Dralthis IVs Inbound for WC2 Modding Project

Wing Commander editing god HCl has provided a status update on his project to import models into WC2. After recently figuring out how to customize movie sequences, the focus lately has been on the game engine and how to trigger cutscenes. A test Dralthi should be released soon. In the mean time, you can test out a Hellcat compatible with WC Academy here.

Sorry for the away time! Unfortunately, had a crazy crunch period at work that took all the energy I had to pull through. Guess that's the downside of working in the telecom industry... I'm glad it's over though, and that I can finally get back to the really interesting stuff (this community and our WC-related projects :) )

So, here's a quick summary of where was I before the insanity started:

- Managed to work a bit more on my WC2 bytecode disassembler. Although I was making good progress, I was clearly still some time away from getting it all 100% documented. I think more work still needs to be done on this until the mechanism / commands for triggering animations is fully understood, so it's probably wise to push the converter for WC animations a bit down the feature list. I mean, we know how to convert animations, but until the mechanisms for triggering them in-game are understood, the converter isn't going to be particularly useful...

- So, given the above, I decided put away the animation converter for a bit and focus on my web-based WC2 ship converter. I ended up playing a bit with pure javascript, but ended up deciding to use the GWT. Looks like Java is the ideal language for this, at this point: it integrates very well with Matlab, which is pretty much my WC-Research platform of sorts, and with the GWT I can compile the same Java code to Javascript and run it on a web page. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid re-implementing algorithms in multiple languages from this point on.

Anyway, I think the WC2 converter is relatively close to a first release. I'm going for a very simple load-file-then-export-ship mechanism at first, then incrementally add functionality to it. Each milestone will include a sample source files for conversion. (note: the WC2 converter works perfectly fine offline... I can also make a zip file for offline use).

I'll upload my Dralthi soon, even in its incomplete form it should be fun to play around with :)