Man of Vision: Multiplayer Added to Prophecy (March 5, 2006)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
When Wing Commander Prophecy was released in 1997, there was one notable flaw: the promised multiplayer component was missing, cut some months earlier in order to release the game when promised. This was a huge disappointment for Wing Commander fans, who had already formed online squadrons, bragged about their flying abilities and prepared to do battle in space. It was a crushing blow to the franchise as well: for all its grandeur, Wing Commander Prophecy could not compete in sales with the likes of multiplayer-capable games like Quake II. 'Would Origin issue a multiplayer patch?' was the question on everyone's lips. No, Origin GM Neil Young replied, it was technically impossible... but a future game would add the capability. Ultimately, neither outcome was to be.

Until today, some eight years later: we are proud to announce that HCl has accomplished the impossible. He has developed a patch reintegrating multiplayer into Wing Commander Prophecy. This is only the announcement - the project is still in testing. The current expectation is that it should be ready for release in about a month. It must be stressed that the software has already begun testing and that it works: during one attempt, four players in different countries managed to play the game smoothly together. In others, two and three players have played the game together on dialup connections. What remains now is simply to squash remaining bugs - something HCl is very, very good at.

Here's how it works: a host runs a special program to start while other players run a secondary utility which links them all together. The host launches Prophecy and everyone meets in the Simulator Pod for multiplayer combat!

The importance of this event can not be overstated- the single most asked for feature in Wing Commander has been added back where it belongs... by the fans! Look out, world: Wing Commander is back!

HCl has updated his website about the project - you can read all the impressive details here.







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Original update published on March 5, 2006
 
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Wait... April 1st isn't for another three or four weeks.

I don't believe it! This is ridiculous (ly awesome!)
 
Oh boy... I'm getting the fireworks out... Now all I need to do is find my Prophecy disks... there goes another weekend!
 
Ummm... wow. HCI truly is our lord and saviour.

I can't express how grateful I am for all his work in making the vision engine so much more than the original WCP.

Thanks, and again, wow.
 
PeteyG said:
Wait... April 1st isn't for another three or four weeks.
Click to expand...

Akkbar actually did a Prophecy multiplayer patch april fool joke on WCHS in 1998. He was pretty widely hated after that.
 
*twitch* YAY!
*more twitching*
I could see a lot of potential with this, if it weren't so very difficult to create missions... Prophecy deathmatches ought to be a thrill, though. Any word on whether there will be some type of multiplayer lobby? (not everyone has my sparkling personality)
By the way, if ya need help testing it through a router, I'd love to dust off the ol' joystick. ;)
 
PeteyG said:
Wait... April 1st isn't for another three or four weeks.

I don't believe it! This is ridiculous (ly awesome!)
Click to expand...

Cpl Hades said:
Akkbar actually did a Prophecy multiplayer patch april fool joke on WCHS in 1998. He was pretty widely hated after that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that would literally be the last April 1 joke we'd ever run. :)

<LOAF> Well, it's good, we've finally made up for Akkbar.

(It was actually a Prophecy multiplayer alpha demo in 1997, just before they announced multiplayer was being cut entirely)

Manic said:
Any word on whether there will be some type of multiplayer lobby? (not everyone has my sparkling personality)
Click to expand...

We have plenty of infrastructure to facilitate whatever's necessary. In the case of playing Wing Commander Armada online, people just meet in #Wingnut to see if anyone else wants to play.

I've been saying for quite a while now that the best is yet to come. For a while now, each year has brought more surprises and exciting developments than the previous year. It's really a great time to be a Wing Commander fan. Here's one more picture, because the original ones we posted above didn't include PopsiclePete. It shows Hades delivering the final missile before pulling away. Hades was like 15 and 0 in our final test round this morning.



Be sure to check out HCl's site too. There are more pictures and a bit more information. http://www.wcrevival.de/hcl/
 
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Just had a thought on the lobby concept, and a game-matching system... an IRC channel, with bots communicating with each other, and feeding it into the interface. (like a #wingnut window for communications, and a new, seperate channel for said "callsign-bots" to inhabit upon creating a game... the bots would name themselves after the game name, and all that would be needed to show up in the interface would be the listings themselves.
Then, when a player selected a game, the player's end of the client would send a message to the bot's irc, which would subsequently feed the player's pc the needed information to connect. (IP, Port, and so on)
Perhaps a bit convoluted in some ways, but the easiest way to get a persistant game-server using an existing infrastructure.
 
That doesn't sound easy or sensible at all if all you need is a central server keeping a list of active games.
 
From a programming standpoint, it's relatively simple to impliment, I would think. It's just an IRC chat-bot(well, two chatbots in tandem, effectively) feeding a command line execution to prophecy... It's more or less the concept Gamespy is based on, just simplified in some ways(lack of game data, ping, etc), and made more complex in others(dual clients running in tandem). Whatever route HCl takes with it will leave me with a grin, I'm just dropping a suggestion.
edit- the main selling point here being there being almost no maintenence required, and bandwidth use would be on dalnet's head, not some poor host...
 
Too bad we're not using dalnet for #wingnut.

(hint: irc.wcnews.com is the server name)
 
This is truly a legendary day for wingnuts everywhere....I can't wait to see what people will do with this new found potential...

Is it limited to just player's craft or is the possibility of having capships and AI fighters present?
 
We use #Wingnut for Armada because it's super simple and easy. What you're describing sounds too convoluted to be practical Manic. If we need something more powerful, we'll develop it. Kris and HCl are both genius programmers. I'll leave it to them to work out the details, if we determine that's what's needed. That's not really what this thread is about though.
 
This is absolutely fantastic!!! My only two wishes heres are:

1. That a limit higher than four people be worked out somehow :)

2. That teams be integrated (don't know if this is already available or not).

Great work, HCL! This is huge!!!!
 
bugger, now i'm gonna have to go find a copy on Ebay, this was the last reason i had for not going ahead and hunting down fresh copies of the three sets i had.

alright not the last reason, thats lack of funding but now the want to blow the money on it is even greater.
 
Maj.Striker said:
This is absolutely fantastic!!! My only two wishes heres are:

1. That a limit higher than four people be worked out somehow :)

2. That teams be integrated (don't know if this is already available or not).

Great work, HCL! This is huge!!!!
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Bandit LOAF said:
Is there a 4 player limit? I thought they did at least one test with 5.
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The current limit is 4. HCl plans to make the limit higher than 4 when his netcode gets optimised enough. Implementing teams should be easy, as the original WCP code already includes eight (8) unused multiplayer alignements, and alignements are just a single flag on an object.
 
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