Ascii Sector Keeps Growing

There's been another incremental upgrade to Privateer Ascii Sector this week. Version 0.3.2 is the first Win32 release, so users no longer need to run the game through a program such as DOSBox. The second big addition is the inclusion of music and sound effects. Chris Knudsen has been carefully collecting a variety of classic Privateer audio files to complement the retro look of the game. He's also interested in testing the Windows performance on a variety of systems. Wingnuts can grab the latest release here and post feedback to Crius.net.

My somewhat loose plan at the moment is to program ship boarding and on-ship character combat for 0.4. Following that I might add planetary combat missions for 0.5, where you'll engage in combat against a horde of Kilrathi, Retros or pirates alongside Confed forces in randomly generated cities. These will probably be a new type of mission for the Mercenaries' Guild. I'll also start work on the scripting part, where players will be able to script 'quests' or 'stories' that other players can load into their game.

Parallel to all this, I'll continue to expand the gaming univers with new systems and add small new features and fixes here and there. I think I'll call it version 1.0 when the gaming univers is complete (all four quadrants have been established). I can then continue to add new features for the scripting language based on player/user feedback. I'll also be working on Linux and Mac versions.

Making the Game - Part 12

We're introduced to an interesting point in this May 7, 1996 Component Manager Meeting agenda: will Wing Commander Prophecy have an 18 or a 24 month development cycle? Corporate, of course, will ultimately win and enforce the shorter timeline... but it's very interesting to see the game being planned in the hopes of having an additional six months of development. Also: who is the Production Designer at this point? Because he seems to be having all the fun - building new destroyers and drawing a ship for Maniac Missions? I'd give my left eye to see these things.

Wing Commander V Component Manager Meeting Agenda Download (4.1 MB) Date: May 17, 1996 Project: Wing Commander Prophecy Donated By: Billy Cain Pages: 8