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That is fascinating, absolutely fascinating! I would have totally played Zero Pilot - the concept of an Ace Combat-style fictionalised world is a great workaround for all the hangups related to marketing a game about a Japanese WWII campaign. I had a look at the credits and screenshots...

Hmm. Was the external view in Privateer 2 actually good enough to be playable? It takes a fair amount of tweaking to go from having a ship view that simply allows the player to take a quick look at their ship from outside in a quiet moment, to having a fully playable third person view. While it...

Congratulations to everyone! I greatly miss actually contributing to fan projects, or perhaps more likely, I'm simply nostalgic for that time in the early 2000s, when I had so much time to spare for such things. I envy both the new community members and the old-timers who still have time for...

Hmm. Ok. Last time I tried talking about Privateer 2, I actually decided to "disappear" myself for a few months from the CZ, because I looked at my own posts, and the reaction to those posts, and decided that hey, actually, I was getting really combative in an ugly, 1990s internet debate kind...

Ah, yes - I do remember somehow accidentally doing that. Now that I remember doing quite intentionally! I think that's probably the single best use of this mechanic, because the way the situation was set up, you not only immediately knew that you were facing a choice, but also, for some players...

Ah, of course - the funerals would be a very natural place for this. It's interesting they dropped it for WC4 - care to hazard a guess as to why? Would it be just because of the stricter timeline (and therefore, the risk of adding unnecessary complexities that require testing), or is it that...

This is remarkable indeed - it's so rare after all these years to learn something genuinely new about these games! I never, ever realised that WC3 has this kind of dynamic changes in cutscenes, I was under the impression that the game usually just chooses between scenes wholesale. Do you know of...

I'm sooooo envious you have the time to do this at all. Every time I see an update, I get this urge to volunteer to start implementing gameplay or something... and then I remember that the most I can do these days is promise to do something, and never actually find any time to follow through. I...

All the background stuff is pretty neat (though I personally would have had the cruisers parallel to the screen, they look a bit weird facing us), but man - that is such a cheap trick with the crew replication! In the screenshot, it looks absolutely horrid. The identical poses, the pixel-exact...

I am really, really loving every update from this project! I hardly ever have time for Wing Commander these days, but if there is any project that I wish I had the time to contribute to - this is the one. It's such a thing of beauty, it really looks like such a natural progression from the...

Well, that's certainly true. I don't think there was a universe in which Arena could have been successful. However, at the same time, it has to be said: EA's lack of confidence meant that this was the only viable option at all for a new Wing Commander product. For this reason, I for one am very...

I am struggling with words. It feels to me like anything I can say will ring hollow in the face of the loss Adam's family faces. Like most people here, probably, I never had a chance to meet him face-to-face. I'm sure we exchanged comments dozens of times, but I can't recall any specific...

Absolutely. The result is always an inconsistent experience from the perspective of the end user, which is bad enough. From the perspective of the rest of the team, though, it can be even worse, since the game becomes to some extent inexplicable. A tester reports a bug with the flight model...

There's a lot in your post that I could comment on, but time is precious, and I'm almost two hours behind already this morning, so... I may be a more of a lurker now, coming back rarely, posting a few times, and then purposely ignoring the CIC for a few months as I try to keep up with work and...

Thanks! Yeah, this is something I've come across in my own gamedev career as well - in so many cases, it's easier for programmers to cheat with AI pilots than to have them follow the same rules. In fact, as I look back, in every single game I worked on where this topic came up, I never stood a...

That is actually very interesting - as I said, I rather enjoyed the gameplay, but it may well be that I simply didn't have much to compare it to, since it was basically the first space sim I'd played in about a decade. So, I guess I just didn't notice any of the AI shenanigans you mention. I...

To be fair, Arena doesn't actually *look* top-down :). The camera is positioned behind and a bit above your ship, so it looks really nice and 3D, it's just that you only fly on a flat plane - hence I say it's top-down. As for Squadrons, your comments are interesting in that your experience is...

Well, the way I see it, Arena is precisely the problem. Yes, lots of us had a blast playing it - but there isn't actually a lot of us. Arena was clearly intended as a gentler way of rebuilding the franchise, and, while I have no idea about its sales data, the results were clearly not...

Ah, if only that were true! There is, unfortunately, a very good reason why people at EA seem to continually toy with the idea of bringing back Wing Commander, but never end up actually doing it. That reason is that Wing Commander is, sadly, not a gold mine. From the mass market perspective, WC...

Hmm, that reminded me of something else that I overlooked earlier because I actually managed to forget what a big issue it was: namely, the engine. For a developer today, making a game for the Xbox and then porting it to the PlayStation is just a non-issue - whether they're using Unity or...