All Your StarBase Are...

Another day, another preview of Wing Commander: Standoff...

Something to Scim Through

And Now They Attack Us!

As promised, Vas Gábor has put the Wing Commander IV Demo trailer online in DivX;-) format! It's a thirty meg download, available here.

That's Not a Bug...

The Earth Militia project has added a features page! You can find it here. It lists... features! And here they are:

• 2 minute intro
• 36 missions
• New voices
• Ships like the Raptor, Centurion, Scimitar and the Sabre are to be flown in
• Gemini Sector and Vukar-Tag sectors entered
• New constantinople base mission
• Earth militia bengal class carrier (your base)
• 1 minute ending scene

Now with BSP Trees

Here's the most recent list of changes to Vega Strike... VS is pretty dashed confusing, but fun to play with. Much like Ultima VIII.

• BSP trees now work perfectly for both line and starship collisions.
• this means that, unlike vegastrike classic, you'll be able to fly close to the hull of a large starship, hug the deck, fly through the launch bay...
• Any closed model (eg Midway) can only be hit by a well placed beam (no hitting if you fire between the legs of those Midway pants)
• This also will make way for skin-tight shield effects on those large ships!
• an optimized BSP tree generator is available that can generate trees for Vegastrike and even for prophecy.
• this generator can minimize the size of the tree or the time it takes to search through it, using ideas inspired from the crystal space engine (http://crystal.sourceforge.net)
• if anyone has any ideas how to enforce the closed-ness of a model, please let me know. Currently many of the vegastrike classic models are "open" and have gaps in them that allow you to collide, mid-space! (bad things)
• These BSP trees are the last _major_ challenge to getting vegastrike working.
• from here on out it's all details associated with gameplay and organization, as opposed to new algorithms I need to learn.

EA Wants You... to Sport On

It isn't really WC related, but it gives you an idea of other things happening at EA. They had a recruitment booth here at SIGGRAPH. When compared to other booths, it was one of teh smaller ones. (You can check out a floor diagram at this URL http://helios.siggraph.org/s2001/exhibition/floorplan.html They are in the center to the back.)

Their booth was manner by about 8-10 recruiters, who were all wearing baseball shirts that said "talent scount" on the back. Their thurst, EA sports. And they were talking about on-line sports games too. No mention of hiring for other divisions or other work. Now, that doesn't mean that they won't be involved with other projects...just that sports is this divisions top priorty now.

Just thought you folks would like to know..

A Day in the LOAF

Apologies for the lack of updates yesterday... the whole computer network where I work (Blair Witch college!) was (and presumably still is) deader than Bhaktosh Redclaw.

From: Schimell Medi-Corp.

The Schimell Medi-Corp. has provided some outstanding research in the past. Recently, however, its study of fluffy rodents has caused some alarm amongst members of the Freedom for Small Fluffly Rodents Group. This group are currently protesting at a spacestation at Nav Point 149. We require you to identify, but not harm, these protesters and their ship 'Freedom Rights'. Two terrorist fighters are also in the area and causing problems. You ahve permission to eliminate these if they persist in their destructive manner. Take the ID data to CIS Patrol Command at NAV Point #6.