Wing Commander Prophecy: Secret Ops Model Update Pack

DefianceIndustries said:
Hey @Adm_maverick let's see if I can answer your questions here.

MED is the original utility that was used to make missions by origin. You can find them here. It should be a help to your video project as you can script cut scenes with it.
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Sweet, thanks for the linky. I hate to be so imposing, but is there any documentation about the tools and materials in that ISO? Or instruction on what the tools are for and how to use them?

DefianceIndustries said:
Sure, you would just add it like any other asset in a mission. The Fralthi II at the beginning of WCP is in fact, such an asset. So really you would just need to create the destroyed hulk of your choosing and create it like any other .IFF for the game (meaning it would need a model in the MESH directory and a related SHIP file)
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Cool. Any info for me on scritping cut scenes?
 
Sadly, no there isn't a lot of documentation on MED. It's a lot of trial and error. However if you have SO, the intro cut scene is in the missions folder, you can load it into MED and play around with it.
 
A Long Overdue MUPdate:

I was playing with cockpits today. I spent a great deal of time combing through the .IFF files looking for anything that would indicate a camera position for the pilot's eye-point. Of course in the end, I should've just remembered the KISS principle and assumed that the programmers would simply default it to 0,0,0...which of course, they did. So after moving the model around the center of the frame in blender I got a basic new-style Panther cockpit to work pretty much as expected. The mesh has a default gray on it, and after putting it in the game I see some more detail that needs to be added - if I can find a good pilot mesh somewhere I'll likely steal it's legs (mu hu hahahahaha) but it's a good start.

New_PPit.jpg New_PPit_1.jpg New_PPit_BankL.jpg New_PPit_BankR.jpg New_PPit_PitchD.jpg
 
Cool! However, you may find that legs will ultimately be problematic to incorporate, because the movement of the cockpit mesh may at times create the impression that the pilot is falling to pieces. Maybe - but then again, maybe not. Uh, we didn't have cockpit legs in Standoff, right? I can't remember :p.

Note that you may want to read up a bit about the F-35 cockpit. WCP was generally aiming to depict a far more advanced cockpit compared to the war era (hence everything being shown on the HUD), but they kind of cheated by framing the cockpits in such a way that the player wouldn't even see any room for screens and buttons anywhere. Since you seem to be adding that kind of space, the layout of the F-35 might be a good source of inspiration to make these look more advanced than older cockpits.

Incidentally, this would be a really good time for someone to come up with a patch that allows parts of the cockpit HUD to be projected as animated textures onto parts of the cockpit mesh :p.
 
I've actually been looking at the all-glass cockpits like the F-35, I have a version with a single unified HUD like the F-35, but it's kind of bland. In the end, I'll likely remove the round radar in the middle and put another MFD in it's place, but I was sort of inspired by the Viper II cockpit from BSG. I think even an all-glass cockpit would have some steam gauges in it (like the three down the left of the panel) for redundancy IMO.

As for the legs, if I get them to project far enough back you'll only see the thighs, but its kind of a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

It also blocks a lot of the visibility below the fighter. but that's kind of a given...

***EDIT

So here's a revision based off of an F-22 cockpit, it has four MFDs instead of the round radar. Thoughts?
New_PPit_F22Base.jpg
 
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So I started working on the ConFleet support craft this week as well as my cockpit experiment. Here's a few shots of the Seahawk clay. I'm going to probably add a few greebles on the tail near the engines so it's not a 100% complete product. But hey, progress. The Condor only has a few head-on high poly shots so I'm using the in-game model as a reference. It'll probably take a bit more time.

Seahwak_Wip1.jpg Seahwak_Wip3.jpg Seahwak_Wip4.jpg
 
DefianceIndustries said:
Well though it seems a bit like abandonware at this point, it's not. I'm working on some models in the background but the big issue I'm facing right now is that I can't get BSP trees to work with the new cap ship models. So I'm kind of at a bit of a standstill. The models would work with Prophecy, there aren't major differences in file structure between them (same engine and all), However, there are huge differences in memory management between prophecy and SO. So the WCP Unlimited version that Gr1mreaper is working on are different code branches. You do need the WCPUN dll or the game crashes. I haven't tested them with WCP, but it is on my list of things to do after I get the WCP models updated, after all it should be a pretty easy port at that point.
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This is the same area I ran into with the cap ship models not working with the bsp tree.
 
DefianceIndustries said:
yeah the trees are a real pain. Fortunately for us @gr1mreaper is on the case. he's got a few ideas on how to tackle the tree issue in the WCP unlimited patch.
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Yes! I am. On and off. Busy work and home life with my Winglady and little wing nut grabbing most of my attention.

It will actually be a separate app and not part of wcpunl. Just trying to make an easy interface like the hard point editor but that let's you see what you're working with. Still learning Windows gui programming.

By the way , loving the SWACS there. she looks sleek if not a little thin from belly to back? May be just the camera angle. Cockpit looks top notch too.

Did someone mention HUD elements to cockpit texture @Quarto ? Hmm.... My list may be getting a little longer.
 
"The Seahawk? Sure, I've heard all the colorful nicknames, my favorite though is 'The NASA Nacho'. You know what bugs me though? It isn't all the crap we get for flying SWACS 'non-combat' missions; it's listening to these rocket jockeys talk about us like we aren't on the same ship they are or something. I don't think half those I-D-10 T's realize we got plucked out of fighter training early, not because we couldn't hack it, but because we score in the top 30% for both IQ and stick ability. Then they train us to jump ahead of a fleet, alone, and nose around in a ship whose only weapons are its ability not to be seen, or barring that, seeing bad guys before they see us so we can scram; that's of course before those same fighter jocks and their giant fleet hops in behind us to do 'the real work'. Yep, they LOVE to gripe about how we get it easy...sure, easy..."

-Cpt. Gabriela Callighan TCS Mistral Sea

Seahwak_Fin1.jpg Seahwak_Fin3.jpg Seahwak_Fin6.jpg Seahwak_Fin2.jpg

And here it is all converted an in the game...for the one time it appears in SO, the intro.

AWACS1.jpg AWACS2.jpg AWACS3.jpg AWACS4.jpg AWACS5.jpg
 
I was just thinking... It makes sense that a real AWACS dome is on top since the plane has to land and there'd be no room underneath, and really it's looking around laterally 360 degrees in all directions with just a minor shadow underneath the fuselage. But since the SWACs operates in more three dimensional space and its dome is proportionally much smaller compared to the body, then that must mean the ship has to continually roll in a spiral to get proper 720 degree coverage of local space...
 
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