Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: Nubarus on December 03, 2008, 08:04:04 am
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As a big fan of the WC games I must say that I am completely stunned here after playing the 3 released demo's.
I truly cannot wait to see more.
Are you guys going to remake all the WC games into this conversion? (I will say sorry in advance if this is posted somewhere already but I just got to this stuff 2 days ago)
Is there any way to make the excellent movie bits a bit sharper by maybe making the movie windows smaller, they look pretty bad on todays sized monitors. Or is it some setting I could use to sharpen it up?
Other then that I have enjoyed the demo's more then anything as of late.
After the Freespace and Wing Commander series there hasn't been anything worth playing in the space sim genre, well Starlancer wasn't too bad but playing that game now on a newer PC is pretty crappy, very unstable and without a voodoo card the background graphics are horrible.
Kind of funny to see an older game engine like the freespace one totally kicks ass still after all the effort put into it by this community. :D
Actually, even without all the mods the Freespace 2 engine is better then the Starlancer one if you look at the graphics on todays PC's. :D
A big salute to all of you who made it happen. :cool:
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As a big fan of the WC games I must say that I am completely stunned here after playing the 3 released demo's.
I truly cannot wait to see more.
just wait until you see the final product ;7
Are you guys going to remake all the WC games into this conversion?
probably not
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Welcome to our little project.
As for your questions. Well we are not completly redoing any of the games. We did so for some techdemos but that was just to show that we could archive similar stuff as it was possible with other WC games.
The story of the final release will be during the WC3 timeline, roughly taking place while Blair is on the Victory but you will be somewhere else, seeing other locations, meet different people and so on.
So when you played WC3 you might know the overall story but there will be different parts, things that haven't been told in the WC3 game...I can't tell you now, you have to play it to see.
About the movies...well there are two things that could be wrong or better said problematic.
First of FS limits the resolution of the videos to a very samll size. I agree it looks bad on a 24" display. Another thing is the original videos where not recorded in widescreen so you might experiance some stretching.
The other point is that we tried to keep the package of the techdemos as small as possible. Therefor the videos where highly compressed, resulting in the bad quality.
I don't know if there are people working on lifting the restriction of the video resolution but remember. Even if we could, technicly spoken, have Full HD videos there would again be a limit to this.
Frist would be the downloadsize for the mod would rise, not just a little but get realy big. The other part is the time that is needed to render stuff at this high resolutions.
We allready have a hard time to put things together during our spare time. Taking away even more time for highres videos...well I don't mind if you want to wait another year for the release ^_^
Last point...I enjoyed StarLancer a lot. It even had some missions or better said a mission that I like just so much. Its when you fly the stolen bombers right into the middle of the enemy fleet to destroy that carrier. That is one of the best mission I have ever played...well mostly. At least its the mission I allways remember first when I hear StarLancer.
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Thank you for the reply.
Ok, that's cool, something different is nice too.
Maybe I should try and install the WC games on this system and see if it works.
I came across your project via an article in the PC Gameplay btw. Same goes for the revamped FS campaigns. I have enjoyed myself with that a lot as well, especially the FS1 campaign. :D
I did not say I didn't enjoy Starlancer, and yes that mission was a lot of fun, but what I said was that Starlancer is pretty crappy for todays systems.
It crashes a lot, it looks pretty crappy because it is made in 3Dfx Glide, and the D3D is pretty bad.
Well, the ships look nice, but the background, lighting, nedula's and such really look so crappy that you cannot even see the ships that fly in front of it, unless you are so close you can almost kiss the pilots cheeks.
From all the space sims I played I loved the X-Wing/Tie Fighter, Privateer, Wing Commander and Freespace series the most, it's a shame that all of these projects are dead in the water from the developers end.
Starlancer was pretty ok, so was I-War 2 but they did not score as well in my list as the ones above.
I am also looking forward to the Star Wars mod for Freespace 2, funny enough I also read an aricle about that in the PC Gameplay some time ago. ;)
Maybe a Privateer 2 mod for Freespace 2 engine is a nice follow up project. ;)
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If you are interested in Privateer there are some projects that are going in that direction.
Wing Commander Pioneer -> These dudes are createing there own engine, models look awesome but one still waits for anything workable....release unknown.
Privateer Remake, Privateer Remake Gemini Gold and Privateer: Parallel Universe -> All of theme are using the Vega engine and have playable versions.
Privateer Remake - http://wcuniverse.sourceforge.net/
Privateer Remake Gemini Gold - http://priv.solsector.net/
Privateer: Parallel Universe - http://pu.wcjunction.com/
The differance is how close these projects are to Privateer. Gemini Gold should be the closest port while Parallel Universe has some new stuff.
I have heard of a Glide emulator that you could try with StarLancer. I don't know if it works. It has been ages since I ever touched StarLancer again and I am not even sure how it will work with Vista 64 if at all. Mh where is my copy of it.......*starts searching*
PS: Anyone noticed that they reused some parts of the infamouse WC movie in some game cutscenes?
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Yeah, I tried the Glide Emulator, it's not working at all, it's build for old cards like the TNT1 and 2 and the G200.
That is ancient dino tech compared to a 9800 GTX. :wtf:
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Nubarus: How about Zeckenzack's Glide wrapper? It works just fine with a Radeon X1900 and the most recent Secret Ops. (Not the expansions to the OOOOOOOLD WCs, but for WCP. Only it's stand-alone. :nod: )
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The Addons for WC1 where called Secret Missions and WC2 Special Operations. While I agree they sound similar its a different name for each game addon.
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Oh well, I can live with not being able to play Starlancer in it's full glory though.
I still have the CD's for WC Prophecies and the Secret Ops add-on, I will give them a go with that glide wrapper this weekend.
I take it if i do a google search for it I will be able to find that Zeckenzack's one.
Last time I installed WCP on a newer system it was like high speed dubbing when it came to the movie bits and the overall game looked pretty bad in D3D so I gave it a rest.
Maybe it's an idea for the future to do a Starlancer port to the FS2 SC project. :lol:
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There is a so called highres patch for Prophecy and Secret Ops. This lets you set some higher resolutions for the game and fixes the movies. There is also a "DVD" version of Prophecy. Basicly its the movies in DVD quality without the game but there are ways to get the game to use the better videos.
I think there are discriptions on how to do that on either the CIC (www.wcnews.com) or the WingCenter.de but thats only if you are speaking german, since its a german site and I don't think that there has been a translation for how to do it.
I have lately tried to install Starlancer and found a way to reset the resolution but no mission is playable. I get everything till the first mission then I go back to the desktop.
Maybe I will try the glide wrapper myself but I guess its that the max resolution of the game is 1024x786 and I tried it with 1920x1200 ^_^
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I found that the highest resolution Starlancer accepts is 1280x1024 or else it crashes to desktop.
Wich shows what a buggy piece of crap it actually is, not to mention that there has never been a single patch made for it, even with many ppl at the time reporting bugs and glitches.
And not to forget the infamous "The rear turrets don't work" bug that was debated to death on many forums.
That I never understood, they added rear turrets on pretty much all ships and they never ever worked...........why bother putting em in?
Not to mention that it's pretty weird they didn't work since it has been done before several times in various other games.
Even the Atari game Star Raiders (Very old, like me ;)) had a working rear turret.
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Ever thought that it isn't direktly a bug with the turrets but a very late design decision to remove them?
I mean from experiance with Thunderbolds/Longbows and Vaktoth/Pakthan I can tell that a rear turret can be quite a pain in the ass and they might have thought that it would make the player to powerfull.
I also never noticed that there even was a option for using turrets in Starlancer.
As for the resolution. I don't think of that as a bug or crappy programming. Think about when it was released. What was the basic resolution during that time. 1024x786? Supporting 1280x1024 was more then enough I think. Also its normal that when you crack up the resolution, that textures would become bad since it was never meant to be played at these resolutions. Its like watching TV on a Full HD TV, it looks like ****.
Still I don't think that a good movie or game becomes bad just because its not good looking anymore when compared to newer games.
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It wasn't added later, they always have been there, supposed to be auto opperated like them turrets on FS bombers.
They just never worked from day one.
I really think that Chris got held back and the game was rushed by pressure from Microsoft.
It was a spokes person from MS that told the community at the lancers reactor that no patch of the game will ever be released and that the game was playable enough to finish it to the end, so we should not ask for more.
Prolly the sales of the game where not up to MS standards and they pulled the plug on everything.
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Thanks for the info on WCP, I was digging around on the attic in my old game collection and managed to find it, even though it does not match the true Glide graphics it still looks great and it sure brought back some sweet memories.
I have not found the WC4 cd's yet, really looking forward to that since I really liked the story from the 4 game.
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Have you tried the Wing Commander 4 tech demo we released a while ago? ;)
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There's just one problem with that being a WC4 tech demo. If it's the same one I still have, for demoing the fact that you got autopilot flyby to work right, the cutscenes I saw in it are from Wing Commander III, as are the missions.
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:wtf:
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Try again ;)
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Have you tried the Wing Commander 4 tech demo we released a while ago? ;)
Yeah, so you better make a whole WC4 port to Freespace 2 now. The story is seeping back into my mind and I want to play it again....... :lol: :D :cool: :P ;)
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I'm not kidding, Tolwyn. That whole bit with Hobbes welcoming Blair aboard and Blair informing Hobbes that he's back on the flight roster is straight out of WC3. I played the same frelling first mission, albeit somewhat painfully, via my DOS copy in DOSbox. I still haven't gotten the Kilrathi saga windows version to work right. Not sure why.
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I'm not kidding, Tolwyn.
I am not kidding either. You might want to check which file you actually downloaded. :lol:
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Gee, the only one there that was a tech demo, maybe? :P
Now there are two tech demos available at this time, but when I got the autopilot one, there was only the one demo.
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There are 2 demo's a WCIII and a WCIV tech demo. :D :cool:
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I thought, that having two sticky thread was pretty obvious. You're now on my naughty list. Sorry, no gold Hellcat model next Christmas."
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:lol:
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Something just came to mind btw, I saw that the Battlestar Galactica mod also is going to get cockpits, like WCS.
They Will be in full 3D with the additional use of TrackIR, that is going to be awsome.
Are the pits in WCS going to be 2D or 3D?
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Naughty list, huh? Ok, maybe I WON'T help you with voice acting like I said on the other thread. :p
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Are the pits in WCS going to be 2D or 3D?
4D. Seems to offer best gaming experience.
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Naughty list, huh? Ok, maybe I WON'T help you with voice acting like I said on the other thread. :p
I'm sure that will get you off the naughty list. You won't like the list it does get you on though. :p
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Are the pits in WCS going to be 2D or 3D?
4D. Seems to offer best gaming experience.
Sweet. :D
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This game is amazing. I am impatient to see the next mission.