New batch of screenshots!

Eder

Mr. Standoff
...this is the last time I use absolutely spectacular screenshots to make up for the lack of a release date announcement! Promise! :p

Since Pedro's openGL renderer made the game fast enough to handle more detail, I went and started adding new effects and extra detail wherever I could (time permitting, of course). In these shots you can see our Star Base model (with blinking lights! :p), the Wraith's cockpit, a new WC2-style afterburner effect, and ship-specific debris! See if you can identify what the kill was in each of the three debris screenshots:






(Each ship now has somewhere between two to half a dozen debris pieces that it can explode into. That's about 150 mesh files for debris alone, and it brings Ep 4's mesh count to 231... that'll teach me to never put over 50 ships in the same project again! :p)


On a side note, I apologize if the gamma correction is a bit off in these screenshots... I've just switched monitors to my first LCD ever, and I haven't gotten used to the colors in this thing... I adjusted my in-game gamma to see what I could improve, and only now I realized this might have screwed things up even further for everyone else. :p
 
Awesometastic. :)

(But I don't get why "Rabaul Station" is funny...)

For the debris: I'd say Drakhri and Krant (possibly Jalthi) are but I am rather unsure. It's been quite a while since I played Standoff.
 
(But I don't get why "Rabaul Station" is funny...)
"Funny" is the wrong word, but Rabaul was one of the major Japanese bases in WW2 after they captured it in 1942 at the "Battle of Rabaul." It's just nice to see that the Standoff team keeps the tradition of WW2 references. (Although I'm not sure if Rabaul Station might have already occurred in any of the WC novels.)

(As a side note: It's also one of the missions in "Blazing Angels" that gave me a lot of trouble...)
 
The base interior looks amazing, along with the new space background, nice work guys.
 
Wow. Those screenshots make me feel really impatient. Do you guys have an official release date set?

In other words, fantastic work on the base! How did you make those textures?

As for the ship debris screenshots, the first one is a Gothri, the second one may be a Krant, and I'm not sure what the third one is.
 
Wow - That's amazing. You guys have done just an incredible job increasing the visual quality of the Vision engine. Just spectacular. I love the new afterburner colors, too - last I heard that wasn't something you guys thought you could change! Great job, guys.
 
"Funny" is the wrong word, but Rabaul was one of the major Japanese bases in WW2 after they captured it in 1942 at the "Battle of Rabaul." It's just nice to see that the Standoff team keeps the tradition of WW2 references. (Although I'm not sure if Rabaul Station might have already occurred in any of the WC novels.)

(As a side note: It's also one of the missions in "Blazing Angels" that gave me a lot of trouble...)

Ah good, thanks. I though I missed a joke...:)

I'm gonna say Gothri, Krant, Gratha...

That seems like a good guess. I want to change mine! :)
 
aw damnit, ya used the WC Armada cockpit!!! Other then that, they look great!!
Well, Armada does need all the love it can get - it's one of the best WC games, and one of the least remembered.

"Funny" is the wrong word, but Rabaul was one of the major Japanese bases in WW2 after they captured it in 1942 at the "Battle of Rabaul." It's just nice to see that the Standoff team keeps the tradition of WW2 references.
Well, it's only a WWII reference by proxy, so to speak - the naming theme for these star bases in WC2 seemed to be castles (if you can even say there was a naming theme - after all, half of them had names that didn't fit in), so I figured I'd name one after a fortress, which Rabaul arguably was during WWII.
 
I'm glad everyone seems to like the Star Base, it was a model that I had lying around for ages and that we weren't going to use in Standoff anymore.

Those screenshots make me feel really impatient. Do you guys have an official release date set?
Unfortunately we don't yet... because we're still missing voiceovers, which can be fairly unpredictable. We've even had to alter some conversations in Ep 4 from the original scripts, due to people going missing. I'm particularly disappointed about one specific in-flight convo which we had to remove entirely, and which served its purpose very nicely.

In other words, fantastic work on the base! How did you make those textures?
Just takes some different layers and a lot of airbrushing. :p And I usually borrow some detail from original WCP textures.

I love the new afterburner colors, too - last I heard that wasn't something you guys thought you could change! Great job, guys.
Thanks. Yeah, the afterburner cones are not traditional meshes that I can import replacements for... each of them is made up of a pretty short list of values (which I *think* are just the cone creation parameters and deformation info, but I still can't edit them).

So I figured I would try a simpler (and a bit unlikely :p) solution... edit the textures directly to see how they were mapped onto the afterburner cones. Turns out there was some UV space that was only used by the stretched (AB) version of the cones, but in the original WCP textures, this area was filled by the same blue gradient as the rest of the texture, so that this wasn't noticeable in the game. So I just went and replaced a few rows of blue gradient with blue-pink-yellow-white gradient, and voilà. :p

As for the Debris, Mekt-Hakkikt and PaulTheWolf almost got it - Drakhri, Krant, Gratha is what those cats were flying. :)
 
Unfortunately we don't yet... because we're still missing voiceovers, which can be fairly unpredictable. We've even had to alter some conversations in Ep 4 from the original scripts, due to people going missing. I'm particularly disappointed about one specific in-flight convo which we had to remove entirely, and which served its purpose very nicely.

I hope you're going to let me fix those two bugs too! I'll be back up and running on friday, a happy weekend of coding will take care of those pesky blighters.
 
Sounds good, the turret bug is getting me killed lots.

(Yeah, it's the turret bug, not me being a lousy shot).
 
Well, Armada does need all the love it can get - it's one of the best WC games, and one of the least remembered.

Amen to that as well - but isn't the same true for Academy? :)

Though I think it's more realistic to use the Armada cockpit since the Academy Wraith was still in development while the Armada Wraith was the production model.

And jay for being quasi-right on the debris! :D
 
Amen to that as well - but isn't the same true for Academy? :)
Well, no... Academy was a very weak game, IMO - all it had going for it was a great manual, and two new ships (...which isn't a trait that defines a good game, really). I mean, it literally was nothing more than a (very limited) mission editor tacked onto a slightly better-developed version of the sim that had been included as part of WC1.

I mean, I spent quite a bit of time trying to get Academy... and in the years since I got it, I don't think I put more than about five hours' worth of playing time into that game. I definitely spent more time than that going over its manual time and again - that tells you a lot.

Armada, on the other hand, was the perfect spin-off - a great, great manual, and the game, while being completely different to the main series, contained just enough depth to make you want to seek out the other games.

(and that's why Armada is so special to me - it's the first Wing Commander game I ever played, the first time I ever heard of Wing Commander at all)

Though I think it's more realistic to use the Armada cockpit since the Academy Wraith was still in development while the Armada Wraith was the production model.
True, though in Standoff, the Wraith cockpit is only seen in the sim as well, so the prototype may still be in development :).
 
True, though in Standoff, the Wraith cockpit is only seen in the sim as well, so the prototype may still be in development :).
Yeah... Keep that damn superfighter out of my campaign! And I mean that! You know what I'm talking about! :p


If our Episode 2 is set between Academy and Armada (I don't remember any dates for Academy), then our Wraith might be anything - there might have been other stages of development between the Academy prototype and the Armada production version, I guess. And if our Ep 2 is set before Academy, then it might be an earlier prototype whose cockpit ended up getting re-used later. :p
 
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