Website update, July 3rd

PopsiclePete

Mission programmer
Here is this week's news update:

More voices

This week, the last remaining voiceovers for the new Episode 1 cutscenes were delivered - so I can now get started rendering the cutscenes themselves. It really went much smoother than I thought, which is great. Now if only they don't cause any trouble in rendering, it shouldn't take too long. Our schedule is starting to look a little tight - after all, Michael will need to add some music to these, too.

Not much other progress to report this week. I mean, I'm still working on the new ships, but I'm not gonna waste my time reporting on each of those ;-). Other than that, Pierre is working on fixing up support for some of the new graphical updates, and and bughunting.

The testers, meanwhile, are busy reporting new bugs for Quarto to fix. Apparently, Dundradal wasn't too impressed when it turned out he can't reach the newly-completed final mission because something got broken in the previous one ;-).
 
Pfftt...that was the least of the concerns this week....you know there was that big bug that was actually more annoying...oh and then the one Pete and I were working on this evening...which is a real big pain in the ass.

But beyond that I've had a good last few days filling up Quarto's mailbox...once he gets steady internet service back he's got a lot of work to do. :p
 
Been waiting a while for Standoff and thanks for the hard work. I have yet to play an episode, been trying to hold off and play the whole thing at once :)
 
Eh, with all the improvements to the earlier episodes - and especially given I haven't had much time to spend with Standoff for a long time now - I intend on starting from the very beginning anyway.

I think the end is in sight, friends. Keep persevering, your efforts will be celebrated soon, I am certain.
 
Keep up the good work :)

Seriously, I'm getting desperate to play this new episode ~~~

Usually I would play the previous 4 chapters and all, but knowing you have added new cutscenes and voices to the first one, and all the graphical update.... I'm trying to wait until the final release :)


On a side note, how difficult would it be to translate the game to other languages?

I was thinking about maybe doing a spanish translation so my friends could play this.
 
There is a lot of text, but it'd be all pretty easy to edit (no programming involved or anything). Some things might not be translated without some graphics knowledge since there's some text stored as images. We've had people wanting to do other localizations in the past, but I never heard back from any of them after the initial 2 days of excitement. It's just a whole lot of text.
 
There is a lot of text, but it'd be all pretty easy to edit (no programming involved or anything). Some things might not be translated without some graphics knowledge since there's some text stored as images. We've had people wanting to do other localizations in the past, but I never heard back from any of them after the initial 2 days of excitement. It's just a whole lot of text.


Well, I'm interested in doing it eventually. Right now I'm finishing System Shock translation and working from time to time in the Ultima Lazarus one, so I'm actually with a lot of projects right now, but I really want to do this one too. Of course I must admit that I don' want the story spoiled, so I will probably wait at least until the game is released to really try translating this game.

The only thing that really worries me about it is the special characters like: ¿, ¡, á, é, i, ó, ú, ü and ñ. Do the fonts from Secret Ops have this special characters?
 
Eh, with all the improvements to the earlier episodes - and especially given I haven't had much time to spend with Standoff for a long time now - I intend on starting from the very beginning anyway.

I think the end is in sight, friends. Keep persevering, your efforts will be celebrated soon, I am certain.

Normally, I'd say "Get your ass into the cockpit now!" But with all the new bells and whistles that are going in, it's definitely better to sit down and play through the entire experience. Then sit down again and play the other paths. The winning and losing paths offer some great experiences.

I'll have to see about also devoting some time this month to polishing up the Standoff guide, maybe get the preliminary version out for the CIC birthday, I could use another person though to help look it over. Anybody want to help?
 
I know I'm gonna probably get yelled at for this but...I don't want the finale to come yet...I don't want Standoff to end! :(
 
Secrets ops does include language files for other languages including Spanish, so you shouldn't have any problem from the font if set the language for Secret ops to Spanish....not sure how to do that, but there must be some way.
 
Much better to have a satisfying conclusion than an open ending purely because it is unfinished (as opposed to a deliberately open-ended story by artistic design).

I can agree that the anticipation of a new thing is a fun phase to be in in its own right. There's lots of other cool Wing Commander projects going on, but Standoff has a great niche. What's going in there after Episode 5 comes out?
 
Yay, me internet has returned.

...Now, why do I find that disappointing? :p Seriously, last few days was fantastic, I was able to work away on Standoff with no distractions at all. Why, I've always known that the internet wastes time, but I don't think I ever quite realised how much time it wastes.

Anyway...

I can agree that the anticipation of a new thing is a fun phase to be in in its own right. There's lots of other cool Wing Commander projects going on, but Standoff has a great niche. What's going in there after Episode 5 comes out?
I think after Standoff is done, we're going to have to give a lot of thinking to what it means to us as a team. We keep on talking about how tired we are of modding... but you know, I've spent my entire adult life so far working on WC projects, nearly a decade. I do need a break, especially with my wedding coming up - but how long will I really be able to stay way? We'll see...

...And a post-mortem. We definitely need a post-mortem. I think one of the problems of the WC editing community (and it's been so much of a problem that it's hard to speak of the editing community as such - I'm not really sure it exists any more) is that everyone is always on their own, and everyone's making the same mistakes. We've screwed up so many times in so many ways along the way, I think just summarising our mistakes would be a great way of helping the rest of the modding community.

Anyway, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. For us, it's still a bit early to talk about "after Standoff" ;).
 
Why, I've always known that the internet wastes time, but I don't think I ever quite realised how much time it wastes.
<pats Q> There there, I know just what you mean. :)

And you're right, of course. Any talk of what happens afterwards is, at the moment, premature.
 
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