Prototype Dralthi Cockpit Looks Great

Here's a peek at the absolutely badass Dralthi IV cockpit that Howard Day recently put together. The plan is to integrate this with the Academy mods that HCl has been experimenting with for Wing Commander Academy. It bears a very strong resemblance to the Dralthi II layouts that we see in Secret Missions 2 (pictured first after the quote below), but it also packs in some really great asymmetrical features. On the programming front, HCl has managed to make some good progress recently on the Dralthi importation, but he's also encountered some complex glitches. If anyone can overcome them though, he can!

I finally managed to do some more work on the WCA Dralthi. Basically, I managed to implement the stats and do the necessary tweaks to account for the "higher-resolution" mode being used (which, as a side effect, ends up making the ship look larger than it should). Reducing the bitmap size parameter on the ship file (and adjusting the hit radius somewhat) seemed to do the trick, and the ship seems now to have the correct size in-game. Oddly enough however, the ship on-destruction explosion is still smaller than the ship sprite, even though the ship was scaled down. Not only that, but the explosion size seems to *decrease* as the ship radius *increases*. Strange...

I'll look into the ship stats chunk again and double check things, maybe there's one parameter in there that I should be editing and i'm not (although there are not many unknown values in there at this point). Still, I wonder if i didn't hit a WC2 bug, it certainly feels like one... I would expect the explosion radius to increase as the ship radius increases, not the opposite. Well, I guess it should be possible to work around this, either via EXE hacking or simply by importing higher-resolution explosion sprites to match.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can start coding the various regions for Howie's cockpit :D