Ship Viewer Released for Secret Ops

Quarto has put together an awesome little program for Wing Commander Secret Ops. The patch is based on the ship viewer in Wing Commander Prophecy, but this version adds all of the new Secret Ops ships, Terran capships, Kilrathi designs and even Nephilim vessels. It also shows alternate versions of some craft, such as the Midway with plasma gun and the destroyed model of certain ships. It's really impressive how many models are in the game.

Just unzip this small file (60 k zip) into the Secret Ops folder, and then click on the small sphere above the holographic Cerberus in the game's ready room (normally the "Prophecy" easter egg). It may be worthwhile to set this up on a separate game installation, since it could temporarily impact normal function. Quarto has additional notes below. Let him know what you think at the CIC Forums.

I've cooked up a rough-and-dirty ship viewer for Secret Ops. This mod (if I may even call it that) does the following:

• Replaces the easter egg with the object viewer.
• Breaks SO completely - with this thing installed, you will not be able to play through the campaign (which also means that you may have trouble using this mod with a savegame in place... but it just possibly *might* work, unless you try actually flying a mission).
• Adds every single ship from WCP and SO to the object viewer. I've also modified the text files, adding names for all those other ships - but only names. Stats are only available for those ships that already had them in WCP. Apart from ships, there are also various other objects - the cargo container, the ejection pod, buoys, capship missiles, etc..
• Adds a few other curiosities. There's a couple of objects included in SO that were never used in the game: ◦The Copernicus-class research vessel from the WCP intro (note: the mesh files included in SO are actually broken, so I'm including fixed mesh files with this viewer - the credit for these files goes to KillerWave).
  • The mining probe (or whatever it is) from the WCP intro (also seen in the first mission of UE).
  • An unknown hull that I have no idea about. The file is called callisto.iff, but it is clearly not Callisto Station (which is under a different name). It appears to be a capship, not a station of any kind. I'm not sure whether this is a complete ship, or whether there should be components attached to it - it actually looks pretty complete.
  • An unused version of the Fralthi II cruiser wreckage from WCP, with debris included as part of the model. Presumably, this didn't work too well, because in the end they chose to use the wreckage alone, with the debris added separately as a kind of asteroid field.
  • An alien drone - and the only reason I can even identify it as a drone is because that's the filename, adrone.iff.
  • A weirdo alien buoy... with Kilrathi parts sticking out of it! I'm pretty sure this one wasn't used in WCP.
  • Some unused meshes probably meant for the Stellar Accretion Device. As you might recall from SO, the Stellar Accretion Device actually wasn't a single object - they placed a drydock and a relay station together with the wormhole cone. The wormhole cone is a separate ship... but it seems that they did consider creating a single capship that would include all three of these things as one object.

While I'm at it, there's a few things that I found that are worth mentioning, but which are not visible in this viewer:
• Power-ups. Yep, all the meshes are there for WCP's multiplayer powerups. I didn't include them in the viewer, because they have no textures - so it's impossible to make out any details anyway.
• 3d planets (rather low-poly). Did they want to have 3d planets as part of the background? I don't know.
• 3d terrain. That's right - there is a mesh in WCP called terrain.iff. I can only presume this was a test for planetside missions. This mesh, unfortunately, makes the game crash when I try to display it - so, we'll never actually get to see it. Keep in mind, the existence of this mesh does not actually mean that planetside missions were planned for WCP and cut out - as far as we know, no design doc for WCP has ever included planetside missions. This was probably a test conducted purely for technology's sake.
• Missiles and gun bullets. I know these could probably be useful for you guys, but I haven't added them at the moment. It's just a chore, because there's quite a few of them - so, if anybody actually wants them, I'll update this package at a later date, but for the time being, they're not in there.

One final note. WCP's object viewer has some limitations - it was never really designed to display capships. What this means is that while it is possible to show an object that consists of a base mesh with child objects (after all, this mechanism is used in some fighters, e.g., the Wasp and its detachable booster, the Vampire and its rotating engine nacelles), it is not possible to show the child objects that would normally be attached to a child object. Or, in less technical terms - I can attach turrets to capships, but I cannot attach gun barrels to turrets. This is not a problem for most capships, but there are two whose silhouettes will be significantly different because of the missing barrels - the Cerberus and the Plunkett. Nothing I can do about that, unfortunately.