Ue2????
- Thread starter Kevin Caccamo
- Start date
Pedro
Admiral
Dyret said:
I hate to say it but I've been less than impressed with WCU and the Remake, its a massive undertaking and remarkable that they even exist but they could have been so much more (ofcourse in retrospect I'm unhappy with Unknown Enemy, I am a massive fan of Standoff however, it truly is superb, despite my poor voice acting).
I've not really been in the community much lately, tbh I from the days when the community was split into three factions, the over protective #wing-commander group, the immature and arrogant wingnutters and the modders, who themselves fell into two categories, extremely competant and positivley useless (as a designer I fell into the latter, I'd like to think as a mission scripter and was atleast competant).
My perspective was (although I've not been in #w-c lately) that its improved a lot, the modders talents seem overall more balanced (and HCl has risen to unprecdented heights) and the wing nutters seem slightly more mature, have we seen the rise of a new and evil party?
Iceblade
Admiral
Well, you do have to look at one thing, though. It shouldn't take ya'll three years to make UE2. You already have most of the ships, most of the hacks, and most everything else not directly related to the story (eg missions, ciematics, music, etc.). Although granted, missions and movies do take large amounts of time to make.
I do have an obvious suggestion, though, concerning looking for a new engine: go for one that has a built-in mission editor.
I do have an obvious suggestion, though, concerning looking for a new engine: go for one that has a built-in mission editor.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
These aren't actual groups. Two IRC channels being stupid to each other doesn't split the community -- the community is the thousands of people who visit the CIC every day, not the twenty people on IRC.
The fact that the people in charge of #WingNut are brilliant and useful doesn't raise whatever petty squabbles they're involved with to some kind of community dividing level. I'm sure the people in the Aces Club divide the community between Holding the Line readers and Maintaining the Vigilance readers (or, at least they did at some point)... but the community at large doesn't care about any of this debate and simply incorporates the work of both groups into its greater consciousness.
ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Pedro said:
That's a flawed philosophy. You don't make some generic hyper space sim for the masses and hope they turn into bigger WC fans. The best projects our community has produced have been focused on experiences that the most fanatic Wing Commander players would appreciate. The quality and attention to detail that has resulted from this has been what's attracted many people on the periphery into our community. Anybody can make a mod for the hottest new space sim out there today, but our growth has come from people seeing just how incredibly devoted we are to our classic franchise.
Pedro said:
Wow, what a ridiculous categorization of the Wing Commander community. Taking thousands of people and representing them by a couple dozen outspoken jerks is crazy. Back in the day there were huge distinct sets of fans. The hundreds of active posters to alt.games.wing-commander had a different culture than the hundreds of regular posters to Origin's Official Wing Commander Chat Zone. These people in turn were somewhat distinct from the people involved with the Acenet Posting Board. And we're just talking about message boards here. There was overlap between them, and a great many people weren't involved with them at all. There were other active clubs besides the Aces, and a variety of competing news hubs like the CIC that each had their own community. Back in those days, I used to worry that the CIC was actually founded too late to gain traction versus other major WC sites.
Your timeline in regards to your categories doesn't fit either. By the time there was any modding community to speak of, #Wing-Commander had long since stopped being about Wing Commander at all. And if you knew about the divide between the two irc channels, you'd know #Wingnut was founded by the dozen or so most knowledgable and experienced people in #Wing-Commander who couldn't stand the immaturity building there.
Pedro said:
Yes, of course. But there's no benefit to bringing them up here now. You haven't been to #Wingnut lately either.
Pedro
Admiral
ChrisReid said:
No, but the members who sprang to mind I've observed posting on the forums.
Obviously I could only form an opinion on those who were active and I had contact with but tbh the statement was far from completely serious, it was interesting to see the response though
(I don't get out a lot these days so I'm easily ammused 
)I had absolutley no concept of what caused the rift, and didn't much care. It was the lack of immaturity that got to me there though, no sense of humour whatsoever
But yes general absence of wing commander-ness was quite noticeable.As for the engine, I've been disucussing this with pete over msn for an hour now and he made some very persuasive technical arguments for sticking with the vision engine, and those are the ones I'm generally most receptive to (for better or worse).
Iceblade said:
Its not that simple, apart from anything we didn't have a coherant style due to changing modellers every 15 minutes. What was produced by Eder was superb but he has outdone himself lately and UE looks really rather ancient in comparison now. The game really needs a refit, it would be nice to update UE1 and produce UE2 simultaneously (one of the benefits of using the vision engine for UE2).
As for a mission editor... theres a lot to be said for low level scripting; you can only make an editor so graphically based before you lose flexibility. However, for a recent group project we created an editor which allowed you to place objects within the world and then select the object and alter its defualt lua script. Something like that would be useful for the vision engine. The project I was working on only had a single triggering script per game tile but WC objects basically only consist a declaration of positition, rotation and model and of scripts for briefing, game and death so it should be doable.
The placement of objects in a fully 3D world with few reference points would be difficult and would take some careful design work, but even a 2D view which allowed you to manually specify the y component would be of some use. Sadly my C# skills are quite limited because I do feel that would be a very worthwhile project. It would probably only knock 20-30% off development time for any given mission though. I really should have a look at how the freespace editor worked.
Other things would be nice, such as the ability to select appropriate pilots for a ship based on the alignment of it, or to drag and drop comm messages into the script files, letting the editor worry about the comm number. Infact the more I think about it the more I'm sure this could be of use to every vision engine based project... are there any skilled C# coders out there?
Pedro
Admiral
KrisV said:
The majority of proffesional games tools are written in C#, and in my opinion for very good reason. Its fast, its flexible, its great for producing GUIs and it has very good 3D support, and this is a task which really lends its self to OOP (although I tend to think that about every task). I'm smart enough not to get into a programming language debate however (I've had enough of those thanks to having a friend who is a mobile phone games programmer, eurgh, Java programmers).
KrisV
Administrator
It sounds like the 3D aspect in this case is limited to assigning X, Y and Z coordinates and orientation to an item. There probably aren't many people with the time or skill to make you a mission editor, so I wouldn't narrow it down even further over something as minor as the way you paint your dots on a canvas.
Pedro
Admiral
As I said originally, it would be ideal to have some kind of 3D representation where you could change the angle and view the actual models, even if the placement was only done it 2D (when I look back at UE now I'm really horrified that I didn't improve the relative positioning of some of the ships). In a community as large as this I'd expect someone with the necessary talents, its not a tough language. The guy on my team who put together the level editor learnt it specifically for that project. Hell I know a little, if I didn't just get roped into helping with another wc project (never mention your schedule is easing up) I'd investigate it myself.
But if someone wants to knock something up in VB or similar then I'm certainly not going to discourage them, I'm just surprised you feel its such an unlikley skill to come across.
But if someone wants to knock something up in VB or similar then I'm certainly not going to discourage them, I'm just surprised you feel its such an unlikley skill to come across.
ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
Pedro said:No, but the members who sprang to mind I've observed posting on the forums.
Obviously I could only form an opinion on those who were active and I had contact with but tbh the statement was far from completely serious, it was interesting to see the response though
Well, if you'd like to continue baiting people to amuse yourself, we'll be happy to show you the door.
eddieb
Vice Admiral
Pedro said:
The Flight Commander mission editor already does this. There is little to no demand for a Prophecy backend. Anything other than really simple missions still requires scripting, regardless of the engine.
Pedro
Admiral
eddieb said:
As I said, it wouldn't cut a lot of time off, but it would cut some off and a preview mode is always nice. But you would need an amalgamation of graphical and text editor, and most of your time would continue to be spent with the scripts. This was actually what Thomas Bruckner tried accomplishing quite some time ago I believe, but his conclusion was the amount of work involved wasn't justified for the potential benefits (but it did lead to WCP Pascal). In the end I agree, its a nice idea with limited practical use (we'd probably be better off with one extra mission scripter in the community), but its in my nature to get excited about most projects... well just about anything actually (too much caffeine in my diet these days).
*Looks at Chris' half deleted message*... now I remember why I left the community.
On a rather relevant note to UE2's possible future, has anyone seen much of Quarto the last couple of weeks?
BTW eddie I always meant to comment on how impressed I was with flight commader, pulling that off as a one man operation was impressive going
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
It's funny, because that's exactly what Chris' deleted message was about. If you're here to troll, the community doesn't want you.
Heaven forbid the long, established, and generally well thought of practice of free speech. He was entitled to his opinion, and the freedom of expressing his thoughts certinaly wasn't hampering your own. There have been worse things said on these boards without a word said than the offense Pedro gave.
A community can be a exclusive thing-- but not this video game community. This site is public, giving news to anyone who wants to come and spend the time to read the words. Anyone, by just reading the boards, or the site, can become a member of this community. Who is anyone to tell them that because of their words, the community doesn't want them? I'm part of the community, I value both his time and effort.
That being said, I'm probably due for a ban myself, as I just exercised that very same right. Where will I be next? Perhaps the re-education camps.
A community can be a exclusive thing-- but not this video game community. This site is public, giving news to anyone who wants to come and spend the time to read the words. Anyone, by just reading the boards, or the site, can become a member of this community. Who is anyone to tell them that because of their words, the community doesn't want them? I'm part of the community, I value both his time and effort.
That being said, I'm probably due for a ban myself, as I just exercised that very same right. Where will I be next? Perhaps the re-education camps.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
What a terribly offensive thing to say. I'm all for pointing out that the First Amendment has absolutely nothing to do with Chat Zone moderation, but your internet-ized intepretation is even more terrible than the generic Slashdot version -- because you've managed to suggest that while you value "free speech" you also think there *should* be some sort of control over it (if it 'hampers your own'). Silly, silly stuff.
You value his time and effort? He's some stupid kid who showed up to pick a fight. Go to every other message board on the internet and you can happily interact with thousands and thousands of Pedros.
Haha! I get it! Re-education camps! What clever, biting satire! And original, too! Like whichever Orwell novel they had you read in middle school! Getting rid of worthless rifraff *is* exactly like a critique of Stalin's Russia! You, sir, win the day. If you do end up banned -- and you're clearly dumb enough -- you can go out knowing you're the only person in the entire world who ever came up with this analogy. Pat yourself on the back, original thinker!
Bandit LOAF said:
I'm sorry, I forgot to recognize the plethora of quality, original writings I've been seeing from someone with an "Advanced English Degree."
And in all fairness the remark was a comment on the re-education camps of Communist China, where even more so than Soviet Russia, those who disagreed disappeared for twenty years to reappear in public as a reformed citizen. The comment was made in remark that the decision making here works very much like a totalitarian government, and not so much similar to Lenin's brand of Communism as you so quickly took offense.
I also don't see, anywhere specifically, where Pedro started any offense enough to warrant a ban.
Congratulations! Instead of acting like an adult, and personally discussing this with him, you decided to use your powers of persuasion to make him shut up. You're a role model for us all.
Actually I'm referring to the writings of J.S. Mill in On Liberty in the thought that one's freedoms, be they freedom of speech or the right to pursue happiness, only constitutionally extends as far as the freedoms you enjoy not impeding others. Constitutionally you can only take your freedoms so far-- you cannot exercise your freedom of speech at 3:00 a.m. outside your neighbor’s window without problems arising.
This is how the law works. So it's exactly as I said it. I value free speech, but there is control over it if it impedes anyone else’s right of free speech.
Thank you-- I was originally surprised someone with an Advanced English Degree didn't understand where I was coming from. I'm glad to see you appreciate my originality of thought though.