Saga Goes Goth (September 7, 2008)

[Bandit LOAF]

The Wing Commander Saga team has decided to go back and give their fighter models a 'lived in' feel with a new set of textures! Explained:

In the Prologue, we wanted our models to stick with a clean military look. At the time, we were still learning the tech that we were using as tools, so we weren't certain of the limits of exactly what we could pull off. So, we went with something a little on the safe side: pristine models that looked like they had just come off of the assembly line. In the past months, however, we went back to the drawing board and started applying different effects to the textures and models. As you can see, Confederation fighters now look like they have seen hard combat duty, and are dirtier and battle scarred. In this visual shift, we wanted to show that the war effort is not going well for Confed, that every fighter counts, and that every effort was made to keep these warbirds flying, sometimes even long after they should have been decommissioned. We are hoping that this visual evolution will add to the overall atmosphere of the part of Wing Commander history that we are trying to capture in our main campaign.

Here's how they look:

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Original update published on September 7, 2008

 

[Drizzt Do Urden]

They look awesome!

 

[ChrisReid]

Yeah, the game wasn't dark enough before. I've been saying all along that everything in Saga needs to have a shadowy filter applied to it.

 

[ELTEE]

Weathering is always a difficult and debatable activity in modeling, scale or otherwise. I certainly appreciate the impact it can have and the level of detail required to pull it off. It's very easy to overdo it. Done properly, weathering often reveals important information about the war effort 'between the lines.'

I could envision a few scenarios where weathering would come into play. It presents an interesting challenge since the needs of a starfighter differ somewhat from a 20 or 21st century combat aircraft.

Maybe the Confederation begins running short on paint supplies, or decides that there is no time on the production line to be spared for painting. A 'bare metal' version of a Confed fighter, or at least its WC equivalent, would be interesting. Is there residue from repeated energy weapon's fire? How about if too much afterburner is used without adequate maintenance intervals?

This brings up a point I'd love to see addressed in a future manual like Star*Soldier. How many hours of maintenance are required for each 'flight' hour for some of the well known fighters? That would be an interesting way to describe why some ships are used on certain fronts while others are not. I'm thinking here in reality of the F-14 vs the F/A-18....

 

[Max Gene]

These look fantastic. Well, so long as I'm not the one in the cockpit, I guess .

 

[NinjaLA]

clearly I'm going to have to turn the gamma way up on my monitor to play saga.

I couldn't even see any longbow until I adjusted my monitor brightness just now.. just disembodied yellow stripes.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

This brings up a point I'd love to see addressed in a future manual like Star*Soldier. How many hours of maintenance are required for each 'flight' hour for some of the well known fighters? That would be an interesting way to describe why some ships are used on certain fronts while others are not. I'm thinking here in reality of the F-14 vs the F/A-18....

I think the closest to that that we've seen comes from End Run: "The accountants back at fleet headquarters would most likely go nuts if they ever found out that the new planes assigned to Tarawa had clocked over two hundred hours of flying time in the last thirty days. Planes aboard frontline carriers were expected to last a minimum of fourteen months before their thousand-hour strip-down and rebuilding check, a process which grounded the craft for a month and cost a cool million just in parts."

As for the rest of you -- as funny as it is that Saga keeps making everything extraordinarily dark for no reason, it's about time we lay off.

 

[Mjr. Whoopass]

I liked the 'clean' look of the fighters for the Prologue. I imagined that everything looked newer because they were training fighters that hadn't seen combat. I think it could make sense to have the more beat up looking fighters flown by squadrons that are seeing a lot of combat. I might also expect the Excaliburs to be cleaner looking since they're brand new fighters that haven't yet seen much if any combat.

 

[Aginor]

I looked at the screenshots on an old crappy CRT and now I understand what you mean.

It's really a funny thing how different (and really kinda dark) they look on that old screens (or when I set my TFT-display on lowest contrast and brightness).
But those of you who played the Prologue might have noticed that Saga doesn't look as dark ingame as the screenshots might do on your screen (and yes, for those who like it brighter, there is still a gamma correction )

 

[ELTEE]

I liked the 'clean' look of the fighters for the Prologue. I imagined that everything looked newer because they were training fighters that hadn't seen combat. I think it could make sense to have the more beat up looking fighters flown by squadrons that are seeing a lot of combat. I might also expect the Excaliburs to be cleaner looking since they're brand new fighters that haven't yet seen much if any combat.

This makes sense to me. I would imagine there would be certain ship types that would have experienced less combat than others.

The best scenario is to incorporate dynamic weathering which changes during the course of a fight. This is a tall order on system resources and programming time, as I understand it. I'm excited 'weathering' has been considered in the first place.