EA's first new WC game in a decade

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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-DanR-
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EA's first new WC game in a decade

Post by -DanR- »

WC arena, only on Xbox live :?

What do you guys think, I get the impression that Wing Commander is about to become totally bastardized.
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Post by mkruer »

From what I have seen, this game is more of the shoot-em-up, in the same vein as the classic side scroller’s like R-Type, Gradius, Thunderforce etc… I don’t know how successful this is going to be, but I know one thing. This is a radical departure from the original games.

I don’t know about anyone else, but what attracted me to WC was that it was a space sim, not some button mashing game. Privateer brought that to another level by including some RPG style elements into the mix, unfortunately that never materialized in later games.

What I do find interesting about the “feelâ€
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But I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

I can't speak for Wing Commander as i never played it but Privateer does not have the best graphic's in the world but it's game play is fanstatic, and the story line is very good.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

mkruer wrote:Right here is the genesis of the new look and feel; If it works for Star Wars, lets make WC look and feel more like Star Wars. I would have preferred them to go back to the WC1/2 era style ships but by today’s standards that look and feel is a minimalist look, and strangely enough the minimalist look probably requires greater over all thought in design. Instead they are using the Star Wars approach all that is required is some basic 3d shape, and then keep adding geebles until it looks better, no matter how nonfunctional each part is.
Actually, they are not the first doing so. A lot of the late WC fan projects have taken the starwars route. At the wcplanet board, where I've been posting progress shots of my Demon texturing work, Brad posted his texturing of the Demon as example for me to follow, and it was a persian rug of lines and boxes to kingdom come. Nice looking, but you know what I mean; totally meaningless. What I think is at the root of this problem is that starwars ships DO make people go "WOW!", and so modellers and artists in the gaming industry conclude that's the way to go. What they don't understand is that in a starwars movie you only see 2-second shots of the ships, so if nothing makes sense it doesn't matter. But in a game, where you can spend time looking at a ship; greebles need to look like they serve a purpose. Otherwise the "WOW!" factor wears out pretty quickly.

As for Arena, frankly I don't care, as long as they place their storylines after or outside of the rest of the WC timeline. If they decided to make a new game that overlaps existing canon in the time dimension and they contradicted other canon, that would piss me off; --and a lot of other people, I'm sure.
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Post by BradMick »

have you ever looked at an airplane up close? all the panel lines and this and that? hell, just looking at the frame of my mighty th67 with all its rivets and overlapping panels, the sides of a battleships (got some great shots i'll see about posting of the USS Alabama). There's layers, layers and layers of overlapping panels, acess hatches, etc..etc. Standing up close and personal with an F-14 tomcat and the like theres a crap ton of lines and what not all over that sucker. So, it's not 'star wars wow factor' so much as its...hey, that airplane has a lot of acess panels and panel lines and rivets and this and that. but, wait...i did say that over at wcplanet and you conviently ignored that there, so...go for it here as well :)
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, here's a plane's wing:
http://www.cns-snc.ca/branches/Toronto/ ... 47wing.jpg
Granted, that's not a military plane.
Sure, pass me some examples; I'm all for details, as long as they are
based on actual stuff, and aren't just enigmatic rectangles and lines.

EDIT:
F14 tomcat; beat you to it:

Image

Yeah, I see 2 or 3 hatches.
Where there's a good deal of stuff is on the pylons:

Image

And I can't speak for Dual Joe, but I think you'll see something sort of
like this in our Hornet's pylons.
But this kind of illustrates my point. In real life, detail comes in tight
clusters. You rarely see tapestries of detail, unless you're looking at a
satellite picture of a city or something.

EDIT2:
I see what you mean now...

Image

But this is a variable wing aircraft. That's cheating! Of course it's bound to be complex...
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

That last picture is what you'd be most likely to be looking at in WC or PR. You would hardly ever get that close to a ship in the game.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

micheal_andreas_stahl wrote:That last picture is what you'd be most likely to be looking at in WC or PR. You would hardly ever get that close to a ship in the game.
Right. Which brings up another point: Given that greebles in real life happen in small clusters rather than evenly distributed, and given that one hardly ever gets close enough to a ship to see individual rivets, is it worth the trouble and the video memory bandwidth to have hi rez textures? Because, to have a little cluster of highly detailed texturing, you have to reduce pixel size across the whole ship, which multiplies the texture's size. Wheras, making a few little greebles using geometry doesn't have a multiplicative effect on the rest of the geometry, and if you do get that close, it looks better than textured greebles.
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Post by klauss »

You can unwrap greebles on a separate texture, and incurr the extra batch for top-level LODs - then have only a proxy low-rez texture-base greebling on lower LODs.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

That's an idea. Another is, if you know in advance what parts of the ship will need more texturing detail, to make their UV islands bigger. However, I've tried this and somehow looks funny. But maybe a detail texture would lessen the the sharp dicotomy.
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Post by micheal_andreas_stahl »

Why have all that extra detail? You would need it if you were taking picture or vidios.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, no reason, really. Long story. Like, if in the future we have the ability to walk around on the deck of the carrier, then we can look at ships up close.
Then again, in that case we could have a separate file for on-deck.
Then again, separate file == extra work.

But yeah, it doesn't make sense to worry so much about details, in the final analysis.
Though, generally speaking, the more detailed you make the ship and its texture, the better it looks --even from a distance.
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Post by GrreyBunny »

Personally, for me, it's not so much the complex models as intelligently put together models and matching textures. As an example, in the original WC game, one of the things that stuck me is the "used" feel of the ships in the cut scenes, mainly from blown fluid stains (not that leaking hyd fluid blows in space, but that's another issue). Referring to the last picture of the Tomcat, the wear marks at the wing roots where the out wing slides under the root when it is fully swept. Adding little details like that that make sense...that goes a lot farther towards making a ship believable that uncountable little 'bits' that don't seem to have a purpose.

Just my two cents...
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Post by VagabondVirden »

In reference to the original topic, I think this is a horrible way to revive the WC franchise. They're targetting the wrong demographic. They're throwing up the proverbial hail mary, hoping they can cache in on a new fanbase with all the 'xBox livers', but they'll end up abandoning their key demographic by venturing so far away from what made half of us fall in love with WC in the first place (what that is, I don't know, but WC Arena's not gonna have it).

They're probably relying on the notion that half of us will run out and buy the game just cause it says WING COMMANDER, and I probably will, but that aside, I know it'll probably end up shaking my faith in any future WING COMMANDER titles, and it's gonna hurt.

By the way, I don't know if xBox Liver is the prefered nomenclature for said species, or if there even is one, but if there is, I'd really like to know. I'm curious.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ You mean like the ShadowRun and Atomic Bomberman games are essentially Mario 2's: familiar imagery wrapped around alien worlds.

edit: point of clarification,
^ - -^ I am referring to the ShadowRun PC game from the early 90's not the 'current' Shadowrun game from Microsoft.
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