Preview A Special Prophecy Pack (August 11, 2006)

[ChrisReid]

As August 10 got nearer and nearer, rumors have swirled about the status of HCl's Prophecy Multiplayer Patch. Does it really exist? Will it be released on the Birthday? Did HCl die? In fact, he did not, and here he is with a special birthday gift for you!

Finally, an update! What have I been up to lately? Well, unfortunately Real-Life responsibilities have succeeded in keeping me very busy, so I haven't been able to divert much time to my usual WC activities. This means that the Multiplayer Patch hasn't seen that
much progress for the past few months, and it still doesn't have the functionality I intended for a first release. However, in celebration of the 8th CIC Birthday, I decided to put together a package that will allow everyone to take the MP patch for a spin and try it out by hosting your own games and battlng it out in the WCP engine.

It must be stressed, however, that this is experimental code, probably around beta quality. There is still much improvement to be made, such as making the code lag-tolerant and making a decent communication protocol, since most of the work done so far was determining what does what on the game EXE and studying how to best modify existing code to implement multiplayer functionality. This being said, have fun and try to be tolerant of any problems you encounter. ;-)

Download the test release of the Wing Commander Prophecy Enhancement Pack here! Unzip it to your Prophecy directory, but note that it will overwrite your Prophecy.exe unless you back it up first. The pack is actually more than just a multiplayer patch. It incorporates the video skip fix, new high resolution upgrade and multiplayer patch all together. Install.exe configures the high res patch, and Multiplayer.exe launches the online component. One person runs the game as the server, and everyone else connects to his IP address in client mode. Stop by #Wingnut to meet up with other players. Have fun!

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Original update published on August 11, 2006

 

[BrynS]

Thanks for releasing this test release, HCL. I played a couple of matches last night on Wingnut and they were all a thrill. Performance was good with five people and playing with Devastators, Vaktoths, Devil Rays and Pete's deadly Panther flying around really made for an explosive experience!

Cheers,


Bryn

 

[HCl]

Thanks for the feedback, i'm very glad the test release is being a positive experience for everyone!

I'll have my hands full for most of August (RL), so it will be difficult for me to show up in #wingnut in a regular basis.. However, you can bet i'll make an effort to show up from time to time for a game or two ;-)

Mário

 

[gwydion]

i'm having great fun with it, thanks HCl

 

[Musashi]

Thanks again!

Thanks again for this update - in my case due to the patches included more than the multiplayer functionality although I'll try that one day! I reinstalled Prophecy and couldn't get the movies to play properly. This software has allowd me to fix that problem.

I wish there was a similar patch for the Kilrathi Saga!

Musashi