Nice work! (episode 2 spoilers)

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DJ Erik said:
I thought that the love story was pretty good. And the music is swank. Cheers to Michael and Daniel. :cool:
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Why thank you. More of the same kind of orchestral and jazz music to come from me, although for episodes 3 and 4 the inflight music gets something of a revamp. Episode 5 will also be a nice suprise.... but I won't say what.

I'm not sure, but I believe Daniel is done at this point (he's responsible for the techno in the simulator... the music team works well. I know about orchestral music and jazz, and nothing about techno, so he fills in my weakness).
 
The two conversations go something like this

Sparrow likes you better: Bradshaw and Sparrow make some steps towards repairing their friendship
Spoons likes you better: Bradshaw says he would like to trust Sparrow again but it is going to take a lot of time
 
Needaham45 said:
Why thank you. More of the same kind of orchestral and jazz music to come from me, although for episodes 3 and 4 the inflight music gets something of a revamp. Episode 5 will also be a nice suprise.... but I won't say what.

I'm not sure, but I believe Daniel is done at this point (he's responsible for the techno in the simulator... the music team works well. I know about orchestral music and jazz, and nothing about techno, so he fills in my weakness).
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The jazz was a complete suprise when I heard it, I wasn't expecting anything like that at all. It really sets the mood for those scenes though, I liked it alot.

I'm now going to be wondering about how the music will turn out. Even more of long wait this one is going to be, eh? :D
 
Music sounded silly when i first heard it dureing the opening cutscene, but then I got you used to it, and now I think it's pretty darn good! Especially in Ep2 it got better! Grats!
and that simulator music is fun :D
 
Nomad Terror said:
Personally I've always like Cougar the best. He seems top notch leadership material.
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Ah, a vote for a character I have done a voice for. It warms the heart!
 
lorddarthvik said:
Oh, and one last thing. When will we get the next episode? :D
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Hopefully in less than eight months ;). I wish I could give you more specific information, but that's all I'm willing to to say for the time being. It might be sooner than you would expect, however.

(I hope you gonna fill it with more missions then ep2, ya know, we wanna shoot furballs, it won't hurt anyone if those missions are not totally unique, some simple "fly and shoot" kind of missions could fill the gap, without any cinematics and comms and such :D umm, and that lovestory feels pretty baaaaaad. Its starting to shape up in ep2, but in ep1 it mades no sense. No introduction, no info on why the hell is our hero so deeply depressed! I don't think that the med would let someone as broke as him fly, especially not an armed ship :D )
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We're not going to fill the next episode with more missions, for the following reason - starting in episode 3, we have completely separate winning path and losing path missions. Indeed, in episode 3 we go as far as having the winning and losing path take place in different systems. So, while episode 2 had five missions, episode 3 will have ten missions... and that's not counting the alternative missions within each path, and the alternative missions that happen depending on your choice of ship. So, all told, we're talking about having about twenty missions per episode... and that's a lot :p.

As for the love story, remember, this is supposed to be film noir, and film noir was always b-class movies with b-class actors and b-class scripts... so at least some of the stuff that feels bad to you is just our intentional attempts to reference the genre we're working in (heck, why else would we have a b&w intro in episode 1? :)).
 
DJ Erik said:
The jazz was a complete suprise when I heard it, I wasn't expecting anything like that at all. It really sets the mood for those scenes though, I liked it alot.

I'm now going to be wondering about how the music will turn out. Even more of long wait this one is going to be, eh? :D
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I'd also like to point out any time you hear a saxophone it's a REAL INSTRUMENT. I recorded all the saxophone tracks myself, and there will be a lot more of them in the future. To my knowledge, the only other Wing Commander game that ever used any real instruments was WC4 in a few cutscenes (they had a real guitar and a real sax). We're all very proud of this :)

And the wait for the music shouldn't be so bad - I'm very far ahead with it. Ask Q and Eder - about a week before the release I started pumping out a song an hour and constantly asking for more work... I think they were ready to kill me :p At this point I can't really do much more until other things are done, but I'm proud to say that in terms of future episodes, the item that is farthest along is the music at this point. As long as the episodes are released in a more timely manner (which is the plan), music will not be whats holding everything up.


Out of curiousity, what did everyone think of the music from the openning cutscene of Episode 2 for the Kilrathi (the stuff that sounded, a little... out and unearthy)? I was trying to create music that the Kilrathi culture itself would have produced... was it effective, or should I just start using a traditional bad guy music style in the future for them?
 
I used some of the ideas I came up with from that post. I thought about kilrathi physiology to think about how they would have to play an instrument, and that helped me determine placement of notes, then I used some very basic acoustical physics to come up with pitches for an atonal synthetic scale. That also contributed to rhythm (the agility of a Kilrathi's fingers on an instrument for example). From there I thought about warrior-like Earth cultures and their music - a lot of tribal, ritualistic sounding stuff. A lot of awkward dance beats (something where you would need training to be able to dance it it), so that led to me coming up with an asymetrical repeating beat pattern. I used my synthetic scale to come up with a melody and thought about the sounds war-like cultures would like, and kept in mind the idea of cats ( for example, purring. The strings do a tremolo throughout the piece).

The scale I used is as follows (Using post modal chord theory, as I understand it - you assign 1-12, 1 being tonic, and each chormatic note higher being given the next number in the sequence):
1, 4, 7, 8 9, 11, 12
In the key I ended up using (C as the tonic), this became C, Eb, F#, G, Ab, Bb, B

Part of that was me saying "I like how this sounds" and wasn't entirely scientific, although I did use some scientific base in that.

My rhythmic pattern was (in even notes, in my case eighth notes)
1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1 2, 1 2, 1 2 3, 1-2 3

Some of the ideas discussed in that Kilrathi music thread did find there way in, as you may have heard in the intro.

I don't know if any of that made any sense... if you all are reading that saying... uh... yea... right... I'll clarify.
 
Needaham45 said:
Ask Q and Eder - about a week before the release I started pumping out a song an hour and constantly asking for more work... I think they were ready to kill me :p
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Hehe, I'm afraid I was far readier to kill you a week before you started pumping out songs ;).
 
Nomad Terror said:
The two conversations go something like this

Sparrow likes you better: Bradshaw and Sparrow make some steps towards repairing their friendship
Spoons likes you better: Bradshaw says he would like to trust Sparrow again but it is going to take a lot of time
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and which one goes to which action? i would think that tractoring in Sparrow would get her to like you better but when i do that it goes to the one that he says he needs some time. but during the missions he seem stands up for Sparrow and stuff. I went back and played it again this time leaving her and during missions Bradshaw isn't happy about flying with Sparrow but he gets the other conversation. what's the one that gets them to repair their friendship??? :confused:
 
Quarto said:
Hopefully in less than eight months ;). I wish I could give you more specific information, but that's all I'm willing to to say for the time being. It might be sooner than you would expect, however.


We're not going to fill the next episode with more missions, for the following reason - starting in episode 3, we have completely separate winning path and losing path missions. Indeed, in episode 3 we go as far as having the winning and losing path take place in different systems. So, while episode 2 had five missions, episode 3 will have ten missions... and that's not counting the alternative missions within each path, and the alternative missions that happen depending on your choice of ship. So, all told, we're talking about having about twenty missions per episode... and that's a lot :p.

As for the love story, remember, this is supposed to be film noir, and film noir was always b-class movies with b-class actors and b-class scripts... so at least some of the stuff that feels bad to you is just our intentional attempts to reference the genre we're working in (heck, why else would we have a b&w intro in episode 1? :)).
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Hey thats a great thing about the missions! I didn't expect that you will go so deep in the paths choosing and such! Great! :D
When I was thinkin about the lovestory, somehow Max Payne turned up in my mind, as a similar thing :D Sorry, I didn't know it was a film noire. Now that you said it, it seems totally OK ! :D Only thing is that your actors are starting get better than class-b :D
 
Max Payne is a pretty damn good film-noir-inspired game... probably the best out of all 5 of them or so. :p
 
Quarto said:
I can assure you, Eder, Trigger is only 28% as psychopathic as Tempest is :p.


Hehe, well, the Stiletto is better than the Ferret in every aspect... and the Scimitar, of course, doesn't carry torpedoes (not to mention that it was already used very extensively in UE and has the same guns as the Stiletto, so it would make things rather repetitive).
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True, I guess I was just being nostalgic ;). It doesn't make sense according to WC canon that the Stiletto didn't win the deal for Confed as its main light fighter, unless it was because the Arrow was its contender and not the Ferrets (not sure).

Something else, I noticed that it's far too easy to kill Gothri's in the missions. Having the more nimble ship helps but I can still easily kill it without evading much (which you should have to, against such a powerful ship).

I used to shit my pants when I saw a Gothri in WC2, but here it feels like a walk in the park.
 
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