Wow, a website update!

Eder

Mr. Standoff
I'm serious, it's there... :D

Go check it out, there's a roundup of all the latest progress on the news page, and I've also updated the progress page which was really, really outdated. There's also one new screenshot of the Stiletto's cockpit, this one in 640x480 (so it has the smaller gauges, not the 1024x768 ones from the screenshots I've posted here on the forum).

Also, there's my extremely delayed welcome to Tango, our latest member, who's already been coding missions for like a month now, but I kept forgetting to update the staff page. Shame on me :p
 
Eder said:
Due to WCP's "background comms", we won't be able to use custom faces for the most important wingmen. That means that videos like the one you see in screenshot number 89 of the screenshots page had to be scrapped in favor of more generic versions

That´s too bad. It was a great feature.

Congrats on the updates! How about those last 2 or 3 ships that need finishing? I´m specially curious about the Hakaga.

I´ll start working on my voiceovers this weekend. IIRC, my pilot (Landreich Generic #2) will only show up in the Main Campaign, right?
 
Starkey said:
Congrats on the updates! How about those last 2 or 3 ships that need finishing? I´m specially curious about the Hakaga.
I´ll start working on my voiceovers this weekend. IIRC, my pilot (Landreich Generic #2) will only show up in the Main Campaign, right?
Well, as Eder said in the update, his time is rather limited, so it's not known when they'll be done. And yep, Landreich pilots only show up in the main campaign.
 
I feel so fortunate; I get to do a buttload of vocal work for standoff. :D Now if only I knew how to design ships or code missions, I'd be invaluable.
 
For they're jolly good fellows! For they're jolly good fellows! Which nobody can't deny.

3 Cheers!--an update

It's Christmas and updates and demos abound!

Yyyaaahhh!!!!
 
Eder said:
Due to WCP's "background comms", we won't be able to use custom faces for the most important wingmen. That means that videos like the one you see in screenshot number 89 of the screenshots page had to be scrapped in favor of more generic versions

Freyers (the comm officer) will still have his custom face, right? Also, can´t you trigger those custom faces to show up in specific key moments only? I mean, regular in-battle comms would feature generic comm video and, when the special wingman has something important to say, he would show up with his customized face.

BTW, how is Standoff´s progress?
 
Starkey said:
Freyers (the comm officer) will still have his custom face, right?
Right. Freyers can keep his custom face, since he doesn't use "background" comms. At least not often... if during beta testing we run into an error triggered by him (we haven't so far, but hey, anything can happen here), we'll probably just remove the line in question, since it's not vital that capships use certain types of comms (taunts, kill reports, etc) like it is for wingmen.


Starkey said:
Also, can´t you trigger those custom faces to show up in specific key moments only? I mean, regular in-battle comms would feature generic comm video and, when the special wingman has something important to say, he would show up with his customized face.
We could, but that's pretty lame. :p One minute you see the guy with an all-black helmet, the next minute he has custom helmet art and his visor has gone translucent? That'd just look strange and confusing... It *could* work, if the change wasn't too noticeable (for example, add just the face, and no helmet art) but that's kinda missing the point... I would be rendering a dozen different comms and praying that nobody noticed the difference between them. :p

Starkey said:
BTW, how is Standoff´s progress?
Official statement: Steady. :D
 
Eder said:
We could, but that's pretty lame. :p One minute you see the guy with an all-black helmet, the next minute he has custom helmet art and his visor has gone translucent? That'd just look strange and confusing... It *could* work, if the change wasn't too noticeable (for example, add just the face, and no helmet art) but that's kinda missing the point... I would be rendering a dozen different comms and praying that nobody noticed the difference between them.

One last idea: Would it work if you had two separate files for each pilot, one with the "background comms" and other one with the main, custom-faced comms?
 
Nope.

What happens is that we have a list of comms, with a block full of numbers for each comm line. These numbers control the video type (which video to play), comm type (when to use that line) and sound file (which line to play), among other things.

The game randomly picks comms to send as background comms based on their comm type. Some comm types will never be sent as background comms, but others (taunts, for example) can be sent either as background (sound only, reduced volume) comms or as regular (full sound and video) comms, depending on what the game randomly chose to do at that moment... so there's no way to know when a comm will be used as a background comm, because the game takes the same reference and just randomly decides to play it without the video (resulting in a crash if the "video type" number is a reference to one of our custom videos... but resulting in no problems at all if the "video type" number is a reference to one of the generic videos).

HCl just learned about this bug (been a while since I had caught him online) and he says he'll try to fix it because it sounds simple. Depending on wheter he succeeds, and how long he takes, the custom helmets might come back, even if only for the main campaign.

In that case, I'm not sure what the effects of overwriting the pilot files used in the Prologue would be... If there's no chance of savegame incompatibility, installing the main campaign will extend the update to the prologue as well. If there's a chance of savegame incompatibility, we'll study our other options.
 
Hey Eder, what is your best estimate on how long it will take to get Standoff done and what will the download size be?
 
The prologue will be released this year... probably before December :p The main campaign will probably be released next year. No estimate on the filesize yet... probably larger than UE, since we have much more speech as well as more ships (fighters hardly matter, but capships can be a couple of mb each + textures).
 
The Prologue is the demo :p. And when Eder says it will be released before December, he doesn't mean it will be released in November (or even October :p) - he's just implying that we're not going to give a date more specific than "this year" until we're pretty sure of it.
 
Nope, they will release a 7-missions Prologue, which will be very useful for beta testing, and then a whole 31-missions Main Campaign, along with 10 simulator missions. They can release the game faster if more good programmers show up to help coding missions, which is what takes the most time.
 
Just for the record, I wouldn't call the prologue beta-testing per se. We'll use it to get feedback on the features of the game - not to hunt bugs like in a beta.

We'll be thru bug hunting by the time the prologue is released... it will be as stable as possible upon release... but feedback on the game will be useful to include improvements in the main campaign as much as we can (read: anything that doesn't require re-programming half the prologue :)).
 
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