One Last Sortie...

LeHah

LeHah

212 Squadron - "The Old Man's Eyes And Ears"
With the release of the Xbox One, we're now staring down the barrel of the end of the Seventh Generation of gaming consoles. This means that we're finally on a timeline when it comes to accessing Xbox Live and its multiplayer features; admittedly, MS has said it'll be years before they shut down 360 capabilities, but certainly with the influx of a new system, fewer people will play their current consoles.

And considering this is a long weekend / short work week for most people, I figured one more sortie for Wing Commander Arena is in order. (Also, this is a blatant attempt by me to wrangle some of you into helping me get that one achievement I missed. So sue me.)

Leave your mark here and maybe we can schedule something before the game is gone for good.
 
Well, thats one. Who else wants to take up the sword?

I was thinking Friday around noon (EST).
 
Friday afternoon won't work for me. I've been drafted into a family Friday. Probably that night I can.
 
I'll pop on #wingnut to see if we can't wrangle anyone else into it
 
Should be set for 8pm launch. Maybe post something over at RSI too?

We should be able to get a few pilots together...
 
I'm always down for Arena - and usually say so on #wingnut, but no one is ever around when I say it!

Whats a good day for everyone? We should try to get one or two more "big" group games out of it before the servers are shut down in a few years. We'll never be able to play the MP again after that.
 
And so do I.
It's great that fans create their own servers for online games after the official ones are shut down. Star Wars Galaxies is a fine example for this. :)
 
IIRC, Wing Commander Arena actually comes apart pretty easily... and it's based on some common-as-dirt shared engine (not Unity, but... something Unity-like?) I don't think it'd be his biggest challenge!
 
I wish it were that simple. If you look around, the modding scene on consoles is non-existent, even though most big console games are based on well-known engines, and the assets should be very easy to tear into. The problem isn't deciphering the assets. The core issue that you have is hardware. The console itself needs to be cracked to allow a modified game to run at all - and that's a big deal. Then you need to get the console itself - again, not the game, but the console - to connect to a different service than it normally would. In fact, it may well be that to get Arena to run without a Microsoft server, you wouldn't ever need to actually touch Arena itself - just the hardware and its operating system.

In some ways, it may actually be easier to find out which engine the game used, extract all the assets, and simply rebuild the game from scratch for PC. Perhaps this would be a good time for you to contact (via Sean Penney?) the team who developed the game originally? Maybe they would be willing to quietly hand over the source code and project assets, based on a promise that until the X360 servers are shut down, this stuff will sit locked away in the CIC's archives with no access for anyone?

Edit: in regards to the actual service, though, the silver lining in this cloud might be that there will be at least a couple of other games that people want to keep playing. I don't think there'd really be that many, but a few at least. What this means is that hopefully, should this ever happen (and it doesn't actually have to - I mean, Microsoft certainly *could* keep its current and future services backwards compatible), there will be other people trying to figure this out as well.
 
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