HCl's Online Ship Viewer (August 17, 2014)

AD

Finder of things, Doer of stuff
HCl has created a viewer that allows you to see various Wing Commander ships in 3D right in your browser. Check it out here. The viewer is still a work in progress but supports a variety of 3D formats including the ship files used by the games themselves. currently the viewable objects included are from the Wing Commander games that use the realspace engine (WC3,4, Armada). These are the Wing Commander ships ripped straight from the game and viewable right in your browser! HCl is still busy tweaking the code so don't panic if some of the objects don't display properly. Please allow a few seconds for the object to appear when you've made a selection.






Known issues:

  • Realspace supports one-sided and double-sided textures. If an object is facing away from the user it will sometimes look like there's nothing in the viewer. Some of the simpler objects default facing away from the camera. Try rotating the object to view the image.
  • Some realspace geometry doesn't display yet, which includes all the Proving Grounds pick-up items.
  • Some objects display distorted textures and missing geometry.
  • The viewer supports displaying sub-meshes. This is needed for showing the Lance (Dragon) from WC4 properly with it's wings. Carrier hangar bays are also separate meshes. With the way Level-of-Detail works in the Realspace engine that means on most capital ships you can zoom into the hangar but you will not see it until you are inside the ship.
  • Not all ships are currently configured to display the sub-meshes properly
  • Some ships are listed more than once in the list but don't look significantly different because the different LOD models are separate meshes.
  • There were many left over and unused WC3 ship meshes and objects in the WC4 object file. They are included with the WC4 ships but don't currently point to the WC3 palette file and will display incorrect coloring.
  • Wing Commander 3 has a Super Wing Commander raptor (Armada Gladius) hidden in it's object file, though the texture displays psychedelically.

You can look forward to this feature being updated and upgraded in the future. Other 3D formats are supported as well, so HCl plans to add the Prophecy, Secret Ops, Privateer 2, and Arena ships. There's also plans to include the source models for the WC2 and Privateer ships.

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Original update published on August 17, 2014
 
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This is really awesome! Also cool to see all the interior hangar models, especially in the dreadnought and starbase from Wc3; I always liked to fly around inside them.
 
I'm astonished at the complexity of the WC3 and WC4 fighter debris. Did anyone see any pieces during gameplay for long enough to realise that the holes in the outside were exposing some interior textures? If the artists who put all those craters and burn marks on the fighter textures ever read this, know that your hard work has finally been seen and admired.

I had also assumed that the WC4 skeleton was a single "billboard" texture, but I see that it too was modelled to give it detail and depth.
 
Thanks guys, I'm happy to know you like the viewer! :)

As AD said, I'm still tweaking the code, so expect a few bugfixes and updates over time.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to check the various asset lists, as there's quite a few interesting nuggets in there to be found. For example:

- The Armada mine / decoy item (missile 10) was apparently reused as the base for the Jump Buoy (see "f base" on the WC3 list)
- There's a couple items in WC3 that look that might be "mini-transports" of some kind. Not sure if they are unused items, or were just hard to spot.
- The Triangle Transport in the WC3 list is pretty neat: it makes an appearance in one of the WC4 cut-scenes, but I don't think it ever appeared in-game!
- The Radar Station in the WC3 list. I don't recall ever seeing it in-game, although it looks like it could have appeared in one of the ground missions.
- Camo Transport Cargo Pods: those are pretty cool! I'm curious about these, did we ever see transports with such pods in actual WC4 missions?
- The "cannon" item on the WC4 list is the "secret" Stormfire power-up from the WC4 Demo! (secret in the sense that you had to follow the Hermes for a bit before it dropped, as I recall)

Anyway, that's some neat stuff! It's always a pretty cool adventure to dig around the game files :)

edit: Yeah, I was a bit surprised that some of the debries were as detailed as they are, and not just a couple of triangles with textured damage. Very cool!
 
This is awesome, HCl! Thanks for working your Maniac magic!

- The Triangle Transport in the WC3 list is pretty neat: it makes an appearance in one of the WC4 cut-scenes, but I don't think it ever appeared in-game!

You see them after rescuing the Kilrathi in WC4. You escort two (?) of them along with a few Dralthi to their base in Pasqal.

- The Radar Station in the WC3 list. I don't recall ever seeing it in-game, although it looks like it could have appeared in one of the ground missions.

At first, I thought it was the shield generator from Freya, but it's not. I don't remember seeing it in any of the ground missions.
 
Thanks HCl! It's a great project.

There's a few objects with odd names in the list. Basically if I couldn't immediately identify the object I sometimes retained the objects internal file name. There's some obvious ones I should rename like fbase that I guess I missed (there's a lot of entires) and I know that there's quite a few WC3 objects in the WC4 files that I didn't label as such. So if anyone feels like submitting a list of suggested changes that would be super appreciated.

Another change I hope we'll be able to implement (especially when we start adding more games) is to have you select the game in the first dropdown menu and then have the list of ships in a second dropdown that would dynamically change based on which game you chose. (also working on the mouse scrolling issue too ).
 
Just for my own curiosity, is there a way to implement something that would let you toggle between textures/polygons/wireframe? I don't know if I'm alone on this but I think that would be pretty neat.
 
That's great - Il love sseing those Kilrathi Ace paint jobs of the regular fighters. Too bad we didn't see Dakhath and Kramm. I wonder if their ships also have special loadouts.

And I never realized that there were "dead pilots" (Kilrathi or Terran) - or that the dreadnought's hangar has two levels.

This is awesome, HCl! Thanks for working your Maniac magic!

You see them after rescuing the Kilrathi in WC4. You escort two (?) of them along with a few Dralthi to their base in Pasqal.

Really, you see them in the game? I fought you only escorted some shuttles in WC4. But it has been a long time...
 
Really, you see them in the game? I fought you only escorted some shuttles in WC4. But it has been a long time...

Hmmm maybe that's what I was thinking of. Must have confused the two...

EDIT: Yep. That was definitely it. The shuttle is two wedges connected by a beam. I was going to link to the WCPedia page but it's one that we need to complete. The VDU is here though:

https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Category:Kilrathi_Support_Ship_Class_Names#Wing_Commander_IV
 
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It is a great Viewer , I always wanted something like that :p .

Quick question , why in WC4 we have WC3 ships ?? Did the models exist in the game data ??
 
It is a great Viewer , I always wanted something like that :p .

Quick question , why in WC4 we have WC3 ships ?? Did the models exist in the game data ??

We mentioned this in the issues list in the original post, but yes, the WC4 objects (including the WC3 ones in the list) are all from the WC4 files. They didn't bother to remove the unused stuff I guess.

It occurred to me that it might be useful to also play with the files from other realspace games like Strike Commander, if someone wants to extract all the IFFs and send them my way.
 
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Awesome! Is this something you could use regular 3d model formats with? Or would it have to be converted into the WC format?

Example: How would it do with a 20,000 poly 2048 x 2048 uv mapped Dralthi, for instance :)
 
We mentioned this in the issues list in the original post, but yes, the WC4 objects (including the WC3 ones in the list) are all from the WC4 files. They didn't bother to remove the unused stuff I guess.

Too bad they could use the extra models for variety , they where already there !
 
It's great looking into these files :) Going through these really makes me curious about the development process of the Maverick team. I'm guessing model conversion to Realspace format was a manual process instead of automatic, so they'd convert the latest version of the ship models as they became available into some assets folder without cleaning it up first, and then just pack whatever was there. Half a dozen extra megs per CD isn't really all that much, and I suspect WC4 development might have been pretty chaotic. It'd be interesting hearing a few "war stories" from the former WC4 devs...

But anyway, I agree, they could have reused a couple WC3 Kilrathi meshes for more variety. The change in palette is not even that noticeable for most WC3 Kilrathi ships.

Awesome! Is this something you could use regular 3d model formats with?

Actually, yes! :) I was able to reuse a few Javascript loaders, so the viewer can handle at least *.obj and *.dae formats, besides Realspace models. By looking at the file extension, the viewer can pretty much figure out which loader to use.

There might be limitations though, I don't think I ever tried loading really complex models. Also, loaders may need one or two tweaks, i'm pretty sure the *.obj loader is incomplete, going by what i've seen. Having said that... the best way to figure out is just to make a quick test :p Klavs, if you'd be willing to e-mail me a copy of your Dralthi both in *.obj and *.dae formats, I'd be more than happy to load them into the viewer and see how it goes!
 
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