Standoff Development Entering Final Phase

One month to go

Crap, one month left :-P. We're definitely gonna be cutting things close. But what the hell, I mean, it is the last episode, so it's allowed to be a race to the finish ;-).

By the way, since I mentioned last week that we finished all the additional voiceovers for the new cutscenes, this is a good opportunity to throw some pointless numbers at you :-P. So... following all the additions, Episode 1 now has a grand total of 710 lines of voiceovers. Episode 2 has gone up slightly as well, to 541 lines. While we're at it, Episode 3 had 460 lines, Episode 4 had 553, and Episode 5 will (if Tempest moves his ass... or at least his vocal chords) have a total of 747 lines.

So, that means Standoff as a whole will have 3,011 lines of voiceovers. Now, I know quantity isn't quality, but I hope this goes a little bit towards explaining why Standoff's taken so long to complete. It's a huge damn cow of a mod that has, over the years, gotten way bigger than we had originally planned.

Anyway, what's been going on this week? Pretty much the same things as last week - ship improvements, music, and a huge bug testing & fixing effort. Our automated patching system turned out to be really useful for this. Getting new versions to the testers is easier than ever.

Making the Game: UNITS

This text file sets the rules for units in Wing Commander Prophecy. In order to scale everything properly, the designers sat down and decided on constants invisible to the player -- distances are measured in meters, speeds are measured in tenths of a meter and so forth. What actually interests me the most, though, is a little notice at the top of the document: "NOTE: This document is currently a text file as some members of the team have Office 97, and others have Word for Windows 95. Once everyone has switch to the same version of Word, this document will be converted to Word format." That, more than anything, makes me feel like I'm there -- makes me understand exactly how this sort of development could be an everyday thing for people.

These updates are thanks to John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel, who provided several CD image archives of material used by the Wing Commander Prophecy development team!

UNITS Download (3 kb) Date: March 25, 1997 Project: Wing Commander Prophecy Donated By: John Guentzel Pages: 2