[General Battuta]

Hey folks,

Lovely game, and it shows all the hard work that's been put into it. If you folks want to implement skippable dialogue and mid-mission checkpoints for any of your future work, please let me know and I can try to put together a tutorial for you. I saw some requests on the WCS site.

If on the other hand this is a design choice you're opposed to I completely understand.

Regards.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

That would be worth considering for the next release in my opinion. Some missions have some rather lengthy beginings before getting into the action, meaning one has to go through all that dialogue'n'stuff as many times as s/he has to start over.
Of course this also mean a rather significant amount of extra work to implement something like that and make sure it doesn't break the mission in any way (I'm looking at you, DE checkpoint 1).
In any case, what Battuta said :

If on the other hand this is a design choice you're opposed to I completely understand.

[Spoon]

I just finished a mission that lasted 31(!!!) minutes and I ended up with 76 kills.  Thankfully I didn't die. Else I would have been mighty pissed at the lack of a checkpoint system.
I'd say, take Battuta's offer with both hands. WCS deserves it.

[newman]

Agreed, this is the single most needed feature that would make for a dramatic improvement, in my opinion. I'm surprised there aren't more requests for this, tbh. Checkpoints wouldn't take away anything from the game except some needless frustration.

[jr2]

Complete game state game saves a la Descent would work... I don't know if that would be easy to do though; Descent and FS probably are different enough so that you can't just port it over... right?

[MatthTheGeek]

If that was easy to do, it would have been done years ago. The checkpoint implementation is complex enough, and it is proven to work just fine.

[General Battuta]

Complete game state game saves a la Descent would work... I don't know if that would be easy to do though; Descent and FS probably are different enough so that you can't just port it over... right?

You clearly do not know anything about how we've handled checkpoints in FSO, so please get out of the thread.

[Vidmaster]

As someone who did make missions for WCS, I can state that all missions were fredded in a rather similar structure that would lend it to FS0 checkpoints rather well.
I can't say if checkpoints were discussed after I left the team but I suppose it was not a subject (as it wasn't one before). All the effort went into finally getting it done and playable for the people out there. 10 years are 10 years and I think everyone is happy that it is OUT.

[General Battuta]

I totally agree, and I'm not pushing the team to do what I want. FSO checkpoints are messy and labor-intensive and the team may just not want to use such a hackish technique. I'm just saying I'm available to provide advice if they want to try it out - though I'm certain WCS FREDders could work it out on their own.

Dialogue skips would probably be a little easier to pull off. You could rig them so they were only available on the second+ playthrough of a mission.

[mjn.mixael]

Battuta, I would love to see that tutorial regardless of whether or not WCS wants it...

[General Battuta]

Battuta, I would love to see that tutorial regardless of whether or not WCS wants it...

Okay, I'll whip up a quick and dirty post to reveal all the dumb secrets of this slightly silly and totally hackish technique

[karajorma]

I wouldn't mind reading it myself. I remember discussing it with you a long time ago and I'd be interested in seeing what refinements you've come up with in the intervening years.

Hell, I might have some suggestions of my own.

[General Battuta]

I wouldn't mind reading it myself. I remember discussing it with you a long time ago and I'd be interested in seeing what refinements you've come up with in the intervening years.

Hell, I might have some suggestions of my own.

That would be awesome. I'm pretty handy with FRED but I often miss elegant solutions because I am a lunkhead and don't have a great handle on coder-think.

[Dragon]

The good thing about WCS missions is their waypoint structure. You pretty much always know the precise state game is in once you can proceed. Often, you'd need only a few variables to store ship HP, as the checkpoints are very detached from each other. This should make such missions comparatively easy to add checkpoints to. Add to that the lenght of WCS missions and it seems like those missions were made with checkpoints in mind.

[headdie]

The only issue i have with checkpoints is that to my knowledge there were none in WC (not played Prophesy so i dont know if it was different for that) and would having chekpoints mid mission change the feel of the game?  I actually get a greater sense of satisfaction knowing I did the mission without using on mid mission saves.

Dialogue skip on the other hand would be awesome when replaying a mission.

[MatthTheGeek]

I don't see how checkpoints being there would disrupt the feeling. If you feel using checkpoints is not WC-ish, just don't use em !

[newman]

WCS is already different from Wing Commander games, as it couldn't exactly use fully acted motion video cutscenes to tell the story. WCS can't do that so it relies on a lot of in mission dialogue to set things up. This results in very long talkie parts and having to redo them several times for tougher missions isn't so much a game feature as an annoyance. For some, it will be a game breaking annoyance, which is a shame after that much work.
Also, "but the xy game from 20 years ago didn't do it" isn't really an argument. Game development has come far since then, and if you want to successfully pay homage to an older franchise, you should do it by replicating the general feeling as closely as you can (something WCS does very well), adopting the game mechanics that worked (another thing that WCS does great), and tossing those that didn't really work and the authors themselves wouldn't do it that way today (one thing where WCS could use a bit of polish).

As someone who has played all Wing Commanders from WC2 upwards, I can tell you that even though those games also sometimes had annoying bits, I never found them nearly as frustrating as WCS can be at times. The "oh no 10 minutes of that dialogue AGAIN" moments are just all too frequent.

[Dragon]

Agreed. Especially the last missions are overly long and dialogue intensive.
BTW, there's one thing that's been bugging me through the entire WCS campaign. Did they really called flights "wings" in WC on a regular basis? IIRC, they didn't made this (very silly to anybody who knows anything about air force units) mistake. What's especially strange, it gets the uses "flight" correctly a few times. For me such glaring mistake is actually somewhat worse than long, unskippable dialogue. And what's worst, correcting this one would mean re-recording half of the voice lines, which is unlikely to be done.

[Qent]

Being able to skip autopilot sequences would be very nice.

[Aginor]

Did they really called flights "wings" in WC on a regular basis? IIRC, they didn't made this

Actually they did.
But it is easy to explain why in Saga some call it flight (although in reality that would not always be correct either, some would be called "package"):
There are people in the Saga team who know how that works in reality, so the real terms sneak in.
The Wing Commander terminology stays in a lot of parts though, because, you know... it is called WING Commander.

I quote the very first mission briefing of Wing Commander 1:
"You rookies’ll be flying with experienced pilots on your first missions. I want the rookies to fly as wingleaders. You vets keep an eye on the kids out there. Here are the assignments. Maverick, you’re leading Alpha wing. Spirit will fly on your wing. She’s quiet, but she knows the ropes. You’re the wingleader, but if Spirit talks, you be sure and listen. Got it?"

EDIT:
Briefing of mission Tamayo 3 in Wing Commander 3:
"If you and your wing can cut through the fighter cover, we might have a shot at destroying those transports."

so yes, it seems to be normal WC terminology.