Is the Standoff team still supporting the game?

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
I was just wondering...are the Standoff folks still supporting the game (i.e. fixing bugs, updating to work as Windows and DirectX, etc. evolve, and so forth), or have they all moved on to other things?

Just asking because I love Standoff...it's in the running for my favorite Wing Commander game, including the official titles. I still fire it up from time to time and revisit the Battle of Earth.

But I'm also contemplating upgrading my system to Windows 10 when it comes out, and I'm worried that changes that Microsoft makes might break Standoff, especially if they update DirectX or change other things that break the engine. If Standoff is not likely to be "maintained" so it will work (eventually) under Windows 10, I'll have to look at preserving an old computer or a dual boot or something.

To be clear, I'm not whining or complaining. The Standoff folks could never touch the code again and I'll still be grateful for the wonderful game the built. Just trying to plan.
 
The old DirectX render is outdated. Standoff defaults to OpenGL. So no risks there. I highly doubt there will be any issues moving to windows 10.
 
I know there are a list of things we've wanted to do for several years, but have never gotten around to them because of various life things.

I suggest keeping up the posts and some motivation can be built up to tackle them. :D
 
Look, sooner or later, it is inevitable that some new version of Windows will break something, just like time and again new Windows versions broke things in the original games. However, every time this happened, sooner or later a solution was found. There are currently no WC games (Arena excepted, obviously) that cannot be played on a modern PC.

Standoff is actually pretty fortunate, because it's linked so intimately to the upgraded version of WCP/SO. There will always be an interest in keeping WCP/SO working, and in keeping the upgrades compatible with whatever version of Windows is current, which means that Standoff will also be maintained. Now, of course, this will only happen as long as the community is still here to do it - and when I say community, I really mean the three people who bear most (all) of the responsibility for these patches :).

In regards to Standoff in general, there's many things we should still fix. Formally, we've never said "no, that's it, we're done." I think all of us continue to hope to do a final, perfect Standoff release at some point. It's just that it simply hasn't materialised. I will admit, it's not only time constraints. Standoff was developed often under far more intensive time constraints than we've faced since then. It's also much harder to go back to revisit something you haven't touched for years, particularly when you get the feeling that by now, most people really won't care.
 
Yes, I'm sure there will come a point when all software will be difficult to run, I'm just saying windows 10 doesn't look like it will be it as far as the upgraded WCP/SO is concerned.
 
In regards to Standoff in general, there's many things we should still fix. Formally, we've never said "no, that's it, we're done." I think all of us continue to hope to do a final, perfect Standoff release at some point. It's just that it simply hasn't materialised. I will admit, it's not only time constraints. Standoff was developed often under far more intensive time constraints than we've faced since then. It's also much harder to go back to revisit something you haven't touched for years, particularly when you get the feeling that by now, most people really won't care.

Yeah, it comes down to inertia. It's obviously a lot harder to pick up and start than it is to just continue marching on the path you've chosen. That's the very reason why we've committed to daily CIC updates. We don't post amazing stuff every day, but we post something, because as soon as we miss a day or two here and there, it becomes a few missed days a week, then every other day, then we're just updating on the weekends, and on and on. At each step, we'd be losing viewers, which would make us less motivated to write updates, and it's a downward spiral from there. Nobody would be left when we did post something amazing. This actually happened to us in the wake of the early 2000s WC game cancellations, and by June 2002 we only posted 12 front page items for the entire month!

I've written before on how this is not the end of the world, however ( https://www.wcnews.com/news/2013/05/28/celebrating-ten-years-of-wing-commander-prophecy-advance ). It's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario, but the content creators can always choose to step up. If you build it, they will come. After our 2002 low point, by 2003 we had committed to ourselves to keep up the momentum no matter what, and our traffic rebounded. The nature of the internet has changed, so you don't see it in our front page hit counter so much, but over a thousand Wingnuts still visit the CIC every day somehow! (Our Google analytics show that hundreds of people now come to the CIC daily to an individual post landing page through our twitter or RSS feeds). So the audience is there. I'm not even really directly speaking to Standoff - each development team has unique factors in their lives that they need to overcome to find time to work on WC projects - but if any fan wants to get active and do stuff for the community, there's a built in base of people out there waiting to see it!
 
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OK, thanks for the responses. I know I'm still hoping for, one of these days, an "all in one" finalized release package with a single install file, but till then I'll keep playing the game as it is!
 
Yeah, it comes down to inertia. It's obviously a lot harder to pick up and start than it is to just continue marching on the path you've chosen. That's the very reason why we've committed to daily CIC updates.
Indeed. The worst part of it is that, predictably, inertia grows with every day. As time passes, it becomes harder to resume modding, because you forget things about what you were doing, what needed to be done, and how to do it. All of the tools we used had their little idiosyncrasies, some of them frankly barely worked at all, some had weird bugs that required special handling, and so on. To get back to a mod after a long time is daunting, because you know you'll need lots of time just to figure out how to get started.

At the moment, I don't really see a solution to it. Currently, I'm barely keeping up with my work, and I really have difficulty even finding time to play games at home, let alone work on mods. The best I can do is simply not forget about Standoff (and UE!), and keep promising myself to get back to them when there is more time.

I would really love, in time, to not only finish up those projects, but one day to also make something new. Originally I had no intention to do so, and while I'd occasionally talk about it, I rather hoped that a new generation of modders would come along and do great and amazing things... not to mention that Arena, released a couple of years before the last Standoff episode, gave us all hope that more WC titles would eventually emerge. By now, I no longer have any such hope. When you guys put up the usual start-of-year poll about what the year will be like for WC, I actually have a hard time deciding if I should vote "average" or "poor", because it feels like they are by now synonymous - poor, because whatever other things might be coming out, there's no new WC games, and average, because... we're used to it by now, and that's actually the way it's been for more than half of the 25 years since the WC1 was released. Paradoxically, though, this makes modding more enticing, because it seems like the WC universe is now entirely our playground. So, yeah, it would be fun.
 
Yeah yeah, I know. I guess I should get it done. But somehow It seemed less relevant now that the game isn't really getting installed by anyone anymore.
 
Yeah yeah, I know. I guess I should get it done. But somehow It seemed less relevant now that the game isn't really getting installed by anyone anymore.

A streamlined repackage is just the kind of newsworthy event that would net the game hundreds of new fans who missed the game originally.

It might not seem like it based just on forums posts, but there's A LOT of new traffic lately. We're seeing numbers in the neighborhood of 2100 visits per day - almost double the monthly visits that we were before WC showed up on Netflix. That really brought a ton of new people in. August 2015 has been our busiest month in three and a half years, and we're not seeing a dropoff like it was a singular event.

A Standoff repackage is the type of thing I'd post to our Facebook page as well. We didn't even have social media accounts when Standoff was being actively made, and now we have over two thousand followers across our various platforms. Sometimes those posts can reach 2500+ views, and these can be largely different folks than the 2000+ people who are visiting the site every day.

Now is the PERFECT time to reintroduce awesome fan projects that have been quiet for the last couple years.
 
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Seems like you would not only do me a personal favor but there is a valid chance this might serve a real, tangible purpose for a larger audience.

Anything planned for your week-end? :)
 
I'm honestly kinda waiting for the full package to be released. My last computer that I put this on it was a little complicated to get it all installed correctly. I would love to have a single install. If you don't I understand but it would be great and easier to share with our friends if it was in a full package. Anyways, thanks for your hard work.
 
We're just four months away from the next CIC Birthday - seems like a good amount of time for any projects to jump on a minor refresh attempt :)
 
EDIT: Oh, wow...he really did send me a full package to test....on a date previous to today...and we both completely forgot about it. I thought he was just joking before. Sorry, guys. I'll get on that this weekend.

 
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