Strike Commander with Oculus Rift (Virtual Reality Headset) project.

[fabiensanglard]

So I have the Conversation format partially reverse engineered. I am still missing the facial expressions timing unfortunately:

But since I control the format, I can create whatever I want :

 

[fabiensanglard]

I have the conversation pixel perfect if only for a text rendering bug.

 

[Shades2585]

Nice work! Keep it up!

 

[Silent Hunter]

Great work!

 

[Six-Gun Slim]

Just the idea of an open-source, reverse-engineered version of Strike Commander with more modern graphical capabilities makes me literally giddy: the prospect of being able to actually play the game in VR even more so! All it needs is a RetroWave soundtrack...

 

[Darkmage]

Has anyone tried to apply these tools against Wing Commander Privateer? Strike Commander looks like a bridge between the Wing Commander 3/4 engines (based on RealSpace) and Wing Commander Privateer (conversations/bar system) I'd love to know if it's possible to remake Wing Commander 3/4 using the code for the Strike Commander remake. I reckon they reused the terrain engine features of Strike Commander to do Wing Commander 3/4's ground missions. The space aspect of Wing Commander 3/4 would just be strike commander without a ground. (just thinking Wing Commander 3/4 on all platforms with support for Oculus Rift would be freaking NUTS.)

 

[Wedge009]

Wow, I completely missed all this impressive work. I came across Fabien's blog posts on this development work while I was looking for something to unpack the PAK files from Strike Commander. I was thinking about giving the Strike Commander story the same treatment I did so long ago with the Wing Commander games and so dusted off my old copy of HCl's TRE Manager. Not sure if it's an ancient 16-bit program, but I had to dig into a WinXP VM for this - didn't have much luck with DOSbox. I can find some couple of random midgame IFFs but presumably the rest are all tied up in the PAKs. I see Fabien's made some tools to manipulate the IFF and PAK archives - how easy is it to apply them to a command-line binary in similar vein to TRE Manager?

More to the point - is this project even still going? The sharp resolution on the screenshots, even if the models are hopelessly primitive for it, looks really nice.

 

[AD]

Wow, I completely missed all this impressive work. I came across Fabien's blog posts on this development work while I was looking for something to unpack the PAK files from Strike Commander. I was thinking about giving the Strike Commander story the same treatment I did so long ago with the Wing Commander games and so dusted off my old copy of HCl's TRE Manager. Not sure if it's an ancient 16-bit program, but I had to dig into a WinXP VM for this - didn't have much luck with DOSbox. I can find some couple of random midgame IFFs but presumably the rest are all tied up in the PAKs. I see Fabien's made some tools to manipulate the IFF and PAK archives - how easy is it to apply them to a command-line binary in similar vein to TRE Manager?

More to the point - is this project even still going? The sharp resolution on the screenshots, even if the models are hopelessly primitive for it, looks really nice.

I recently used Treman in Win7... IIRC the solution was that you have to have cwsdpmi.exe in the directory with the tre file and then run that in dosbox before running treman.

 

[fabiensanglard]

@Wedge009 I wrote tools to open the TRE, PAK and IFFS. The project is not updated anymore since i started my new job at Google. I was hoping to reach a critical mass back in the day to have a team ala pentagram to hopefully do something like ultima7 or ultima8 rewrite but it never happened.

Overall I am happy with what I learned and how far I went. My only regret is to have never figured out the object coordinate placement on the map. That would have been pretty cool to inject a flying simulator model in it and be able to replay some of the mission. Well, maybe someone someday will finish it ?

 

[Wedge009]

Thanks, AD. The VM solution worked for me, but I'll keep that in mind for DOSbox next time. Been a while since I've gone retro - always relied on the old 386 in the past but one of the boards released the 'magic blue smoke' some time ago...

I admire what you did so far, Fabien - no doubt Google is doing well to have you working for them. I'll dig through your source code - I miss playing around with C++ though I'm probably horribly rusty at it now.