Privateer & adding WCU

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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vass1
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Privateer & adding WCU

Post by vass1 »

Sorry if this is a question addressed elsewhere, but I have scoured this board, Privateer's, and the interweb superhighway generally trying to find an answer....

First things first: Thank you, thank you, thank you. And Thank you again. I LOVED this game when it came out & have been dying to play something similar forever.

Got my centurion (had an orion 10 years ago) and now I see that WCU can be added to PR, allowing for some OTHER ships.

Unfortunately, now I'm having problems.

1. Created a copy of the Privateer Remake folder, in case I screwed it up, which of course I did.

2. I downloaded the wcu-devel.0.2.3.zip as well as "First Patch" & "Second Patch". Unzipped them to my copy of Remake folder.

3. Tried to run it- It appeared to be attempting to go into windowed mode (I've been playing PR full screen) and then crashed.

4. Tried to just unzip WCU into its own folder and run it- Same problem.

So my questions are these:

Can I simply ADD WCU to the existing Remake and just have all the new stuff show up, in addition to whatever already exists in PR?

Can I continue my EXISTING save game in the combined PR/WCU game?

AM I Unzipping this stuff to the right place?

What launcher do I need to be using to get back to fullscreen mode?

I'm sorry for being so brain dead, but please, if you'd be so kind, explain the entire operation in a way similar to how you'd explain it to a very, very slow & ignorant 3 year old.

Thank you again for bringing this game back- I couldn't be more psyched.

Thanks

Vass
chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I don't know the answers to most of your questions, but while you wait for them, here's something to chew on: WCU is not a game, and was never meant to be a game. It's meant to be a WC platform, upon which others could build any WC game remakes and/or addon's and/or new games. Our current plan is to make a WC1 remake, to serve as a starting point and inspiration to other modders; but we're barely at the beginning of getting the WC1 ships in ship-shape. Traditionally, the WCU releases have included Privateer Remake only as a testbed of the WCU platform.
In other words, there's no "WCU" game for you to play, unless you want to play Privateer again, except having a lot more ship types around to see. Last but not least, WCU is in pre-alpha --i.e.: VERY buggy.
vass1
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Post by vass1 »

Chuck-

Thank you for your reply, and for your efforts. I am aware that WCU isn't something I can just pull down and start playing- I did think that perhaps Privateer Remake was nested inside of the zip somewhere, as I had seen some advice for getting access to the WCU content simply through the 0.2.3.zip.

I suppose what I'd be really interested in is this- How would I go about adding the content in a way that allows Privateer to be run but access the WCU add-ons?

About all I can do is offer playtesting and, of course, cold hard cash- which brings me to a question I wanted to put in the original post- Is there a tip jar somewhere that is still active to compensate for time, or if it's a labor of love, defray some of the costs (server or otherwise-saw that there's some sort of multiplayer effort ongoing- certainly this is costing someone money for hardware).

Thanks

Vass
chuck_starchaser
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Thanks. I'm sure some cold hard cash would find its use. Myself I'm probably the most well off of the people around here. At least I can afford a computer upgrade once in a while... :)
Klauss is our biggest developer, and although he has a permanent job (or two), he lives in Argentina, and the exchange rate makes computer upgrading very expensive. I've sent him my old computer, couple of months ago, by ship, and it hasn't been delivered yet; I hope it will soon. It's an Athlon XP 3000+ with a gig of DDR and a 6800 gpu video card. Not the worst, but not the best; I'm sure he could use something better.
Spiritplumber is a visa student, and can't afford a computer at all, though she's provided with a laptop by the university, not that I'd expect it to be gaming optimized; so she could probably use something half decent. But beware that she's hard to reach by mail. The computer I mentioned, I'd already sent it to Spiritplumber first, to her university department; and it came back here "unclaimed"... :-/ Cost me like 70 bucks to send it, and another 70 bucks they charged me for returning it... So I sent it to klauss instead.

As for installing WCU, I may be wrong, but my understanding was that, for the past dozen releases, it was standalone; and included all of PR, so you shouldn't need to install it OVER PR. But like I said, it's very buggy.

If you want to play PR without additional bugs, but with more ships, you could transfer the ships folders and units.csv over. But then you'd want to transfer the spawning scripts, so that the additional ships show up, and you might want to transfer the huge map of WCU, so that there's some room for the new ships :), and all that may be trickier. How about become a wcu developer and fix the existing problems for us? ;-) I haven't downloaded a quarter-decent release of wcu in probably a year. We could definitely use one. And it's probably mostly gruntwork that's needed: The jumps between systems were all screwed up, there are problems with cargo and upgrades, missing resources, stuff like that.
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Post by spiritplumber »

WCU _is_ very buggy on the grounds that I've been asked by hellcatv to focus on multiplayer, and he's the boss when it comes down to it. However, the MP effort has a useful "fallout" in that most WC1 ships are a lot more refined now, and the Confed ships all have cockpits -- this is good because it's realistic to think that a Scim or even a Ferret would end up in the hands of civilians by 2669, so now they're almost properly buyable (almost in the sense that I need to GOMFA and do the upgrades for them).

It is standalone.

Thanks for the interest, also! :)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

spiritplumber wrote:WCU _is_ very buggy on the grounds that I've been asked by hellcatv to focus on multiplayer, and he's the boss when it comes down to it.
That's what I was afraid. No he's not "the boss" (or won't be for long).
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Post by spiritplumber »

Well, it's his engine. Also, as a general rule, if something works in multi it'll work in single -- the opposite isn't necessarily true. Eventually the plan is STILL to put up a permanent instance of gemini sector...

One thing I cannot do a thing about is the video part -- I don't have the know how. The multiple choice convos... that's python coding mostly... might be able to do something with it.

Lemme take the GRE first.
My Moral Code:
- The only sin is to treat people as if they were things.
- Rules were made for people, not the other way around.
- Don't deceive. Real life is complicated enough.
- If all else fails, smash stuff.
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