Please describe WCU!!

Ok like I said before. Continuity is important as far as keeping the same look and feel of the universe. But I think its a BIG mistake to try to shoe-horn every pice of WC storyline into a WC Universe. If you want to play all the differing WC games then fork the project like WCR was forked and build your own remakes. Im still learning a lot here as I was not a big WC fan (lack of computer) but I would not mind trying to help remake many of the WC titles.

The WCU project in my opinion sould try to caputer the feel of WC and be a firtile staging ground for mission addons (with a good supply of existing fan fic missions could be scripted up rather quickly) and the creation of forked of projects (art, physisics models, etc...).

If we choose to progress though the timelines espically with a single character (and unless you can come up with some amazing ideas for character transisions, I really dont think there is a choise here but to stick with a single character), its going to already be very difficult without forcing ourselves to observe every pice of cannon, without the player feeling railroaded. In WCU I want to play my story, I want to be the hero/villian, I want to be the one making a diffrence. If the fate of everything is hard coded into the storyline I may as well be reading a book.
 
Potential: limit it to privateering, but keep the original sense of the word here - people given letters of marquis by their government to go kill (legally) - and who were often well-funded and could even have fleets. Five or six people could organize together, with one handling the finances, to take smaller missions and build finances, potentially even hiring enough mercenaries to stage a planetary raid (would net a LOT of cash, but you don't have to worry about working in a planetary development system because the government would take over.). If you wanted to get really fun, you could start a "hardcore" mode, where players had one life to live, and ejection pods were your FRIEND, and if you had to bail you should hope one of your surviving friends has that tractor beam. Die, and you're back to your base freighter again (although one of your friends might be nice and hang onto what could be salvaged from your wreck to help you get started). You aren't running on rails, but you're in no great position to damage canon. (I doubt you could go to Kilrah and kill Blair, because it was a rather sudden event and Blair was cloaked most of the time... but you might catch the tail glimpse of a VERY LARGE ship passing through on the way to war, later on in the years)
 
I'd be all for the "hardcore" mode. After I finished Privateer, a gazillion years ago, the very next game I played was called TFX (Tactical Fighter eXperiment), a simulation game that was way advanced even compared to the flight sim games of today (except for the graphics, of course). That game was hardcore: If you died, there was no reload. Your former self was now MIA or KIA, period! You had to start the game all over again, even go to the academy first. And how thrilling it was! There was no autopilot or time compression: If a mission took an hour of flight to get to your target, you'd spend an hour sitting in front of the screen, reviewing your mission objectives, rehersing in your mind, imagining possible scenarios, anticipating... In some of the longer missions, you had to fly for an hour to meet a tanker plane, refuel, and then continue on your way. Engagements were easy for the most part. The increase in difficulty was very gradual. And that would be a requirement if implementing hardcore mode.
 
Hardcore Dosn't mean much when you can save and reload. Maybe if there was on a server playing in a persistant multiplayer world it would work. But I think thats a little beyond the scope of the project currently (seeing as there is no multiplayer in VS yet).
 
Also, who would implement a persistent server, and how could they afford it? No, I doubt that will happen.
 
Well if it was implamented like Neverwinter nights. Each person could host a small part of the universe. Take advantage of Peer to Peer. And what else am I going to do with my cable connection. :p Play a non-Wing Commander MMORPG or something?
 
Well I know I can get 500kb/s up 24-7-365 add a day on leap year (unless my room mates are messing around and screw up my router... AGAIN...).
 
I would involve the 'other' games by simulating them as the timeline goes along... so PLAyERCHARACTER can fly his Tarsus off and join in the fighting between fleets in the Freya System or somesuch if he wants.
 
Oh, come on, people, the program wouldn't allow re-load; but of course, people could find out which files changed with each save, and force a restore. The way to prevent that hack would be to have a server, yes, but all the server needs to keep is a hash code of the saved files. That's 4 bytes. Hardly a bandwith killer.
 
I'm sure that if you can manage to make a massively multiplayer Wing Commander game, the CIC and the community can find a way to host it.
 
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