Wing Commander online

K

Kuppowski

Spaceman
Hi! isn´t it possible to create a WC game basing on Standoff in which you can play online player vs. player like Counter Strike? That would be very nice!!
 
It is, but there's something required to do it. Time. Currently, the Standoff creators do not have enough time to creat a multiplayer patch.
 
Kuppowski said:
Hi! isn´t it possible to create a WC game basing on Standoff in which you can play online player vs. player like Counter Strike? That would be very nice!!
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We already have WCP Multiplayer online thanks to HCl. You might want to check that out. You can find people to fly against on #wingnut. It's really a great time, that is unless you fly against Popsicle Pete, he's sneaky.
 
I'm sure everyone's noticed that there hasn't been as much progress this year as we'd like. It's been almost exactly ten months since the previous episode, and we still can't even guess when the upcoming episode is going to be ready for release. So, what I'm getting at is that we are really not giving any thought to multiplayer at the moment.

(also, once we do get onto a multiplayer patch after ep. 5 is done, it'll most likely be a fairly straight-forward adaptation of HCl's multiplayer patch, without any additional special features; I'm sorry to disappoint anybody hoping for cooperative missions or anything complex like that, but we simply have to finish Standoff before Standoff finishes us... :eek: )
 
Quarto said:
but we simply have to finish Standoff before Standoff finishes us... :eek: )
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Your devotion makes me feel bad about not playing Standoff anymore.

It's really great when people put this much work into a fan project, especially at the cost of real life stuff... You guys are amazing! :)
 
As Q said, progress has been slower than expected (back when we released Ep 3, the idea was to have Ep 4 out by now, and Ep 5 released by christmas '06 or early '07), but we do hope to make use of HCl's multiplayer patch in Standoff after Episode 5 is out.

Q is also correct in that this multiplayer component will have nothing overly fancy to it - what you can expect are dogfights with Standoff's ships and gameplay.
 
Yeah, why would he ever say something like that? On the contrary, he's talked quite a bit about all the different things he believes is possible, but they are all a long way off.
 
PopsiclePete said:
What ? I do have a great time flying against you ! ;)
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Yeah, because I'm usually exploding. No, we really had some great times during the bday. Quite a few memorable engagements.
 
Quarto said:
I'm sure everyone's noticed that there hasn't been as much progress this year as we'd like. It's been almost exactly ten months since the previous episode, and we still can't even guess when the upcoming episode is going to be ready for release.
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With the slow progress is it mainly that the new missions are proving very difficult to work with stability wise? Cause I noticed myself that the bigger missions like the pirate base and the Snakier strike that the game can run a bit choppy.
But then in the battles at Sirius and Earth add a few supercarriers a line of snakeirs, cruisers, destroyers, corvettes etc + the confed fleet and literally hundreds of fighters its easy for me to imagine you guys might be having technical difficulties.
Am i right in guessing that is at least partly what is making it difficult?
 
They probably won't have more than 4 or 5 capships in a nav in the first place. The engine without enhancements can only handle a max of 7 capships.

I would think that the primary reasons for the lacking progress are real life and the fact that modding SO is a time-consuming affair just in programming the missions and creating the animations.
 
Thunderbolt said:
With the slow progress is it mainly that the new missions are proving very difficult to work with stability wise?
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Nope, we just haven't managed to dedicate nearly as much time to Standoff as we hoped to this year.

Thunderbolt said:
Cause I noticed myself that the bigger missions like the pirate base and the Snakier strike that the game can run a bit choppy.
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Well, yes, the engine not being optimized to make use of the latest graphics hardware gimmicks is a bit of an inconvenience to us, as it tends to limit the amount of stuff we can have onscreen regardless of what video card we're testing with. This has always been an issue ever since Ep 1, though, and so it's a problem we already know how to deal with (if you already have framerate problems with the current chapters, however, you will continue to have framerate problems with the next chapters :p).

Iceblade said:
They probably won't have more than 4 or 5 capships in a nav in the first place.
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Yeah, we'll be splitting things across different navpoints mostly, but I'm not sure wheter 4 or 5 capships is an accurate figure. What I know is that we can't downscale these big epic battles too much, even if the framerate suffers.
 
Iceblade said:
They probably won't have more than 4 or 5 capships in a nav in the first place. The engine without enhancements can only handle a max of 7 capships.
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Not sure where you came up with these figures. I've never actually reached the limit on capships, even though I have on a few occasions had to use a test mission with every Standoff capship in there at the same time.

...Of course, the utter limit and a practical limit are two different things - for this reason, as Eder mentioned, we do split big battles across multiple navpoints. The practical limit, however, is set by two factors, with framerate, oddly enough, turning out to be by far the less important one. The other factor is quite simiply mission survivalability and winnability. We could probably throw ten capships and fifty fighters at the player, and the framerate would survive... but the player wouldn't. We don't want that. Standoff isn't UE, the hard part is supposed to be victory, not survival :p.
 
I got the 7 capships value from an error that occurred long ago when I was making SO missions. I had I think 5-6 capships in a nav but my code didn't have a terminate for several spawn functions and the engine eventually crashed with a error message that said that the mission exceeded 7 of something (don't remember what that something was but I got the impression that it was essientially capships or huge numbers of smaller objects). Also, isn't there a dll used by Standoff (maybe UE, too) that took care of this limiting factor in some way or another?




Ahh...I may be remembering it incorrectly.
 
I did crank the amount of polygons that can be displayed in the current build of the DLL, but it's been easy to put more than 7 capships in a NAV point in the past, too. Your crash was probably caused by something else... it's very easy to trigger a crash while coding missions :p
 
It probably wasn't capships it was refering to but it was essientially an overload of polygons that was the error message (tons of bug ships repeated being spawned without end). I fixed the bug and never got that error again. That was probably the first time I really got into a lot of variable use -- now I love to code them into missions (super useful things).
 
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