Ok that are a lot of questions...well lets see what informations I could give you so far.
WC saga looks to have more missions than other mods.
I wouldn't say that. We are at the moment at about 30 Mission for the main release and about 5-6 for the prologue.
However, going through the forums from CIC, both new and old, I have noticed alot of skepticism regarding this project.
Yes there has been and I think till the final release their will allways be some, but thats understandable. We use, as you said, a different engine and its hard to do a total conversation of that engine to get a good Wing Commander feeling.
The problem of giving the game the right feeling is also one of the points for our delays. Still the momentary version of Saga has a nice feeling to it. Balancing the missions is still a problem cause some testers say its to easy...others its to hard.
We are aiming for a good balance so everyone can play it.
Obviously anticipation for any WC mods is very high right now with the release of Standoff ep 2, so it would be a great time for a release.
We are aware of that, but their are thinks we can't controle that are slowing us down alot.
First...our real working team is down to about 3 persons with some sporadig help from other people and even these people have real lifes that needs attention.
Starman has a lot of work to do after he got promoted. Tolwyn had is final exams a short while ago so that he also had his mind somewhere else. Myself...well I am in the middle of my final exams projects.
Their are other people who are helping us and without them the mod wouldn't be so good, but most of them aren't artists (2d/3d) or modelers so they can't help even if they want to.
Second...we need some coding/programming done so that we can implement some features that we need. Without them we would have quite some problems, but without a coding team on our own we have to wait till the coders we know have time to do the changes.
These are the main reasons for our delays...there are others but these are the importend ones.
The website is so out of date that I wouldn't recomment to belive anything written their ^_^
We are working on a new updated version.
t seems some WC patrons are already starting to think that this project is dead, or at least will never be finished, because there has been so little progess made in the last few months...You guys should definately give your fans something, if half of your game is already complete.
No we aren't dead in any way...just very busy with other things.
The lack of visible progress is because their isn't anything to show...well their is but then you would know the plot before we release the prologue ^_^
About having a half finished game...that isn't completly right. Their where a lot of changes during the last month that force us to rework some of the stuff we thought that was ready.
The overall status of the prologue is about 90% finished.
But as said before we are forced to wait till some codeing is done and the last parts of graphics are finished.
Episode release vs complete release
We had a lot of discussions in the team about this topic. Some are still for an episode base but the common consence was to make one complete release.
The reason on the one side is a technical one..as far as I got it...and the other is that we think that a storyline as we planed it would be more intense if you don't have to wait for the next episode each time. Something that bothered me about Standoff a little was that Ep2 was so short and that I mostl likely will play each time the previews ep again to get into the game again. It is..to me at least... a differance if you have just a few days between continuing the game or some month.
So their are a lots of pro and contro points about releases in episodes and complete...lets just say that we have decided to do it this way and I hope the complete release will be worth that time of waiting.
I hope that I could answere some of your questions. Feel free to ask more I will hopefully be able to answere them....exceptions would be releasedate and storyline...they are still a secret ^_^