WCPedia - Progress Update

Dundradal

Frog Blast the Vent Core!
WCPedia has already had a very busy 2011. LOAF has done some great work in adding Priv2 Bulletin Board Mission articles. He's also put together a temp skeleton of every mission in the WC universe. We are currently in the process of working through this list and adding mission information.

I'm continuing through the Ultimate Strategy Guide text and LaFong's memoirs are almost finished.

By the end of the month, WCPedia should contain more than 1,450 content articles. That means we've added over 350 new articles since August 10 of last year. Dozens of articles received massive updates and rewrites in the same period. I'm hoping we can still make my goal of doubling the size of WCPedia (roughly 2,200 articles) by August 10, 2011.

"Fight the good fight, Heart of the Tiger."
 
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This weekend was a huge success for WCPedia. LOAF continued to add Priv2 missions as well as finding an ability to create and edit infoboxes!

I've continued with LaFong's entries. All that remaining are 35 pages of text for the WC2 winning path missions.

Be sure to take a peek at what we've been up to!
 
We are over 1,500 entries now.

The big news today is that I've finished entering 132 Privateer 2 BBS & SOS missions--all the information from the official guide and all the text from the game itself. They're a lot of fun for anyone with any interest in the Tri-System.

My next step is the plot missions, which are a little more confusing... and after that I'm going to expand the Privateer 2 material into proper entries (ie, characters, ships, a timeline and so forth.)
 
It's great to see all P2D BBS missions together. Thank you for this great job.
Do you managed to uncompress/uncode the game files or do you copied the text by hand? If you've done it the first way, i would be really interested to know, how i can read/ get access to the uncompressed/uncoded game files.

However i also have a question to the newsposter. There is this Privateer 2 screenshot which has completely different values for the weapon prices and also some different graphics. From where is this screenshot? Is it a beta one or one from an update/patch or different version?
 
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That screenshot (and two others) are from a very very old Interview we (Akkbar) did with Erin Roberts way back in mid 1996, before P2 was released. You can find the article at https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/7010

Check out how the screenshot was even compressed down from 640x480 to 512x384 - silly '90s!
pdshot1.jpg


pdshot2.jpg


pdshot3.jpg
 
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It's great to see all P2D BBS missions together. Thank you for this great job.
Do you managed to uncompress/uncode the game files or do you copied the text by hand? If you've done it the first way, i would be really interested to know, how i can read/ get access to the uncompressed/uncoded game files.

Thanks!

Unfortunately I haven't had any luck extracting things from Privateer 2--and I'd really, really like to so I can fact check the Official Guide's mission data. I know, for instance, that it's missing all the pods, spacemen and mission specific space stations. At present I think I'm going to play through every mission myself next to see what I can learn. The text in the guide came from files provided by the game's programmer Paul Hughes.

However i also have a question to the newsposter. There is this Privateer 2 screenshot which has completely different values for the weapon prices and also some different graphics. From where is this screenshot? Is it a beta one or one from an update/patch or different version?

That was one of a big lot (50-odd) images used by Origin to promote the game very early on. I'm still trying to find a backup of them all (I'm sure it's around somewhere). It's hard to believe but there was a time when we couldn't have so many images on a website at the same time!

Another great source for pre-release P2 material is this magazine supplement that was put out to promote the game: http://download.wcnews.com/files/documents/p2preview.zip
 
]

I love this screenshot. It appeared in the E3 '96 cover of the game and then went on for a long, long time as being seemingly the only screenshot from P2, ever. Odds are if you try and find a review of the game that'll feature prominently. For years I wondered if P2 ships could only pitch up and down.

(The really fascinating thing of it, looking now, is how the Blade features prominently in the hostile VDU, as opposed to the final game where every ship is a Duress for the sake of damage reports).

Bandit LOAF said:
At present I think I'm going to play through every mission myself next to see what I can learn.

Fun thing: In the Bexian band mission, the transport and Faldari escorts are pegged as neutral from the start - they still seem to recognize you as hostile, but won't fire until you fire first. This led to a really silly occasion where the ships in their eagerness to shadow me ended up crashing into each other like drunk fish. I took a screenshot, but don't know if I have it anymore.
 
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I love that shot just as a cool pre-release image showing things differently. It's neat that all the VDUs are turned on, where the screen would normally be mostly empty. I am sorely lacking in P2 screenshots overall though and would love to get more gameplay pics in a variety of situations.
 
For those interested we are doing some project work right now in #wingnut.

Lots of P2 stuff should be going up today along with some more USG text. Be sure to check it out or drop by #wingnut!
 
You can now read the entirety of LaFong's memoir in WCPedia! I finished uploading all the main text today. The only thing remaining are some captions related to images and a few other small text boxes.

I'm in the process of going through the text now making article links and highlighting others for new article creation.

It's going to be a good year for WCPedia!
 
Another update....

We've reached 1,600 articles!

LOAF has been adding P2 entries like a madman!

Check out his Temp P2 skeleton showing what's in and what's still to be done for that game.

Also be sure to check out all the current missions that have been entered in the P2 Mission Archive.

The Mission Skeleton still has quite a few entries to go before it's completed but we've made great progress this month.

As always, we are looking for people to help with all kinds of smaller projects on WCPedia. You just need to ask where you can help.
 
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To round out the month of January...as of right now we have 1,756 content articles! I'm pretty sure this month has been the busiest in WCPedia history. We've seen over 500 new content articles added and over a thousand updates to existing pages.

Here's something else to take a peak at...Orsini 1, the first mission in Wing Commander 3. The article is only missing a few more pieces before being complete but check out the information from the two official guides and read the actual WC3 script for the game's conversations.

2011 is looking to be an excellent year for WCPedia!
 
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1,876 articles which means we are 224 short of doubling the size of WCPedia since last August 10! It's ...and every Priv2 ship, from every faction, is now in WCPedia. The current article text is placeholder as it will be rewritten in the coming weeks with improved text.

We've added a ton of data to the infoboxes for the ships (cargo holds, cost, gun mounts, and so on).

Privateer 2 data is well on its way to being completely uploaded. Still quite a bit to go, but getting Priv2 ships uploaded was a great feeling to finish. There are just a few of them after all. :p
 
The Freij MKII data has a small glitch
WCPedia said:
Gun Mounts 4
Missile Mounts 7
Module Mounts 7
Cost 180,000 credits

It's actually

Gun Mounts 5
Missile Mounts 7
Module Mounts 7
Cost 200,000 credits

I assume it was a simple copy paste mistake using the data from the normal Freij.

However, please tell me from where you got the exact Acceleration, Max Y/P/R, Armor and Shields values. I've searched all privateer 2 folders and files with a hex editor and couldn't find them.

\EDIT
the Krono has in the wcpedia
WCPedia said:
Armor 2500 cm
Shields 2500 cm
while it is actually invincible ingame. Even if you give yourself or your freighter a Krono, you or your freighter can't be destroyed.

\EDIT
the PR01 Aurora and PR02 Shaman don't have the Gun, Missile and Module Mounts listed. The Shaman also has way too high armor and shield values.

\EDIT
the PL3A Skecis MK II has
WCPedia said:
Gun Mounts 4
Missile Mounts 5
Module Mounts 3
While it's actually

Gun Mounts 3
Missile Mounts 7
Module Mounts 4

\EDIT
CR01 Gea Transit has Cargo 250 tonnes (not 220)

CR1A Gea MK II has Cost 110 credits (per run) (not 100)

CR3A Ilia MK II has Cargo 900 tonnes (not 750) and Cargo Bays 8 (not 7)
 
The numbers are all from the official guide--we need to go through and compare it to what's in the game.
 
I see. Thanks for the info.
Is this official guide somewhere available to download?

For the player ships and the 5 cargo ships you can use the dark.exe editor part in my savegame editor to check a few values (guns,missiles,modules,price) from the exe.

Unfortunately do i haven't found the other ships yet and still hope that some day someone might be able to find them, so i can finally enhance the editor and allow reading/editing of these values too.

Oh btw, yesterday i used the bigf extractor tool that i've found somewhere here for download, to extract some files from the privateer 2 archives. Among others also the sound files from dani.big. With audacity's import raw data using "VOX ADPCM" and a sample rate of 11025Hz they where hearable almost 100% like ingame, but still had some strange echo effects at the end and some rare clicks/disturbances. Does anyone know the correct settings or has written a tool to import correct the audio files? It could be also nice to have these sounds available to hear in WCPedia.


A question to the mod/admins: Would it be against wcnews rules, if i create a topic which collects all material for privateer 2? I've seen that many gems like the "Tape B" high-quality videos, the privateer 2 archive with 3d models etc and other stuff are only mentioned in their respective newspost, but nowhere else. Thus if you don't know what you're searching for you can't find it.
The new topic would then have nothing else than the links to all the different materials. (Could be maybe also done as a WCPedia page instead)
 
The Freij MKII data has a small glitch


Thanks for pointing those out. Yesterday we were copying a lot of the data straight CIC Ships while adding some of the P2 guide data as well. I'll correct those errors later today.

The Priv2 official guide is not available for download but you can purchase it online. Priv2 on Amazon
 
Do you have a WCPedia account?

We are always looking for people to help. We could use someone to double-check the articles to make sure all the information is correct.
 
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