New Website! Wing Commander Secret Ops Custom Missions (WCSOCM)

Lt.Overload

Rear Admiral
Hi all! You might remember that I've done a few Secret Ops mods and shared them with you all, but now I have a whole site to share with you guys!

WING COMMADER SECRET OPS CUSTOM MISSIONS​
It's a mouthful, but let's just call it WCSOCM for short! Not only do I have missions on there, but also some music files (.mgi), some sectors (.sec), and some rooms (.rom). I hope everyone takes a look and enjoys.
I'll be hosting my >10mb files there, but anything bigger (which mostly seems to be complex mgi files) I'm still stuck with using Mediafire. At least it's all in one place!

With the release of the site, I'm also announcing "The Evacuation Mission Pack," which you can read more about on the site. Here is a little graphic poster to go with it. It will be released soon(tm)! :p

http://wcsocm.weebly.com/
 
Very interested to try your Evacuation campaign. Sounds nail biting as hell...bugs swarming around, desperate odds, ticking clock...I like it. An it's in an official engine!

Have you considered Solsector.net for hosting?
 
Very interested to try your Evacuation campaign. Sounds nail biting as hell...bugs swarming around, desperate odds, ticking clock...I like it. An it's in an official engine!

Glad you like the idea! I thought it was something unique and cool for Wing Commander; the biggest enemy being time and a huge star, not bugs or cats. Though the bugs aren't afraid to lose a couple forces to hold back the megacarrier that wiped out their first wormhole! ;)

Have you considered Solsector.net for hosting?
I hadn't thought of it that much. I don't recall a new site being added to Solsector in quite some time. I'm also not very good at html and CSS and I'd like to be. Weebly makes the website-making bit easy. There's just a lot of limits filesize-wise for free users. Someday, if I learn html/CSS enough to make a good looking site, I might be able to request a Solsector.net domain. Right now I wouldn't be able to manage it as well as I'd want to.

I'm just happy to get my stuff out there again. :)

-----
In other news, a little bit of "The Evacuation" fiction has been added, a report by our favorite Commander Air Group on the Midway's next mission, a short while before "The Evacuation" takes place. On the bottom you'll see some links (which won't work for the time being), to give a little teaser of what else is to come.

I plan to update the "Intel" section with fiction for each new campaign/mission pack I make. Online fiction for all, just like Secret Ops.

I also encourage others to get into (or back into) Secret Ops modding! While I wasn't around for Secret Ops' initial modding boom (being only three years old at the time :p), I hope I can bring it back. The more the merrier.
 
Let's at least find a way to host the downloads here. Better that than put everything on Mediafire and hope it's still there in 12 months.
 
Let's at least find a way to host the downloads here. Better that than put everything on Mediafire and hope it's still there in 12 months.
I'll say. I will forever kick myself in the butt for not leeching all the contents of Thomas Bruckner's website, for example - probably about half of his work is forever gone, just because he used some free hosting service.
 
Hi all! Been a little more than two years since I had an update. The CIC has been kind enough to host my files so I went about updating all the links and adding a few extra things to the site. I also released a new big project I had been working on for Secret Ops.

Many pilots were cut from the game, and I created something that re-adds them alongside the new ones added with Secret Ops. This new pack adds back every single pilot from Prophecy into Secret Ops, such as many Midway redshirts, some aliens, and the Kilrathi.
One thing I also added was WCP versions of Cerberus' pilots, without overwriting their original files. That means you can have old Maestro and new Maestro side by side at the same time, for example.

This is a great modders resource, because Secret Ops had a very limited range of voices you could use, and this pack blows that wide open. Want to bring back Dallas? Now you can. Want to put Hawk side by side with some cats? Now you can. Want to pretend Blair is still around? Now you can.

Also included is a list of the redshirts, which ones are duplicates, and which are completely unique. So you don't accidentally make a wing of the same voice actor. :p

http://download.wcnews.com/files/so/wcsocm_pilots_pack.zip

If you guys have any issues with the patch, let me know. Currently they don't really do anything to a vanilla version of the game, but I might release some missions to show the new possibilities. :)
 
Glad you like the idea! I thought it was something unique and cool for Wing Commander; the biggest enemy being time and a huge star, not bugs or cats. Though the bugs aren't afraid to lose a couple forces to hold back the megacarrier that wiped out their first wormhole! ;)


I hadn't thought of it that much. I don't recall a new site being added to Solsector in quite some time. I'm also not very good at html and CSS and I'd like to be. Weebly makes the website-making bit easy. There's just a lot of limits filesize-wise for free users. Someday, if I learn html/CSS enough to make a good looking site, I might be able to request a Solsector.net domain. Right now I wouldn't be able to manage it as well as I'd want to.

-----

Hey, if you're still looking for a website builder I have some experience in that regard. Based on what you have on Weedbly now, it doesn't look like you have anything terribly outrageous to put on the site. Toss me a PM if you're interested and we'll talk detail and figure out what can be done.
 
That's really awesome.
Does it include the speech pack for Casey from Prophecy? Much as I dislike the actor it was always jarring having a completely new voice.
 
Does it include the speech pack for Casey from Prophecy? Much as I dislike the actor it was always jarring having a completely new voice.
Hey, that's a neat idea!

And it's pretty funny that it took 17 years for anyone to propose this. I mean, ok, Origin wasn't allowed to even recycle Casey's voiceovers from WCP without paying him lots of money, but it's amazing that it never occurred to us fans that we can just copy Casey over from WCP. But maybe it's because nobody really liked Casey anyway :).
 
Ask and you shall receive!

It was simple enough an edit. The player lines are stored as iff files in a totally separate folder from the rest of the comms in the game. I included the text file for subtitles, so they will match the Prophecy lines. I also included the German subtitles file. I didn't include it initially because I didn't want to replace any voices you heard in the game, just add onto the existing ones, hence WCP story versions of SO characters having separate numbers on the pilot list.

Now I'm worried that the pilots pack won't work correctly for German versions of the game. I didn't include the German subtitle files. :eek:
 
Now I'm worried that the pilots pack won't work correctly for German versions of the game. I didn't include the German subtitle files. :eek:

That's ok, incremental updates are a good way to keep your project in the news and in the consciousness of the WC fanbase.
 
That's ok, incremental updates are a good way to keep your project in the news and in the consciousness of the WC fanbase.
In a way, I guess. I just like making things work 100% the first time around. This was an oversight.

Here is the pilots pack, version 2.
http://www.filedropper.com/wcsocmpilotspack_1

It adds the German subtitles files for German versions of the game. Again, if anyone has any issues, let me know.

I don't suppose the site admins could replace the old file with this one? :)
 
Is there any reason to keep the first version around as well, or should this file replace the old one?
 
Is there any reason to keep the first version around as well, or should this file replace the old one?
The new one is a direct improvement over the old one, so there's no reason to keep the old one.
Thanks in advance, again, for this!
 
I always find myself coming back to the modding scene around the same time every year. Hmm.

Recently, and by recently I mean 12 hours ago, I randomly started looking at the comm files again. There's a lot of unused speech in the game, be it alternatives for a certain condition that don't get used for some strange reason, or conditions that never actually activate during the game's missions. An example of the former would be death comms (Aargh I'm dead! for example), most of the Kilrathi and Bug pilots have two different death comms (Aargh I'm dead! and Noo I have prematurely expired! for example), but only one is used. An example of the latter would be comm conditions such as "15 - "Leader report hand off mission"", "41 - "Pilot report something wrong"", or "52 - "Welcome kilrathi"", the last one only being used by a select few pilots during Prophecy's second disk, meanwhile almost all the Midway pilots have some sort of 'Hi cats" line.

Activating the multiple unused death comms, taunts, etc, has proven to be simple enough; in my Prophecy pilots pack from last year I activated the alternate death comms for the cats and bugs, but not the taunts. At the time, I didn't look at how I could incorporate unused condition lines into normal gameplay either. I mean you could probably activate the lines already of one made a mission and coded them to fulfill a condition at a certain point, but they would still remain unused in the vanilla game.

So in short, I'm looking at adding more speech to the game using the voice files that already exist but remain unused. Should add more variety to combat and missions in general with friendlies and enemies saying lines you may not have even ever heard before.
 
Recently, and by recently I mean 12 hours ago, I randomly started looking at the comm files again. There's a lot of unused speech in the game, be it alternatives for a certain condition that don't get used for some strange reason, or conditions that never actually activate during the game's missions. An example of the former would be death comms (Aargh I'm dead! for example), most of the Kilrathi and Bug pilots have two different death comms (Aargh I'm dead! and Noo I have prematurely expired! for example), but only one is used. An example of the latter would be comm conditions such as "15 - "Leader report hand off mission"", "41 - "Pilot report something wrong"", or "52 - "Welcome kilrathi"", the last one only being used by a select few pilots during Prophecy's second disk, meanwhile almost all the Midway pilots have some sort of 'Hi cats" line.
Hmm. I'm pretty sure that the death comms are used. They are triggered at random, so in combat when you kill an enemy he'll use one line or the other. Keep in mind, if you simply force a pilot to speak a particular type of line, they always use the first available line of the given type - the random mechanism only works when the line is triggered by the AI. The same goes for taunts, naturally.

You're right about the others being pretty much unused. Although I do think that 41 gets triggered sometimes. I think it's used randomly if you arrive at an empty navpoint AND then hang around for a while.
 
Hmm. I'm pretty sure that the death comms are used. They are triggered at random, so in combat when you kill an enemy he'll use one line or the other. Keep in mind, if you simply force a pilot to speak a particular type of line, they always use the first available line of the given type - the random mechanism only works when the line is triggered by the AI. The same goes for taunts, naturally.
There's definitely some kind of bug/glitch with multiple lines for one condition; they'll never use the first one ever. So when there's two death comms, they'll never ever use the first possible one. So if there's, say, 3 taunts, they'll never use the first and will random choose between the second and third. For the death comms, since there's two, that means only the second one will play, if at all because AI even using their death comm is random as well.

In fact, you're the one who taught me how to fix it. :p
(...)

Regarding comms, that tutorial is missing a vital bit of information - I guess I wrote it back when we were working on UE :). At the time, we weren't really implementing any normal pilot comms, only replacing Casey and adding special scripted dialogue lines, so we didn't encounter any issues related to random comms. What I found afterwards, when working on Standoff, was that when we added multiple comms of the same type for our new pilots, they usually didn't work (although sometimes they did... which remains a mystery). But WCP/SO does include multiple comms of the same type for many pilots, and they certainly are used in the game (play WCP, and you'll see that the generic Nephilim comms you mention do all get used). So, I investigated the issue, and what I found was that the original comm files included additional comm chunks numbered -1, which seemed to make the randomness work properly. So, for example a pilot with two death comms would include the following three chunks in the comm file:

Code:
CHUNK "MOBJ"
  {
  long 1
  long -1
  long 250
  float 0.5
  long 4
  long 5
  long 0
  long 0
  }
  CHUNK "MOBJ"
  {
  long 1
  long 0
  long 250
  float 2.0
  long 4
  long 5
  long 0
  long 0
  }
  CHUNK "MOBJ"
  {
  long 1
  long 1
  long 250
  float 2.0
  long 4
  long 5
  long 0
  long 0
  }

As you can see from above, the first chunk is a death comm (hence the number 5 in the third value from the bottom), but in the place where you would ordinarily have the line number (second value from the top), you have -1. Similarly, after the chunks quoted above, there begins a set of kill messages (40 - reporting the death of a small target), and again the first one is numbered -1, followed then by chunks numbered 2, 3, and 4.

As long as you take care of that detail, the comms should be properly drawn at random for the given pilot. However, now that I think about it, we also did eventually figure out what the meaning of the third value from the top was (the tutorial lists it as unknown), namely, priority. I think priority mainly refers to the comms queue (because WCP has so many comms being sent out, priority is used to determine where new comms get added into the queue, and presumably also to determine how long a comm should stay in the queue before being wiped, to avoid the player having to deal with too many old messages), but it may also somehow influence the random choice of comms. It may be that if you have multiple comms of the same type, but one has a higher priority than the others, then the random choice mechanism will be disrupted. In fact, given that not all comm files have that -1 thing I mentioned, it may well be that that's the real trick to randomness, and the -1 thing is just something that accidentally fixed the problem somehow :).

By the way, there is also a lot of valuable information to be found in the WCP and SO dev backup CDs that the CIC hosts (or hosted...?). In those, you can find the source for many of the IFFs, often will comments. So, for example, the comm chunks that I discuss above actually have the following info in the SO backup CD:

Code:
CHUNK MOBJ
{
long COMM_TYPE_HELMETED
long AAce7Comm_DEATH_1 // long Communication ID
long 260 // long Priority (1=lowest, 2000000=highest)
float 2.0 // float Transmission Time (in seconds -- currently meaningless)
long BROADCAST // long Category Mask (see comms.def) -- who this can be sent to
long Comm_DEATH // long Content (see comms.def)
long 0 // long Type: Used for matching object type (for Category mask)
long 0 // long Distance: Used for matching object distance (also for CM)
}

...With the above info, I still have no idea what the last two values do, and quite possibly they do nothing because I haven't seen them used. The fifth value from the top is a useful one, although somehow we got through Standoff without ever understanding it :). Here's the values it takes:

Code:
  //  ~~~  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  (items below this line are ORs)
  //  1  =  Wing Leaders
  //  2  =  Anyone on my current wing
  //  4  =  Broadcast to EVERYONE
  //  8  =  Targetted object
  //  16  =  Your wing leader (if wingman)
  //  ~~~  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  (items below this line are ANDs)
  //  32  =  Any object matching TYPE
  //  64  =  Any object within DISTANCE
  //  128  =  Any object which is friendly to sender
  //  ---  =  More to come as necessary

enum CommCategories
{
med_work_around_this_sucks,  // med requires a ZERO valued first entry, regardless of what you set it to
WING_LEADERS  = 1,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0000,0001);
CURRENT_WINGMEN  = 2,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0000,0010);
BROADCAST  = 4,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0000,0100);
TARGETED_OBJECT  = 8,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0000,1000);
CURRENT_WINGLEADER  = 16,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0001,0000);
MATCH_TYPE  = 32,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0010,0000);
WITHIN_DISTANCE  = 64,  //  = BINARY3(0000,0100,0000);
FRIENDLY_OBJECTS  = 128,  //  = BINARY3(0000,1000,0000);
TARGET_WATCHER  = 256
 
Back
Top