Editing Wing Commander III & IV

Thanks a lot! I spent yesterday and today going through all the WC4 ships on your list, and five-view shots of them all are now available in the usual directory. I ended up swapping out the Intrepid instead of the transport, as it made for a nice even view in the object camera (for some reason).

Here's the Border Worlds Outpost:

wc4unionoutpost.png


I can't imagine what it's for, other than possibly the 'rescue the scientist' mission, where this would make a lot more sense than the spacelabs with giant Confed stars on them.

The other unusual thing I found was lex42, which is a Concordia-class ship that's marked CV-42.

The BWS Tango had a broken camera view -- it would only show a distant low-poly version. I wonder if that was intentional, to cover up the fact that the highres version still has an '06' on the side. I flew around it in a Lance and grabbed shots that look better.

I'm still missing... the other buildings from Tyr. The 'main' one was in there (that the shuttle lands on), but the others weren't.
 
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Looked into my notes again ... but it turns out i never gathered much information about buildings or terrain. Looks like you'll have to fly the original missions in order to grab those missing buildings.

Don't forget about the famous Black Lance Carrier (bcarrier). The game version is fully functional, with an open hangar, turrets and even a VDU pic (in fact, after close inspection, i'd say the Black Lance transport uses the BCarrier VDU pic). I wonder why it wasn't used on the "escape Axius" mission.

Other than that, I think that's pretty much it, regarding lost WC3/4 game objects. Good catch about the CV-42. Any idea what ship it might be? We know the Princeton is CV-48 (lex48), but i don't remember seeing any mention to CV-42 anywhere.
 
Haven't been able to get anything more done the past few days... coming home from work after 19:00 doesn't exactly make it easy to find time for WC :(. Mind you, I did take a look at those Armada capships from KillerWave's page, but I'm not too sure about them. Either they're amongst the worst texturing jobs ever, or the textures got messed up in conversion to WCP. Anyway, I'm gonna try to extract the textures from Armada myself and see if I can do anything better.

In the meantime, though, here is a render of the Kilrathi transport. As you can see, it's remarkably... gray. And the markings are blue, which also seems rather unlikely. So, this method is clearly going to require a bit more work.
 

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Don't worry too much about the transports, I'll play with them when I get back to school (in a few days). I'd post to this thread more often, but D*C is killing me at the moment. The bigger question is the stats -- did you figure out some reliable way to decode them from WC3/4? You were making great progress earlier.

In terms of the Black Lance transport - I have the pictures on my drive at school, and I'll paste together an image eventually... but as cool as the 'lost ships' are, the real focus here should be to get the found ones into a great database -- something this site should have had eight years ago.

Now, all that said (and because no one reads this thread), I have a bigger job for HCl. If people have been watching the D*C webcam, you know we have something... pretty cool... that we've been searching for for quite a while. Basically, we need to get Prophecy to play a bunch of beautiful .vob files (that people would download) instead of the movies included on the CDs...
 
Prophecy vobs? Wow, LOAF, that's truly amazing news! :D

Being familiar with the video routines on the Prophecy EXE by now, i think i'll be able to cook up a patch without running into many surprises. Are you planning to post the files in the original vob format or conversions from those sources to another format? The reason i ask is because i already have a DivX patch for Prophecy / Secret Ops, which is used by Standoff / UE to import new comms and movies.

Regardless, I'll be tweaking the existing patch into whatever solution is appropriate to preserve movie quality :)
 
HCl said:
Prophecy vobs? Wow, LOAF, that's truly amazing news! :D

Being familiar with the video routines on the Prophecy EXE by now, i think i'll be able to cook up a patch without running into many surprises. Are you planning to post the files in the original vob format or conversions from those sources to another format? The reason i ask is because i already have a DivX patch for Prophecy / Secret Ops, which is used by Standoff / UE to import new comms and movies.

Regardless, I'll be tweaking the existing patch into whatever solution is appropriate to preserve movie quality :)
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I imagine LOAF, if he's not sending you (HCl) a copy already, will give you a peek at the actual EXE's and such on the DVD (they should be similar to the WC4 ones). So taking into consideration things like gulikozas patch (If this solution is even neccessary with the WCP DVD) it really shouldn't take much to make a patch.
 
All i know is what LOAF wrote above, so on my previous post i assumed i would only have high-quality video files and the current game EXE to work with. Of course, if a finished WCP DVD version does indeed exist, patching it will be a much simpler matter. We'll know exactly what needs to be done after a quick peek inside the new EXE / DLLs.

I'm sure LOAF will be telling us more about this as things develop:)
 
HCl said:
All i know is what LOAF wrote above, so on my previous post i assumed i would only have high-quality video files and the current game EXE to work with. Of course, if a finished WCP DVD version does indeed exist, patching it will be a much simpler matter. We'll know exactly what needs to be done after a quick peek inside the new EXE / DLLs.

I'm sure LOAF will be telling us more about this as things develop:)
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Yeah, LOAF managed to get the DVD, So the origin museum also has a copy now. But you should probably get in touch with LOAF about it on IRC but that might be tricky while they're at Dragoncon.
 
Excuse the intrusion, but can someone give me tips on how to create a WC4 mission while importing the black lance carrier in it?
 
If you emabrk on a mission to propely convert WC4 models and textures, be sure to use the right palette. I don't know if it was ever noticed or fixed but this has been bothering me forever in Unknown Enemy :confused: :

uehighlight06nm2.jpg


The texture with weird palette: The texture with right palette:
weirdnx7.gif
normalxp2.gif
 
Note that this screenshot is from early development tests (we didn't end up making surface missions in UE). Back then, modding Secret Ops was a very adventurous thing and the tools to convert things were yet to be made; in fact, most tools we use to mod Secret Ops nowadays have been made for the development of UE or based on the knowledge gained from it. It is possible that the ship was converted very early in the development and never rebuilt as no one noticed.
 
I'm sure there was more than a few screwed up textures in UE. The project was a huge learning experience, after all.
 
HCl's WC4 mission file

Does anyone have HCl's WC4 mission file IFF that works with Thomas' WCedit? I couldn't find it on HCl's new website.

Thanks!
 
Seeking download link for HCl's latter WC3 editor

Sorry for the bump.

HCl said:
For WC3, however, i'd recommend a more recent WC3 mission editor i put together sometime around 2001. This one is far more user friendly, and shouldn't give you much trouble. It has zero chances of messing up your WC3 installation since it doesn't alter any game files (changes are made in-memory only, when you start your mission on the editor), however it only works with Kilrathi Saga WC3, or DOS WC3 with the Windows executable.
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I'm really quite eager to get hold of Mario Brito's 2001 WC3 editor, but the download link has lapsed. Can anybody help me find it? Or if you have it on your computer, I'd be really grateful to get hold of it: dreeves85@yahoo.co.uk

Thanks in advance.
 
-danr- said:
Sorry for the bump.



I'm really quite eager to get hold of Mario Brito's 2001 WC3 editor, but the download link has lapsed. Can anybody help me find it? Or if you have it on your computer, I'd be really grateful to get hold of it: dreeves85@yahoo.co.uk

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

HCl's site is now here on Solsector: http://hcl.solsector.net/. Most of his projects should be available there though some of his older stuff has been lost to time.
 
Thanks, but no joy - the only one on his current site is for KS. Madman, that'd be greatly appreciated, do you have the non-KS editor?
 
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