WC3 Neutron Gun stats and possible errors

I got interested, and while the WC3 official and Prima guides don't seem to have gun stats in them, the Brady authorised guide does. These are mostly the same as Victory Streak, but they differ for the Meson Blaster (at least in the spreadsheet above)... with the guide having the Meson on a par with the Reaper cannon!

Correction, it's KS that has the different values, Brady and Victory Streak are the same. The spreadsheet is correct (all hail the spreadsheet).
 
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I've added the WCP (and SO) manual data and the WCP official guide. Plenty of weird new guns and descriptions!

Hmmm, no info on refire delay in the WC2 engine data, eh? I remember the mass drivers as having quite a high rate of fire. Might have to check out some youtube clips.
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I suspect it's tied to the specific capacitor rather than the weapon in WC1/2/A.

Well this is serendipitous, for the first time in nearly 3 years, I'm in the same place as all my manuals and I find out from this spreadsheet that the US and UK privateer 2 manuals are different...
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Indeed! The UK version has two manuals (a hospital guide and a guide to the universe) and the US has a single one which includes (but also significantly rewrites) content from both of the UK booklets. You can find scans of all three here https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/7260
 
Updated with engine data from Privateer, Righteous Fire and Armada!

Which means we still need internal numbers for Privateer 2, Prophecy and Secret Ops.
 
Started in on the WC Bible stats. Question: should we mark all damage stats as being in cm or armour units for consistency?
 
YCDTD said:
Started in on the WC Bible stats. Question: should we mark all damage stats as being in cm or armour units for consistency?
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A lot of these stats have no relation to each other. They should just be listed as whatever the source says they are. Internal stats are pretty much just arbitrary units and are only useful in comparing how each gun or missile compares within that particular game. There's a lot of impulse even for me to make everything cohesive but that's just not how game design works. CM of this or KM/S of that is just lore dressing over how it actually works in game to make it fun.
 
YCDTD said:
Started in on the WC Bible stats. Question: should we mark all damage stats as being in cm or armour units for consistency?
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For now let's keep everything exactly as it was originally listed. Once we have all the data collected we can duplicate the sheet and then work on a streamlined one.
 
I finished up the bible stuff for you! I think it'll be a deeper dive to figure out the rest of the in-game stuff.
 
I think that hardcore fans had a very particular 'story' to the guns circa Wing Commander II that the developers just didn't understand or care about afterwards.

Good news here, though: the spreadsheet grows! I noticed the WC3 3DO manual had slightly different descriptions (and some significantly different data) for most of the guns so I've added that. I also got a start on the second sheet which will cover all the in-game missiles. WC1-4 and Privateer are mostly done, with more to come as time allows.

Defiance Industries has extracted the WCP weapon data so that will be in very soon and Pedro is locating the couple of missing missiles for WC3 and 4.
 
Armada missiles are added! To do:

- Guns: WCP/SO engine, Privateer 2 engine
- Missiles: WCP/SO material, Privater 2 material, Arena material, missing WC3/4 engine items
 
@Bandit LOAF , @DefianceIndustries , @Pedro

In-engine ship data - in particular the gun power reserves, shields and shield regen rate, and armour should be next! I wish I could help further; is there a program I can use to look at the data in the game files so that the guys working on models and/or the WC4 remake don't have to take time away from their own projects?
 
YCDTD said:
@Bandit LOAF , @DefianceIndustries , @Pedro

In-engine ship data - in particular the gun power reserves, shields and shield regen rate, and armour should be next! I wish I could help further; is there a program I can use to look at the data in the game files so that the guys working on models and/or the WC4 remake don't have to take time away from their own projects?
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For prophecy stuff I use WCpascal and treman (and dosbox). You need to extract the .tre files in dosbox using treman, and then use WCpascal to read the actual IFF files.
 
YCDTD said:
@Bandit LOAF , @DefianceIndustries , @Pedro

In-engine ship data - in particular the gun power reserves, shields and shield regen rate, and armour should be next! I wish I could help further; is there a program I can use to look at the data in the game files so that the guys working on models and/or the WC4 remake don't have to take time away from their own projects?
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I already sent those stats over to LOAF.
We haven't got a tool for looking at those stats (other than just the iff viewer, which gives you the chunks but then you have to work out the variables).
You can extract the files with wctoolbox, but it would be fantastic if someone were to make a new all in one tool where you could specify data definitions, similar to how renderdoc lets you define vertex/ constant buffer layouts and view the data. I definitely don't have time to do it (and UI isn't my area) but as always I'd be more than happy to advise.
 
I've added some minor elements including the WC4 mine to the spreadsheet. I'll kick off a similar sheet for ship specifications this weekend (I think I have one for WC1 and 2 already...)

We aren't done with weapons yet, though! We need to go through the games with weapon select screens (WC3, WC3 PSX, WC3 3DO, WC4, Privateer and Privateer 2) and get any information we can that's locked in the UI. Names, descriptions, "tacvals", etc. I'm in the middle of a work project but I'll jump on that as soon as I'm done.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I've added some minor elements including the WC4 mine to the spreadsheet. I'll kick off a similar sheet for ship specifications this weekend (I think I have one for WC1 and 2 already...)

We aren't done with weapons yet, though! We need to go through the games with weapon select screens (WC3, WC3 PSX, WC3 3DO, WC4, Privateer and Privateer 2) and get any information we can that's locked in the UI. Names, descriptions, "tacvals", etc. I'm in the middle of a work project but I'll jump on that as soon as I'm done.
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I've created a monster! 😃
 
Bandit LOAF said:
we still need internal numbers for Privateer 2
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Do these actually exist anywhere? The only place I've found that deals with internal values are this save game editor and that explicitly states it doesn't work with weapons values. Other than that I think HCl was the only one to work with the game data and that was a decade ago.
 
Bob McDob said:
Do these actually exist anywhere? The only place I've found that deals with internal values are this save game editor and that explicitly states it doesn't work with weapons values. Other than that I think HCl was the only one to work with the game data and that was a decade ago.
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Thp made an extractor for P2 relatively recently but it doesn't seem to pull out any info on where or how the game stores gun values https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/privateer-2-editing-and-extracting.25122/page-5 . The tools there let you extract images, sprites, sound files, text data like news reports, 3D objects and so on.

I'm sure there's probably enough info in that thread for someone who knows what they're doing to have a crack at it but it's beyond my abilities to figure it out.
 
That's great! The Chirichan Demon model from the P2 model archive has a broken first LOD, so it's great to finally have a working one.
 
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