2 difrent versions of MOD

GreyViper

Rear Admiral
What I would like to sugest is that one mod would concentrate on WC1-WC2(maybe pioneer ones to when they get finished) and other WC3-WCP. What it basicly would do is reduce numbers of ships in both mods. That could use to create certain feeling to mod, like the one with wc1-wc2 ships is centered to confed kilrthi war. While the wc3-wcp is more post war oriented featuring more advanced ships and enemies.
ANother reason for sugesting this was that in current mod I really didnt find it nessecery to fly hornet or other WC2 ships because there were better ships. Anyway this might just be me but I think cutting out some older ships might cut down few buggs?
 
GreyViper said:
Anyway this might just be me but I think cutting out some older ships might cut down few buggs?

I think that's just you. :) Ships like the Arrow, Hellcat, Longbow, Avenger and so on were not new in WC3/4. I think it's pretty great to integrate them into the same mod, because that's how they actually were, even though we didn't often see them together. Keeping everything in one pack would seem to me to be more convenient for everyone too.
 
Yeah, it's a lot better to have all the ships in one mod then having to develop two seperate ones to bugtest them. In any case, the current Reckoning build (actually WCFL) is pretty much only ships, with assignment to come later. I don't think it's impossible that Reckoning Gemini and the possible Epsilon will have different ships in them, but that's all still in the future.
 
GreyViper said:
Anyway this might just be me but I think cutting out some older ships might cut down few buggs?
Actually, it's not so much cutting out the older ships, as cutting out the older ship's setups.

As I'm not a modeler, I had, originally, relied on modelers to correctly setup the ships for use in the Freelancer game.
Unfortunately, I assumed that they had.
Recently, several new programs have become available that allow me, a non-modeler, to check those setups, and make changes, as required.
While working on Wing Commander FL, the current mod, I discovered that several ships were missing vital hardpoints, some had hardpoints mislabled, and some had numbers on hardpoints that shouldn't have numbers.
I also discovered that the "fuses," explosions that Freelancer uses, called for the seperation of parts that our ships didn't have.
So...
I've corrected the ship's hardpoints, and reprogrammed the fuses to work with our ships.

I've only had to remove two ships from the mod, one was the Vesuvius, and the other was the newest version of the Ferret, which was in Gamma.
(I replaced the Ferret with the Reckoning's version.)
I'm not sure what's wrong with the models, but the Vesuvius caused distances to read zero all of the time, and the Ferret causes the game to lock-up or crash from time-to-time.

Other than that, the only concern about ships is, WE DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER SHIPS!
We have a Privateer Drayman that I plan on getting, eventually, into the mod, and a Super Transport I've just started looking at, and I have several Privateer 2 ships I can't get textured if my life depended on it, and a Vaktoth that needs it's textures repaired (several see-thru spots.)

Fact is...
There are a Gazillion people willing and ready to do WC I/II/Armada/Privateer ships, but zippo on WC III/IV/Prophecy ships!
Not much I can do without the ships.

And as far as the mod goes...
(hee heee)
I can add as many ships as I can get my grubby little hands on!!!
(And you'll get to fight every single one of them!)
(or buy every single one!)
Freelancer was set up so that adding ships only requires entries in about a dozen places, but, once a model is set up, the programming only takes an hour or so, per ship, to do.

On our wish list:
Most requested: Excalibur and the Dragon.
My Ship wishlist: (non-capitals) the Avenger, and the Kilrathi K'Ha'Haf (flying rock)
Mod wishlist: Some Kilrathi Capitol Ships, the Durango Carrier, and some Wing Commander Bases! (really tired pf Freelancer bases!)
 
warzog said:
...There are a Gazillion people willing and ready to do WC I/II/Armada/Privateer ships, but zippo on WC III/IV/Prophecy ships!
....and some Wing Commander Bases! (really tired pf Freelancer bases!)
fl016uz.gif

But... what, I mean, OK- my ferret is not good.
...so what is wrong with the rest of 'em? ...I mean, you already have them all...
 
I can explain some of this.

I'm busy converting the Caernaven-type / Confed supply depot right now. It's rather long overdue, I know; things got hectic during last spring and the inertia carried over to the rest of the year (same with the supertransport; quirks with how MAX handles the file conversion meant faces were missing unless I dug deeper).

I *don't* think we'll be using the WCIII ship; for one thing Saga will be giving them a lot of exposure and secondly I just don't feel comfortable mixing WCIII designs with the predominantly earlier game design style. What this means is that the Waterloo might appear.
 
Marc said:
fl016uz.gif

But... what, I mean, OK- my ferret is not good.
...so what is wrong with the rest of 'em? ...I mean, you already have them all...
I didn't say that the Ferret wasn't good, I loved it, but it caused crashes.
The Stiletto and Demon, which were in Gamma also, are in this new mod.
The other ships, I haven't got converted models for.
Bob's been doing the conversion to Freelancer's formats.
There is one ship that WC News lists as a Capitol Ship, but was set up as a fighter in Gamma, Gotta fix that.

And Bob:
We need EVERY ship we can get.
Limiting it to one game's ships, or to one era, removes a lot of fans from the loop.
Besides that, many folks want to see how WC I ships are against WC IV ships.

Remember what I said; "I'm not a modeler!"
I can't model the ships, and I can't convert them.
I CAN setup the hardpoints, and do the programming, but I'm at the mercy, and whims, of the modelers.
 
We need EVERY ship we can get.
Limiting it to one game's ships, or to one era, removes a lot of fans from the loop.
Besides that, many folks want to see how WC I ships are against WC IV ships.

Yeah, this is where the *don't* (conditional modifer, not emphasis) comes in. It dates back to the other concern I had: unrealistically excessive numbers of battleships. This mostly dates back to the earlier builds of Reckoning - the early early builds (summer of 2003) had (crudely textured) fleets of Paradigms, Supercruisers and Exeters making their way around Freelancer. It was a magnificent sight. It also made no sense in the Gemini setting - if the war was on, it made no sense to have such a preponderance of military might in a backwater sector, and if it was after the war, well, it still didn't check out with the well-documented gutting of the fleet in the immediete postwar period. Well, unless Confed decided to do the equivilant of a Great White Fleet cruise.

An Epsilon scenario makes this more plausible. Epsilon is kind of the Southeast Asian Theatre to Wing Commander's Pacific War; a sideshow where some important battles take place (most notably the destruction of the 6th Fleet), and then heavy activity right before the bomb. Since Epsilon is such a mixing ground, it makes sense to have more capital ships in the area, though the paint scheme is going to be heavily dependent on the time period. Personally, I support the postwar setup, since it gives more color to the period and allows a distribution of the ships by age - Waterloos for the Confed, and destroyers and Tallahassees for the Border Worlds. The latter setup would mean the UBW ships need to be retextured in Border Worlds colors. If Standoff has proven anything, it's that a good paint scheme can blend things in.
 
Bob McDob said:
I *don't* think we'll be using the WCIII ship; for one thing Saga will be giving them a lot of exposure and secondly I just don't feel comfortable mixing WCIII designs with the predominantly earlier game design style. What this means is that the Waterloo might appear.

Mods shouldn't let what any other mods are doing influence their project like that. Lots of the designs from WC3 are actually older, so seeing them with ships from WC1-2 would be great.
 
ChrisReid said:
Mods shouldn't let what any other mods are doing influence their project like that. Lots of the designs from WC3 are actually older, so seeing them with ships from WC1-2 would be great.
Well...
I'm kinda guilty of that, myself.
The problems I've had with Reckoning, and all of the new Privateer mods kinda influenced me to rename the mod as Wing Commander FL.
Partly to distance it from all of the bugs we had, and to actually do something different.
Which is where Bob's "Epsilon" remarks come from.
I've been toying with the idea of doing a Privateer-like mod, but in another Sector.
After looking through the excellent map section, I noticed that Epsilon is nicely divided into 3 regions, Confed, Border Worlds, and Kilrathi.
The possibilities for Privateer, and for Multi-Player, in Epsilon, are intriguing.
It would also give us a chance to use the plethora of capitol ships we already have, and would make Battleship and Destroyer encounters, which I tried to include in the last version of Reckoning, much more appealing.
(Still need some Border World & Kilrathi Cap ships to make it work, though.)

BTW-Is there anywhere that I can find information on the contents of the systems in Epsilon?
 
warzog said:
...It would also give us a chance to use the plethora of capitol ships we already have, and would make Battleship and Destroyer encounters, which I tried to include in the last version of Reckoning, much more appealing.
(Still need some Border World & Kilrathi Cap ships to make it work, though.)
I for one am working on it, but it's slow going.
 

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Marc said:
I for one am working on it, but it's slow going.
Very WC2-esque. You know, about a year and a half ago ago, LOAF was looking for a texture artist who could help restore the original WC2 catship models (there's about three or four of them that are either missing parts of textures, or are entirely untextured). I don't think anybody actually responded to the challenge (well, IIRC, Eder might have done something for the Dorkathi, but I'm not sure)... maybe you could help out with that?
 
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Yeah, I love your work, Marc. Its the closest thing to actual WC2 models I've ever seen. Do you have any plans for using all the models you've made in anything?
 
@Quarto, regardless of any challenge or reward, it is my full intention to remodel and texture everything WC -so yes, eventually a complete catfleet will be available.

@Maj.Striker, right now everything I model gets sent to this project. BobMcDob got me the reference material in the firts place and I really like this project. But wheather or not any of it gets used is decided by the programmers.
I do have dreams of projects in my head where I could make use of my models, but just modeling them is so long (the modeling itself is rather fast but just finding the time is really hard)... I'm just trying to get them done in the first place.
 
Marc said:
But wheather or not any of it gets used is decided by the programmers.
(That's Bob McDob.)
Until they're converted for use in Freelancer, I can't do much with them.

Speaking of which...
Today, I was going through the various incarnations of Reckoning, looking for ships that weren't in the mod, that should be.
I discovered a Raptor in Gamma, but it suffers from the same problem that Gamma's Ferret does.
(It causes crashes all of the time.)
Looking at them in HardCMP, both seem to "white-out" everything.
The Hardpoints usually show up as a pinkish-orange cube, with weapon's arcs as green.
With these two, everything's white.

I also went through some 2003 versions of Reckoning, and found a Raptor, a Rapier, a Scimitar, a Korlarh, and a Jalthi.
Unfortunately, they're all sitting on top of their SUR files, which would make them invisible, and harder than H to hit.
 
Marc said:
@Quarto, regardless of any challenge or reward, it is my full intention to remodel and texture everything WC -so yes, eventually a complete catfleet will be available.
That's great, but just keep in mind that LOAF's request wasn't about making new models, it was about restoring the missing textures to existing (original) models. It'll be great to see a complete catfleet of your models... but it would be just as great (for totally different reasons) to have a completely restored original catfleet :).
 
Is it possible to get a copy of one of the early versions of Reckoning...I would love to see the big fleets of battleships ypu took out? I will browse for earlier versoins,
but wanted to ask here in case you have them stashed somewhere special?

I know there may be bugs you have fixed but I am a collector of versoins as well as MODs....thanks a log
 
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