HCl is up to his usual tricks again. This time he's managed to extract ship models from Wing Commander Prophecy and convert them to Wing Commander 2/Academy format! See what the Prophecy Dralthi and the Nephilim Manta both look like in the Academy game engine in the exciting screenshots below. You can also test fly a Hellcat V in WCA with a small patch here.
I was finally able to finish my WCP mesh reader and plug it into the main WC2 ship converter, so I pulled the WCP Dralthi, ran a few tests and converted it to WCA. Sure enough, the ship does look better. The additional detail is noticeable even at the low resolutions used by WC2 / WCA, so that definitely paid off. I'm going to start working on the Dralthi stats based on the discussion on this thread, but in the meantime, here's a few screenshots of the new Dralthi. Note that the ship was converted with the "higher-resolution" mode I discussed some posts back, which means the scale still needs to be tweaked (the ship looks a bit larger than it should at a given distance)
As a bonus... well, since I had a WCP mesh reader in place, i couldn't resist converting one of the Nephilim ships over to WCA just to see how well it would look in the WC2 palette. :p The Nephilim ships are just so different from Confed and Kilrathi ships, color-wise that I wasn't really expecting the WC2 palette to handle the Nephilim textures all that well... However, I was surprised, the result really wasn't all that bad! In fact, i think the result turned out to be rather nice!
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