brought this up?
 
Part of the trouble with this idea, at least for WC3 is that there just isn't significantly higher quality source material available. That said, HCl has been looking into the possibility of a higher quality movie pack for the PC version using the PSX/3DO video as source.

Part of the trouble with trying to just code WCP for the same game is that somewhere in the mix things are bound to get lost in translation. It's perhaps doable as long as the goal is in clear focus but it could never truly replace the original. As soon as someone decides something needs 'fixing' that's usually where problems start.
 
Prophecy has a significantly different gameplay model. It would be fine to do a new game in this engine using the WC3 setting - if done well, I'm sure nobody would mind that everything behaves differently. On the other hand, if you tried to remake WC3, it simply wouldn't feel the same. Different AI, different collisions, different handling of capships... it just wouldn't be it.
 
Make it so that the damage to the Victory, Lexington, etc carries over to the next mission? That would make the game harder...and more fun to play!
 
AD said:
As soon as someone decides something needs 'fixing' that's usually where problems start.
Click to expand...

Yeah you know...I never really liked that it took only a few full bursts from my gun to kill the Victory.

That being said, there are going to be issues with the Capital Ships in any kind of game because torpedoes and capital ships behave extremely differently in WC3/4 and in the Vision Engine.

(Though I'm reasonably certain after playing Standoff there are at least partial work arounds for these things that the Standoff/UE team has come up with.)
 
you could rework the wc3 ships into prophecy so you only need one torpedo to take them out. That would play more like wing commander 3. The hardest thing to implement would be the terrain which afaik noone has a solution to so far.
 
Oh that's right, you can't do the land missions from WC3 and WC4 in the prophecy engine, can you? Well damn... I thought standoff did a GREAT job with all the WC2 feeling and mechanics in the prophecy engine, though, I just wanted to see the other stuff done that way... Especially cause I like the superior control scheme that lets you keep the feel of the ships, but still lets you do more with them... Plus I really want to see the WC3 era guns in the standoff engine, the guns were more interesting in WC3/4, IMO...
 
Uh, I only recall there being polygonal streaks in WC3...

Too, it's not "Standoff engine", it's still the Vision engine with lots of hacks and improvements stacked on top of it.
 
I would personally like to see WC 3/4 redone but in the engine that Saga is using. I think it's much better and the Saga team pretty much has most of the ships done already too. :D (Just update the skins and you're mostly good to go.)

WC4 would be the best one to start with. You could see the DVD quality movies with the ships in the engine that Saga is using. Now THAT would look beautiful!. I just don't know if that engine can be edited to play VOB files.

After which when AD and crew are able to port all the PSX/3DO movies WC3 could to implemented. (if the engine could be edited to play those files as well.)

But that's my 2 cents.
 
Well, here are my own two cents: having an engine render beautiful ships isn't all that's needed to make a great game. The Saga team is working hard and showing stunning renderings, but they haven't released anything that feels like Wing Commander yet. I am pretty sure they're still working hard to that end, but the sheer amount of times the process is taking proves my point: that is preferring an engine over another just because it makes beautiful rendering screenshots is really a bad way to make a game.

On this thread's main topic: I believe the only good way to enhance WC3 or WC4 would be to recompile the original source, only fixing those joystick bugs and enhancing the 3D rendering routines. Else no matter how you try, a remake in any new engine will always result in something close, but different. (See Standoff for our attempt at a WC2-feel game.) Unless we someday get access to that code and have permission to use it, our classic games are better left as they are.
 
What might be more feasible would be a sprite-based remake of WC1 and WC2, using new high-resolution sprites but retaining the same gameplay. If I had any coding talent at all, I'd probably be doing something like that right now.
 
I don't really WANT "exactly the same" as WC3. To me, the feel standoff / the vision engine is MUCH better than anything else I've seen in WC... while retaining enough of the 'old stuff' to still be worth it. I just want to see wc3-era things done the way wc2 was done to standoff/vision.

And I think maybe when Saga gets mouse control working better, it might be closer... not all of us have joysticks, you know!
 
I think WC3 and Prophecy have different game engines/programming languages so the game would have to be totally rescripted. Twould be easier if we had the source code (or do we? I don't pay attention to these things...)
 
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