Gauging interest in a remaster

@Pedro - Awesome! Sorry if this is a question that's been answered elsewhere in this thread (I've not been around much lately) - are you using a new in-flight engine for this remaster, or the original WCIV one?

I dearly missed the cockpits in WCIV, and a few years ago attempted to implement the WC3 Hellcat cockpit in WC4 but ran into some issues with locating assets in the XTRE files (I forget what, I consulted HCl at the time who offered help, but I didn't want to pester him too much).
 
-danr- said:
@Pedro - Awesome! Sorry if this is a question that's been answered elsewhere in this thread (I've not been around much lately) - are you using a new in-flight engine for this remaster, or the original WCIV one?

I dearly missed the cockpits in WCIV, and a few years ago attempted to implement the WC3 Hellcat cockpit in WC4 but ran into some issues with locating assets in the XTRE files (I forget what, I consulted HCl at the time who offered help, but I didn't want to pester him too much).
Click to expand...

It's a new engine. Despite only having a few years between them WCP is much closer to how games are made today than WCIV, and the dll per graphics API gave us a window to make pretty extreme chages; such changes just aren't possible in previous games such as Wing IV so I'm building from the ground up.
However I do intend to support as many of the original formats as possible; in particular the stats and the mission scripts. One of my biggest concerns atm is getting that support in place. For example HCl's tre extractor takes compiled 32bit code straight from the exe, I need to sit down with that and reverse engineer a 64bit solution.
 
gevatter Lars said:
Nice a WC4 rework...please keep it going the screenshots look quite good.
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Thanks.
Hopefully it'll look a fair bit better down the road, I've a tonne of work to do on tools and reverse engineering formats but I plan to do improve the lighting significantly once those kind of essentials are taken care of, possibly switching over to PBR but definitely improving the shadows and post processing.
 
Pedro said:
It's a new engine. Despite only having a few years between them WCP is much closer to how games are made today than WCIV, and the dll per graphics API gave us a window to make pretty extreme chages
Click to expand...

Not really on topic, but it's hard to wrap your head around how much was changing at that time. WC4 was early 1996 and WCP was late 1997. The span of time from WC3 (late 1994) to WCP (late 1997) was just three years, and you have the entire development of WC4 and WCP (and Privateer 2 and Kilrathi Saga!) wrapped up in there.

Even still, that might not have been as rapidly evolving of a three year period as the preceding time span where we go from WC2 in late 1991 to WC3 in late 1994 (including all of the expansion, Privateer and RF, Academy, Armada, Super Wing Commander, a whole bunch of console ports, etc).
 
ChrisReid said:
Not really on topic, but it's hard to wrap your head around how much was changing at that time. WC4 was early 1996 and WCP was late 1997. The span of time from WC3 (late 1994) to WCP (late 1997) was just three years, and you have the entire development of WC4 and WCP (and Privateer 2 and Kilrathi Saga!) wrapped up in there.

Even still, that might not have been as rapidly evolving of a three year period as the preceding time span where we go from WC2 in late 1991 to WC3 in late 1994 (including all of the expansion, Privateer and RF, Academy, Armada, Super Wing Commander, a whole bunch of console ports, etc).
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Oh it was a remarkable time, I'd have loved to have been in the industry in those exciting days.
It may not seem like it as it wasn't such a front facing change as sprites to 3D models but WC3 to WCP was probably just as big a leap. True floating point and hardware acceleration were both hugely significant changes. That floating point is why the WCP engine feels so smooth even to this day, it's the same precision as used today for many titles; whilst processors have been 64bit for a long time since both 64-bit SIMD and GPU registers are relatively recent few engines have made the switch (and it's unlikely anyone would notice the difference anyway).

The only truly comparable jump after WCP was programmable shaders (which the OpenGL dll managed to brute force in). When I entered the industry the XBox 360 was already on the market; the industry was still moving quite quickly but it feels like it's been slowing down ever since, especially in terms of new techniques.

How much of that is down to the hardware, and how much due to the ever increasing number of developers using 3rd party engines is hard to say, but when new techniques are introduced they are from the same few developers these days.
 
The new cockpit for WC4 looks awesome! WC4 would have been a better game if it had some sort of such a cockpit. The video scenes in the game were great and the story was not too bad, but the ingame flight sucked compared to the experience of WC1/2/3 and Privateer. The (non existing) cockpit of Privateer 2 sucked, too.
Sure... you didn't see a lot in a Tarsus... but hey... I LOVED it... Privateer 1 made me feel at home.
 
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