Merry Christmas

Tolwyn

Vice Admiral
The Wing Commander Saga team wishes all of you a merry Christmas.

As a little present, we would like to give you a sneak peak "behind the scenes" of what makes Saga tick. Saga utilizes Theora for its cuscenes. We've provided some information about Theora for those of you unfamiliar with it.

Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies' VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3's lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., H.264, Xvid and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

While VP3 is patented technology, On2 has irrevocably given royalty-free license of the VP3 patents to everyone, letting anyone use Theora and other VP3-derived codecs for any purpose.

In the Ogg multimedia framework, Theora provides a video layer, while Vorbis usually acts as the audio layer.

Theora is named for Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom television program.


One of our goals in creating Wing Commander Saga is to help players feel like a tiny part of a much larger fleet. Combat will take place on both a small- and large-scale basis. Capital ship battles and torpedo strikes will make prominent appearances throughout the game. We've included two small video clips to give a feeling of what they will be like.

01 | 02

- Tolwyn
 
Although the release might be closer than you think :)

If you could please abstain yourself from using lines like that.
it was funny the first couple of times, but now it just seems cruel.

I was, and still am, a great fan of the work you have released thus far.
 
Soundwork

What I don't understand, is with all of this effort to revamp the graphics for a Wing Commander Saga, why there is a distinct replication of the soundwork and music of the original series. The original soundwork and music were fantastic for their time, but hardly compelling given the depth of quality technology presents now.

The sound and music from what I heard wasn't even homage to the original series, but a rehash. With the matured graphics the sounds and music sound completely out of place. The music and sounds were good for the 90's and matched the pseudo-quirky atmosphere then, but not now. My suggestion is that if you want to achieve a total effect of reimagining the Wing Commander Saga in relatively modern terms, mature the sound and music as well.
 
The Prologue originally was going to have original in-flight music, but I decided it was best to wait for the main release as it’s not just a big job to write all those different cues but you also have to make sure they all fit together musically and make sense in the game. Same goes for the sound effects. Currently the game is using sounds from FS2 and different Wing Commander games.
 
In films and TV the sound effects help define a show, example: Star Trek and Star Wars. If you saw a Star Trek film which had a different phaser sound it would sound weird. So, I dont think we want to redo ALL the sound effects. Im sure everyone whos played WC3 and 4 knows the cloak sound in WC.
 
It's been a while, but watching the Terran cruiser smack the Kilrathi fighters was pleasing. It's at least good to know that Saga is still kickin' (albeit slow, but their pace is their own business and not mine to squawk about).
 
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