[Bobboau]

yeah, if I could say one thing that should be considered for the future, if you'r going to have an hour of nav points followed by action, break the action into it's own mission, if posable, it was realy cool the first time through, but spending twenty minutes on nave points and chatter followed by missle-to-the-face-insta-death five times in a row, got old quick. that would have to be my one big criticism for this mod.

oh, there was on other thing that I think could be handled a bit better in the future, give a breif run down of the strengths and weaknesses of new weapons , I couldn't figure out wich ones I should be useing, I managed to figure out in the arrow laser == rapid fire /weak and ion == slow/powerfull, but I didn't know if one was substantialy better at knocking out sheilds/subsystems than the other, and the mission I was in the assault fighter I had absolutely no idea wich of the three (three! ) to use. it would have taken just one screen in a breifing or comand breifing.

[Tolwyn]

yeah, if I could say one thing that should be considered for the future, if you'r going to have an hour of nav points followed by action, break the action into it's own mission, if posable, it was realy cool the first time through, but spending twenty minutes on nave points and chatter followed by missle-to-the-face-insta-death five times in a row, got old quick. that would have to be my one big criticism for this mod.

The best solution would be to base an autopilot flyby animation off the warpout animation (e.g. skip the traveling time, right after you hit "engage autopilot" a shot flyby animation is played and then the player is moved to his destination)

[gevatter Lars]

As for the weapons and their strength and weaknesses...I mostly go with "If brute force dosn't solve your problem you aren't using enought!" I know we got all the details about the weapons on our webpage and I also think somewhere in the handbook and in the techpart of the game so their are enought places to get the info ^_^

Webpage -> Weapons Data

[Bobboau]

The best solution would be to base an autopilot flyby animation off the warpout animation (e.g. skip the traveling time, right after you hit "engage autopilot" a shot flyby animation is played and then the player is moved to his destination)

well this is a problem that is inherent to all campains that have long story telling parts, to be honest the actual travleing from nav point to nav point was just part of it, in between you had to sit through the same five minute conversations with absolutely no way to speed things along (time compression doesn't help that much). now like I said its great the first time through, it just gets a bit boring to have to sit through the same story elements over and over, I know the mission with the electronic signals you need to investigate would have probly worked a bit better if it had split to a seperate mission after you reached the nav point were the fighters were waiting for you, or between that point and getting back to the wellington.

[gevatter Lars]

Personaly I don't like the reloading times between this. Getting back to a mission screen while on a mission is strange to me. On the other hand I understand that you could get bored if you have to play a mission to often that has long waitingtimes for the story/battle to continue. I think we will have to think of making the best out of it.

[Starman01]

In some games (forget which one) you are able to simply interupt the currently playing voiceline, and it hops right to the next one and  the games still continues since the SEXP (or whatever games use) still is fullfilled. Something like that would be handy. A little more work for the player, but maybe not as risky as interupting an entire chain of SEXP

[Huggybaby]

Yes, I haven't played since I died twice at the pirate asteroid field where I'm told to stay in formation and I can't even touch my mouse, the reason is the long times to get back to that point. But I will.

[Tahna Los]

Note to self: Missile up tailpipe = Death.

Interesting considering that you get less missiles but they hurt more.  Almost like a Trebuchet that can actually hit something.

I really have no complaints about this mod, well just one: you've just got me spoiled for the main campaign.

One other thing that you might want to consider: on the thunderbolt, you have a choice of three primaries.  You can cycle through all of them one at a time, or all three at once.  But what if you want the top two?  Or the Bottom Two?  You get the point.  It's not really a complaint, but a request for this to be looked at.

[Bobboau]

yeah unfortunately the way the game was origonaly coded makes that sort of araingment prohibitively compllicated to implement. it was hard enough just to get the tree primaries to work at all.

[MetalDestroyer]

The best solution would be to base an autopilot flyby animation off the warpout animation (e.g. skip the traveling time, right after you hit "engage autopilot" a shot flyby animation is played and then the player is moved to his destination)

Or instead of using Time Compression for the AutoPilot why not increasing speed ? In X Wing Alliance, when you are in the Death Star, there a way to enter into an accelerator which increase the player ship speed to 999.
So, if you can hardcode this kind of feature, it would be great. We could at least make time compression during autopilot.

I don't know i you see what I mean.

[Tolwyn]

hmm... this is also an idea. Besides, time compression (beyond 32x) is causing severe problems on low end systems. That 's why we had to include "Asteroid Field Performance Fix" in the first place.

[Starman01]

What's the big difference between massive speed or the time compression (that also accelerate the moving, nothing more) ? I don't see much sense in that

As for the weapons, there are many different energy weapons in wing commander, but honestly I never ever noticed that much of a difference between them (it is there, but not really noticable ingame) . For me it was always as simply as that :

a) You can constantly fire one weapon and don't risk to run out of energy, but do less damage
b) You link them together, and can dish out double (or in thunderbolts case triple) damage, but you will run out of energy and have to recharge between the attack.

The different weapons just made other pretty colour effects

We will think about the dialogue stuff and try to make it better. Maybe I take on Tolwyns suggestion and create a version without the tutorial stuff, and we will not use tutorial stuff in the main campaign at all so that the action can start right away (but maybe include the tutorial campaign again for new players ) One goal of the prologue was to introduce the WingCommander to the Freespace, and I think we did that Also I hope for the community to come with some additional single missions to share between each other (we could make a sticky here for that) so that the waiting time can be made a little more easy

In the upcoming patch I think I will break up the navpoint route, so that you can skip the dialogue in some missions by simply skipping those navpoints (i.e. in Mission 2 fly directly to Nav3).

[MetalDestroyer]

What's the big difference between massive speed or the time compression (that also accelerate the moving, nothing more) ? I don't see much sense in that

Well, the time Compression works well. However, in the case when you try X times the same mission because you've been killed by shockwave or missile, during Autopilot it's impossible to player to use time compression to reduce the waiting time to arrive at destination because the actual Autopilot use Time Compression.

If you have increasing speed for the autopilot, the player have the abilities to accelerate time to avoid or reduce dramatically the waiting time between each autopilot.

It's just my opinion, but if you don't like it, I'm OK. WC:SAGA with or without TimeCompression is still a pretty good game.

[Starman01]

Personally I think that the issue with the long autopilot in the prologue is also a fact that in two of the five missions (and those are already the two longest missions) you have to escort very slow capships. Those voyages without a capship are much more faster.

I will look that we will not escort so many capitalships in the main campaign, or we will maybe fake it so that the capship just appears at the new location. While this will speed the stuff up, of course some will wonder why the capitalship isn't travelling with you when you switch into external view.

Of course a flyby would be best, but I'm lucky that we have a autopilot at all, we can certainly make it more convinient with a few little mission tweaks or hacks. I rather want the SCP-wizards to do some of my other requests first

[gevatter Lars]

I think the point about haveing superfast ships is that you add time compression to even more speed up the travel time.
Personaly I like the autopilot as it is. I like the brake between a heavy battle...still I understand those who don't like to travel long distances slowly while on escort. The thing is that I like the simulation part more over the action. Means that I feel more like beeing a part of the game when you also have the blowing up and the "this duty sucks" feeling. I know many people don't think that reallife stuff and gaming should become to close and that games are about fun...in this case blowing up stuff...but as said I like this kind of roleplay. Changeing to a pilot in WC universe and see the good and bad sides of the missions...and blow some stuff up ^_^

[Starman01]

There is one important issue with the autopilot that we can't simply cast away by making ships superfast with SEXP or something similar.

The autopilot code determines which ship in the entire autopilot group is the slowest, and set the autopilot speed for all vessels accordingly.
This will be a pain in the ass for any fredder to take care of.

For the moment, we will have to stay with this version (which I also like a lot). But as said, we will try to improve mission building a little so that that the travel times will be reduced. Since I let ships on previous navpoints vanish anyway, I can of course reduce the distance, but I thought that a low number above the navpointer destroys a little the realism.

Travelling to a 10.000 klicks distance, but suddenly your battlegroup dissappearing in the back will be a little strange   We will see what we can come up with

[Scooby_Doo]

Heres a dumb thought about voicelines... how about doing it similar to homeworld. When you want to start a large chat session, cut to camera scene.  Get some nice external views of the fighters while they chat away.  Then switch back to the fighter view when done.  Also is it possible to hit esc (or something) to cut out of the camera view then?

[aceofbase]

WING COMMANDER SAGA
PROLOGUE README



1.1   ABOUT THE PROLOGUE
In the prologue missions you join Markham at the beginning of his career on the TCS Wellington. These missions are not part of the full game, which will be released in winter 2666. The upcoming full release contains more than 40 heart-pounding missions that will take your experience with the Wing Commander universe to the next level.
.

what do u mean by releasing the game at 2666 ???  did i miss somthing here?
or you mean the full  game events will take place at winter 2666.. thank you..

[Tolwyn]

since we can't hold our internal schedule we have decided to release the full game in winter 2666

[aceofbase]

 lol.. dose that mean there is no full game coming up..or it means that you are immortal??