WCPedia - Progress Update

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

I don't think so. I tried entering my forum name and password, but that didn't work.

With a WCPedia account and a successful conversion of my german P2D into english, i think i might also find the time to add/edit one or two articles (e.g. the super long list of the civil ships in the Databank Entries)

 

[Bob McDob]

You can view the pre-game P2 models with a copy iof 3D Exploration. (Put the files in the MAPS directory in the same one as the MESHES, otherwise the textures will come up empty). Stuff like dimensional data is stored by virtue of the 3ds format, although I'm not sure that it scales correctly in-game. (The hit box is placed quite a bit away from the ships; run into a CIS destroyer at 30 meters and a carrier at 300).

 

[Dundradal]

I don't think so. I tried entering my forum name and password, but that didn't work.

Yeah that's not how it works. You need to create a new account then I, or one of the other Sysops, needs to confirm it. Then you can begin editing things and figuring out the wiki.

You should try to drop by #wingnut later if you can. You can get a crash course in Wiki.

 

[Dundradal]

We are now less than 200 articles from my goal of doubling WCPedia! WCPedia currently contains roughly 1,903 content articles and over 1,300 files!

It looks like our new goal will be to see by how much we can smash the old one!

Be sure to swing by and check out all the work that's been done over the last few weeks.

 

[Dundradal]

Two huge WCPedia milestones were hit this week!

First WCPedia broke 2 million views! (2,008,521 to be exact as of this post)

And the hardworking WCPedia team has reached 2,000 articles! This means we are 100 articles away from doubling WCPedia from its state in August of last year!

As I posted before, our new goal is to see by how much we can crush the old goal before the next CIC birthday in August.

Privateer 2 is well on its way to becoming the first game to be completely covered by WCPedia entries!

2011 is shaping up to be a great year for WC!

 

[Silverain]

Dundradal,

Going on 5 yo memory here, but...

Re the Melissa Banks cinematic missions, I recall that there are TWO videos pertaining to Lev Arris meeting with her at Sinner's Inn.

The first occurs if you meet her BEFORE completing the Tamessa Ames mission and cinematic video, the second MB video occurs AFTER completing Tamessa Ames.

Am currently playing thru and will confirm this if I can, but someone else may be able to confirm this also.

 

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

The strange thing is, that there are actually 4 different movies with Lev and Melissa in the Sinners Inn. And i've always seen only one of them.

 

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

I've created animated gifs of every gun,missile and mine from the p2archive files, where they are included only as a single image with the multiple frames.
For some reason i can't upload them in WCPedia, because after clicking "Upload" i only get a blank screen with ":Upload" as the last characters in the link.

 

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

and the next set (the last one is just the "missile locked" anim added for the sake of completeness, as there are only frames for the explosions left in the p2archive which i didn't found that useful as a gif)

unfortunately aren't the frames for the decoys and modules included in the archive as well.

@Bandit LOAF: Were you able to contact Mario "HCl" Brito and does he has a decoder for the various privateer 2 filetypes?

 

[Dundradal]

For some reason i can't upload them in WCPedia, because after clicking "Upload" i only get a blank screen with ":Upload" as the last characters in the link.

That's really odd since bob has already uploaded animated gifs before. I'll try to take a look at it later today and see what's up.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I'm probably just blanking on this, but... what's the non-Skecis ship on the back of the Privateer II box? https://www.wcnews.com/background/images/p2backhigh.jpg

 

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

It's a papogod tembler with a much more detailed 3D-model. It's also shown on some of the official guides and manuals.

I wonder why they made such a detailed model, when it doesn't appears in any FMV and even plays a minor role as a pirate ship, that isn't available for the player.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Huh -- the geometry is very similar, but also noticeably different (like those big extra guns). It sure feels like a StarLancer ship!

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Found a much larger view (inside and on the back) of this booklet - https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/7259

It's certainly strange. I *bet* it was intended to be a playable ship--you can see how the guns and missiles are made to look modular.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Mea culpa - I've been meaning to reply to points in this thread for several days and then when I do it's because I'm all excited about a strange spaceship. Here goes...

Am currently playing thru and will confirm this if I can, but someone else may be able to confirm this also.

Let us know what you discover! Right now the mission entries only reflect what is in Origin's Official Guide to Privateer 2... and I know it's wrong or not specific enough in some areas. I'm in the process of putting together a new desktop and once that's ready I will play through the game to improve the entries.

For some reason i can't upload them in WCPedia, because after clicking "Upload" i only get a blank screen with ":Upload" as the last characters in the link.

Huh--I have seen that error before, but I couldn't replicate it here... I was able to upload one of your animated gifs (which are WAY COOL!) with no problems. One suggestion--try checking the 'ignore any warnings' button when you upload.

@Bandit LOAF: Were you able to contact Mario "HCl" Brito and does he has a decoder for the various privateer 2 filetypes?

I have not yet, but I see he just friended me on Facebook so I will send him a message today.

Privateer 2 is well on its way to becoming the first game to be completely covered by WCPedia entries!

I think it's going very well, I'm very excited to be working on the project again... and finishing Privateer 2 will be a big weight off our shoulders. It's basically the "end cap" of the Wing Commander continuity... and everything it does it does to excess--it has ten times as many ships as other games, ten times as many missions, ten times as much text to go through and so on.

Still, we have a lot of work to do! I am trying to put together a road map/checklist for finishing Privateer 2... and I'm thinking it will take a few more months (maybe that's a good August goal? It will be Privateer 2's 15th anniversary!).

Privateer 2 – Next Steps
- Transcribe the videos and place them where they go in the mission write-ups. Unfortunately, there’s no Darkening script floating around (which would be fascinating to see for many reasons) and no in-game subtitles to extract... so we’re going to have to use Mk. I Ears. (Paul Hughes did mention on Facebook that he was going to ask Erin Roberts if he had a copy of the script, so I will let you know if we have any luck there!)
- Determine a way to embed or include the videos themselves in the WCPedia—whether this is embedded videos a la YouTube or links to download the TGVs directly. I can do the uploading but I will need our far smarter tech people to get the system in place first.
- Add Privateer 2 to the timeline. This is a daunting and somewhat unpleasant task because 99% of the hundreds of points we need to add are simply some time in 2790. It's going to end up being a long bulleted list that will look out of place until it meshes with the rest of Wing Commander over the next year. Basically, each mission and news update needs a bullet point in the 2790 timeline... and then the game itself and all the background from the BBS elsewhere.
- Write several hundred “little” entries. The news posts, mission text and so on creates hundreds if not thousands of single-mention terms that need to be added to the encyclopedia. For example, https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/Tour_company_loses_compensation_battle must lead us to add entries on “Alvus Quint”, “Errata Tours”, “Court of Commerce”, “Excelsior” and “Excelsior tragedy”.
- Comb through the Official Guide, the manuals and any advertising/promotional material for further additions. This may involve doing better scans of images from the manuals.
- Play through every mission to get the entries right. Right now everything is based on the official guide data which does not list a number of incidental things. Among these are things like spacemen, cargo pods and ships which are present but don’t play into the mission (for example: Buddy Carlson flies a Previa which doesn’t appear in the guide right now). I’m in the process of putting together a new desktop that will quite happily be used for this purpose.
- Add a "source" tagging system so we know where each entry came from. Since Wing Commander’s “active history” spans ~170 years we need a quick way to note that an entry has been updated to Privateer 2 (2790) instead of to Wing Commander I (2654). I’m happy to do the cut and paste work, but we need someone handy with tables/graphics to devise the system first.
- Come up with and organize the "big" entries--repeating characters, locations, weapons and so forth.
- Rewrite the ships entries, partially based on our new mission entries which show where every one appears. They're currently just reusing flavor text I wrote for /ships/--I think I can do better!

Still working on this, but heading out the door now--will add to it tomorrow

 

[AD]

Transcribe the videos and place them where they go in the mission write-ups. Unfortunately, there’s no Darkening script floating around (which would be fascinating to see for many reasons) and no in-game subtitles to extract... so we’re going to have to use Mk. I Ears. (Paul Hughes did mention on Facebook that he was going to ask Erin Roberts if he had a copy of the script, so I will let you know if we have any luck there!)

If it's possible, it would be interesting to track down the FMV director. His IMDB page seems somewhat empty.

Also, a couple years back I did have a brief exchange with Diane Duane on facebook about the script. It didn't really go anywhere but I did get the impression that she probably has a manuscript lying around.

Also Paul Hughes insisted that much of the story and most of the computer entries were done by people on their team, so all the in game text for example was written by in house writers, whereas Diane mostly came in to rewrite character dialogue for the FMV. It seemed like there was some backstory there where someone wasn't too happy about this happening either. Paul did think he might have had an older version of the script but not sure he ever looked or found one. I'll just say it sounded complicated and I wonder a bit about how much weight to put on either side of the argument.

 

[Lin Kuei Ominae]

- Play through every mission to get the entries right. Right now everything is based on the official guide data which does not list a number of incidental things.

I think i can speed up this process a bit, because i enhanced the Privateer 2 editor to now include editing the Booth BBS Cards which offer Wingman, Cargo Ships and the single Missions. It's pretty much done and editing them works fine, so you should be able to go through the single missions one after another a lot faster than when you have to find each one ingame and rely on the random generator to give you all the missions.

I'm just improving a bit the menu and fix some bugs and i think this weekend i can upload the new version of the editor.

btw, each mission is defined by a certain number (which go up to 400 and higher; though several numbers are unused and don't give a mission) and during a first test i set a random number. I then accepted the mission and when i took off from the planet i got instantly an email about an offer for a rescue mission (those which you normally only get during the flight via opening the communication). I accepted the mission, but didn't play through it so i don't know if it's really the complete mission, though it seems you can this way also choose the tiny 3000-3500 Credits on-the-fly missions.

 

[Silverain]

Reminder: CIC pages that might be usable

Movies
News
Characters

might come in handy. particularly the first one for the videos.

From Articles page

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I think i can speed up this process a bit, because i enhanced the Privateer 2 editor to now include editing the Booth BBS Cards which offer Wingman, Cargo Ships and the single Missions. It's pretty much done and editing them works fine, so you should be able to go through the single missions one after another a lot faster than when you have to find each one ingame and rely on the random generator to give you all the missions.

WOO HOO! Let me be the first to say: I love you. This is great, great news. I can pick a mission, jump myself to the nearest planet and get them done quickly.

Two followup questions since you are the hex master...

- Have you figured out where in the save game it decides the news story? I did this years ago and ran through what I thought was all of them... but the Official Guide lists seven or eight that I didn't find them.

- If so, have you figured out where it decides the random elements of the news story? Many of them are written so they apply to a random planet which the game selects... but it also selects a random name for who 'wrote' the story. I want to find out what the options for author are so I can add those names to the encyclopedia.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Not as sexy an update, but I snipped out the rest of the CCN databank pictures and uploaded them, to wait for articles.