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Wing Commander II

232 points by doppp 9y ago

everyone 9y ago
So.... 'Star Citizen'. I'm a game-maker and I've been following the development of star citizen since its 1st public announcement, before any crowdfunding even. Even from the very beginning it has looked like an unmitigated clusterfuck. (I decided to hold off funding it, I'm so happy I did) For the initial demo videos it looked like Roberts used his own money to hire artists to make lots of assets for the demo videos in Cry-engine.. Which is grand, makes sense + it worked, they got funded. But then they continued developing that demo-video project into the full game!!! Which is baffling. The main thing is that Cry-engine is one of the worst engines I could imagine for this type of game, I imagined they'd be fighting it every step of the way and they have been. Another practice theyve had from the start is building the game backwards, Creating (extremely labour intensive) final AAA polished art assets before they've even decided what the mechanics are let alone built and tried them, god only knows how may assets they've had to scrap. I could go on and on, eg. completely retooling cry-engine to use 64 bit floats. Which must have been a gargantuan task + also completely unnecessary if you plan out your game right. (eg. look at Kerbal space program)
- everyone 9y ago
  Compare it to Elite dangerous which started development at the same time. It was made pretty much on schedule. Its been at version 1 for a couple years with many people enjoying an extremely solid game. Star citizen has been in development hell for years. It looks like theyve reached the Sisyphusian point where X amount of work creates bugs that will take > X amount of time to fix. Still I would love to be proved wrong and it comes out and is the best game ever of my fantasies. (Elite dangerous is too MMOey for my tastes)
  - ivraatiems 9y ago
    In fairness, Elite: Dangerous was much, much less ambitious than Star Citizen. No out-of-ship experiences, no planet landings or exploration out of the box (that has been added now), not even any character customization in the initial release. Even now, with much more than the initial launch featureset added, E:D doesn't have anything close to SC's scope. What E:D does have is an amazing flight model, great visuals and a genuinely well-made physics engine that offers a surprising amount of realism. It's the most "you are a real pilot in a real spaceship" feeling game I've ever played. It just needs more depth to the actual game beyond that.
    - sundvor 9y ago
      You forgot the ridiculously detailed, rich and vibrant sound! That soundscape as you undock is just nuts, on a good set of cans. The best I've ever heard in a game. Love ED! Edit: I played on a 34" ultrawide with TrackIR and the Warthog HOTAS. The immersion is staggering. Sadly my throttle has died so it's on hold until I can get a new set.
- pvg 9y ago
  None of this is in any way related to Wing Commander II, a game that came out in 1991.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    Except for Chris Roberts and his interest in space games.
    - pvg 9y ago
      Barely. It's thread rage-jacking and is bad.
      - metric10 9y ago
        Star Citizen is “Wing Commander but we couldn’t/wouldn’t get the naming rights from EA, so Star Citizen wink-wink.” It’s the modern day continuation of Wing Commander. Edit: Maybe minus the space tigers...
      - everyone 9y ago
        Thats fair. I have loved wing commander, privateer and freelancer. I hence followed SC development closely, and hence have been cognizant and baffled by these issues. I was too curious what the HN community would have to say in response. I'm frankly hoping to be slammed on my technical comments and have someone prove that its all gonna be ok!
        pvg 9y ago
        You can always write a thing about SC and post it or post a thing about SC and comment on that. But hijacking posts with an unrelated thing you'd like to discuss or complain about just poops all over the ongoing on-topic conversations, please don't do it.
      - pheldagryph 9y ago
        The rage yes maybe, but Star Citizen is definitely not off topic. Article mentions WC1-3, it's a franchise article. SC is Origin's canceled Privateer Online [:)] without the license. For the Wing Commander community, they're inseparable despite the licensing. [:)] http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml
- shmerl 9y ago
  It feels like vaporware honestly, but I still hope they'll release Linux version eventually (using Vulkan). I never backed them, so it wouldn't be as upsetting if they won't, as to actual backers.
- acemarke 9y ago
  I'm a Star Citizen fanboy, and have kept a close eye on the development process. Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology. Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. We'll see how that pans out, and if they can actually manage more consistent releases. I pitched in for them to make the game of Chris Roberts' dreams, and I'm enjoying watching the development process. As long as they continue to make progress, I'm quite happy to sit back and wait for them to get it "right".
  - everyone 9y ago
    "The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer" No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise. With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine) Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game. I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane) "The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal" Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system. Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either. I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ is a good community to find out negative information on the project.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Star Citizen feels like a bit of an off-topic diversion for this thread, I guess. But see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it. ...I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.) Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. I won't be shocked if it fails. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. Maybe it won't. That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing.
- jdlshore 9y ago
  For some reason, Star Citizen attracts a lot of armchair project managers. From where I sit (not a backer, but a curious observer), it looks like a pretty normal large-scale project: full of decisions that are questionable in hindsight, but sensible if taken in context and assuming normal, fallible people following a—neither brilliant nor terrible—iterative and incremental process. One of the things that people seem to miss is that Star Citizen development functions a lot more like a SaaS, with recurring revenue, than a traditional game project, with a big-bang release. CIG (the company behind Star Citizen) averages about $90K PER DAY in backer revenue. This has been consistent for years. [1] The money comes from ship sales which, at the time of nearly all the sales, are nothing but polished art assets in various stages of development. Given this context, their decision to produce polished art assets and prioritize playable releases over rewrites not only makes sense, it's smart. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD... Edit: I've read your other replies in this thread and your dismissive attitude towards software development challenges looks a lot like inexperience. Since you offered your credentials as a "game-maker," I have to ask: is your game development experience as a professional software developer, working in a large team on commercial AAA products? Or is it smaller scale? I ask because decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale.
  - everyone 9y ago
    Ive done both. Based on what Ive seen, star citizen, as a piece of software, seems to be a total mess. Theres no excuse for that imo, if its the result of bad project management or whatever then so be it, its still a mess. "decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale." What scale? Users? team size? Also, I dont see how either makes it ok to write crummy software. Give me an example. Also in what way are the hobbyist problems small? Tiny teams (eg. the Dwarf fortress guys) have done some of the most groundbreaking plain old technically difficult work Ive seen.
    - jdlshore 9y ago
      Team size. (Although, at scale, you're actually talking about dozens of teams.) The problems that occur at scale have to do with dividing work, cross-team collaboration and coordination, and the sheer volume of work being too large for any one person to fully track and understand. I'm not saying Star Citizen development is perfect. They're doing a lot less automated testing than I prefer, the code they show in Bugsmashers isn't particularly well designed, and they would have benefited from adopting feature teams and timeboxed releases much sooner than they did. But software development always looks easier from a distance than it is in reality. The problems are fractal, and don't make themselves known until you're deep in the middle of implementation. (This is why so many projects are under-estimated.) Your criticisms lack that nuance. You say they're writing crummy software, but you offer no evidence other than 50,000-feet hand-waving assertions. It comes across as either inexperience, or an axe to grind.
platz 9y ago
my favorite space sim game was Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994). I think they got the graphics just right in that game (lol, "Gouraud shading"!). It was minimal yet expressive, and felt immersive & real. * note - I wish development had been completed on 0x10c - I think that would've been a good spiritual successor to TIE Fighter, aesthetic-wise
mutagen 9y ago
Ahh, memories of playing this after work on our owner’s 386 because it ran so much more buttery smooth than on my 286 EGA computer. Calling the ATI BBS in Canada to download updated drivers after hours so the call was cheaper and hopefully Wing Commander ran or ran better.
ggambetta 9y ago
I remember playing and enjoying Wing Commander (and possibly Wing Commander II) back in the day. But just a few short years later, X-Wing came out and blew Wing Commander out of the water. True 3D (flat shaded, but still infinitely better than sprites), and of course, set in the Star Wars universe :) Followed shortly afterwards by Tie Fighter, which introduced Gouraud shading IIRC. Then X-Wing vs Tie Fighter came out, it was the first to use a 3D accelerator so the graphics were better, but it wasn't that good compared with the previous one. The series kind of recovered a bit with X-Wing Alliance (back to a mission- and story-driven campaign, and with much better art). And then it stopped. TLDR: I miss X-Wing and Tie Fighter and wish there were new games like that with 2018 technology :(
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  Yeah, I started with X-Wing and Wing Commander always looked like a step back regarding the actual game mechanics and graphics style, too. Shooting at enemies was more fun in X-Wing and TIE Fighter because everything seemed to move faster (except the laser bolts, see next point) and you had to aim with much greater lead, one of the most important skill elements. The production values of X-Wing and TIE Fighter were incredible, whereas the style of Wing Commander felt generic (I and II) or like Starship Troopers (III).
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  There is a guy that is updating XWing game to use modern 3d acceleration with detailed 3d models and FX. https://youtu.be/TLrqtmKazpI https://youtu.be/TLrqtmKazpI Also, try Star lancer. I think that is the most modern game that follows the lineage of XWing and Wing Commander, and had a decent history.
- astrodust 9y ago
  There's dozens of current free-to-play games out there with that sort of technology, plus others like Elite Dangerous that even do it in VR.
  - ggambetta 9y ago
    But has any of them really captured the feeling of the originals, in your opinion? Not to mention not being set in the Star Wars universe... I have a similar problem with FPS, after playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, I haven't been able to enjoy any other FPS :( They're good, they're OK, but they're not quite ET.
cheschire 9y ago
I think I was one of three people that enjoyed the Wing Commander movie, even though it had very little relation to the game canon.
- taeric 9y ago
  The games had a somewhat fun story already. Why the movie decided to completely throw them out the window was baffling.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Books aren't treated well by adaptations, so how can we expect games to fare any better?
    - taeric 9y ago
      With the coming Rampage movie, I'm again excited for silly movies based on games. Clue is one of my all time favorite movies. :) That said, your point is fair. Most book to movies, I though, typically strip out a lot, but don't fundamentally change the story. Do they? Of course, as this article points out, the story for this game wasn't nearly as good as my rosy glasses give it credit for.
      - astrodust 9y ago
        Ask Stephen King if they fundamentally change the story. He's still upset about The Shining.
        taeric 9y ago
        Touche. I felt that one at least kept many of the same events. Just omitted things in a way that changed the theme. That said, I can see the err in that way of looking at it. Wing Commander felt different because it was basically keeping a few of the names, but a completely different story. Not even the same mechanics, since there was no magic to the main character in maneuvering through space in the games. That just came out of nowhere.
edgesrazor 9y ago
This was the game that taught me what system requirements were. My parents got it for me for my birthday or Christmas - went to install it and my Leading Edge purchased from Crutchfield just laughed at me.
acemarke 9y ago
I remember getting it into my head one day as a kid that I _had_ to have WC II right away. Would probably would have been several years after it came out, though - I think I might have gotten one of the later re-releases. I also remember being deeply moved by the story of Spirit and her captured husband, and her suicide run on the Kilrathi starbase at the end of WCII. The article has some valid critiques of the merits of the story and the gameplay, but I've always had extremely fond memories of the game.
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Funny, I had a similar experience a few years later. Saw the WC4 box in a store, very imprssive looking - I knew I had to have this. That was back when I had to save two months worth of allowance to afford it as a kid.
rhacker 9y ago
Loved the Wing Commander universe and specifically Privateer of all things (not Privateer 2 sadly). I think my fav of most of the games was Wing Commander III - I suspect many people thought it was cheesy having video integrated like that - it was becoming more popular in a certain timeframe in 90s video games, but man they did a good job.
- dwringer 9y ago
  I thought of Wing Commander III as the game demonstrating that video could be integrated into a game and it didn't have to be cheesy. The cast was top notch and for what it was, I really enjoyed the story (and even read the novelization). I can't think of many titles outside of pure RPG's that drew me into the characters and their interactions in quite the same way.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  I was seriously bugged by the regression of Tolwyn in WC3. In Spec Ops, he was a fan of Bluehair, but they retconned him back into not liking Blair (nee Bluehair) in WC3 and he seemed gratuitously cruel towards; I was totally find with the characterization of him being a hard-ass and extremist, but it was out of character for him to not like Blair who was well established as a hero by this point. But McDowell played it well as written and if you put John Rhys Davies in something, I will like it.
- jat850 9y ago
  If anyone could point me to a spiritual successor to Privateer, I would be so extremely happy. Does such a thing exist?
  - larrik 9y ago
    There's a ton of them. The "official" one was Freelancer, though.
    - larrik 9y ago
      To expand on this, I feel like there's a lot of Privateer successors, but few-to-no WC successors.
cydonian_monk 9y ago
I deeply miss games that had massively branching storylines. I understand why gamers dislike them (especially the completionists), but the branching gameplay was what set the first three WC games apart. (And maybe WC IV? I don’t remember much about branching in IV....)
gavanwoolery 9y ago
Privateer was my personal favorite because of the exploration / trading / upgrade system. There are similar experiences today, but most of them fail to replicate what was special about this game (maybe I am just wearing nostalgia goggles though)
- SliderUp 9y ago
  No, nothing has managed the same combination of exploration, trading, ship building, and combat skill, plus an over arching slow burn story. So good. I loved WC 1-4 (hated Prophecy), but Privateer was the best. I will not speak of Privateer 2.
corysama 9y ago
btw: We collect material along these lines over in https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/
ScoJoh 9y ago
I grew up on Wing Commander! I had WC1 and got all the add-ons. I guess I'm one of the few who LOVED the branching missions and even played through the game so many times and purposefully lost at certain times to make sure I'd experienced every mission. Heck I even created a branch diagram for all the missions. I was only 15 at the time! I then played through the game with such "anal" tenacity. I had to have EVERY kill for the killboard that was possible. If my wing man ever got any.... I'd dump out and try again! Then WC2 came out... holy moley! Yes I had to have it all, and as the article pointed out... I also promptly saved my pennies until I could afford my first sound blaster card and picked up the Voice pack too! Played and loved and enjoyed EVERY WC game in the series. The sense of wonder that I got... I wonder if kids have anything even close to those experiences today.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I loved Privateer as a kid too. I made a massive chart of buying and selling prices for different goods to and where just about everywhere. I need to see if it's on an abandonware site somewhere!
- larrik 9y ago
  I got into Wing Commander very late (WC 4), after having spent probably thousands of hours in the X-Wing series. So when I failed a mission and the story kept going, I was blown away. It's THE feature I remember most fondly, looking back. And this was a game with branching paths in full motion video! I was blown away.
- fhood 9y ago
  Don't worry, they do. Hell, so do adults. Dark Souls pretty much redefined my standards for great single player games.
- vlucas 9y ago
  > The sense of wonder that I got... I wonder if kids have anything even close to those experiences today. I have 3 kids, and I can honestly say yes, they do. Minecraft. It has simple mechanics, but can be pretty deep too if you want it to be. You can also build anything your mind can imagine. Add on all the fan created stuff, mods, etc. and it definitely provides the same stuff for the new generation.
brandonmenc 9y ago
Be sure to find or download a copy of Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide [0] because about a third of the book is a great set of interviews with the development team about the making of the games, and the company culture at Origin in the late 80s and early 90s. A fascinating snapshot! [0] http://www.amazon.com/Wing-Commander-II-Ultimate-Paperback/dp/B010EWDOE2 http://www.amazon.com/Wing-Commander-II-Ultimate-Paperback/d...
nsxwolf 9y ago
I will never forget the first time I saw Wing Commander in a magazine and the sinking feeling that set in when I realized I needed a new computer to play it, but I was 13 and had no money.
indescions_2018 9y ago
Before my time, sadly. But am familiar with the title from Masters of Doom, the id Software story In 1990, Richard Garriott's company Origin, released a space-themed combat flight simulator called Wing Commander, which became a favorite around the id lake house. Carmack figured he could do better. Flight sims, he thought, were painfully slow, bogged down by their heavy graphics and leaving the player to snail through the game play. What he and others preferred was the fast action of arcade games such as Defender, Asteroids and Gauntlet. Carmack tried to see how he might do something that hadn't been done before: create a fast-action game in 3D
stephenhuey 9y ago
One of the Wing Commander developers visited our computer science class at Rice in the year 2000 and I'll never forget him mentioning how 80-hour weeks became common leading up to a release and they even hit 100 hours for a couple of weeks and he had to be hospitalized temporarily. I know the long hours are common in many game studios but I wonder how many get that bad.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  Wow. This makes me not want to buy them. Why reward slave drivers? Unless it was an employee owned business.
  - e12e 9y ago
    Reminds me of: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
s-macke 9y ago
Thanks to web emulators you can play the game online. Try it. https://classicreload.com/wing-commander-ii-vengeance-of-the-kilrathi.html https://classicreload.com/wing-commander-ii-vengeance-of-the...
leonroy 9y ago
Whilst Origin likely used Wing Commander II as a huge cash cow to subsidize Ultima VII - much to WC2's detriment I distinctly remember a few short years later Origin gave Wing Commander III a lot more resources. At the time (1994) the gaming press declared Wing Commander III the most ambitious and costly game ever made at $4M. Its sequel upped the ante even further with a budget of $12M which made headlines beyond the gaming magazines and actually into the newspapers. Both good games incidentally and well worth a play.
jonplackett 9y ago
Surprised Noone’s mentioned privateer. I loved that game so much. Had to make a special boot disk to free up memory on our 386SX
- GordonS 9y ago
  Hah, I remember fiddling for ages with autoexec.bat and config.ini for ages trying to free enough memory for WC to run with sound!
mdb333 9y ago
anyway you slice it, this was and will always be the golden era of PC-gaming!
mickrussom 9y ago
I played wc, wc2 and all the special missions until my fingers bled without cheating and without fearing the 486-dx2-66. i played that game and i never cheated and I made medal of honor on all possible missions. it was the best game ever!!!! :)
outworlder 9y ago
From the article: " Like so much else about Wing Commander II, the speech, voiced by members of the development team, is terminally cheesy today, but in its day the Speech Pack drove the purchase of the latest Sound Blaster cards, which were adept at handling such samples, just as the core game drove the purchase of the hottest new 80386-based computers." I am pretty sure they got some deals for that too. I got Wing Commander as part of a "Multimedia Kit" from Creative (CD Drive, Sound Blaster 16, Speakers), which bundled Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Syndicate Plus and Ultima VIII. All excellent games.
lerno 9y ago
I can’t believe no-one is mentioning the difference between Elite, WC and X-wing in terms of flight controls. If you know your classic Elite, it’s basically roll and up/down. WC had (as basic controls) left/right up/down. Easier to control but felt very artificial. X-wing was the best of the three, where we had up/down and then left-roll-move and right-roll-move. Not only did it look much like in the movies, it was also excellent for actually dodging people on your tail.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And then came Frontier: Elite II, with its Newtonian physics...
digi_owl 9y ago
I seem to recall coming across an article on how to properly engage the enemy in the original game in some magazine back in the day. The still images alone captured my imagination for weeks.
csmark 9y ago
Everyone thought I was some self taught computer genius. The reality was I wanted to play Wing Commander without having to choose between having sound or a using joystick. Autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem.sys and an insane amount of time is all it took.

232 points by doppp 9y ago

So.... 'Star Citizen'. I'm a game-maker and I've been following the development of star citizen since its 1st public announcement, before any crowdfunding even. Even from the very beginning it has looked like an unmitigated clusterfuck. (I decided to hold off funding it, I'm so happy I did) For the initial demo videos it looked like Roberts used his own money to hire artists to make lots of assets for the demo videos in Cry-engine.. Which is grand, makes sense + it worked, they got funded. But then they continued developing that demo-video project into the full game!!! Which is baffling. The main thing is that Cry-engine is one of the worst engines I could imagine for this type of game, I imagined they'd be fighting it every step of the way and they have been. Another practice theyve had from the start is building the game backwards, Creating (extremely labour intensive) final AAA polished art assets before they've even decided what the mechanics are let alone built and tried them, god only knows how may assets they've had to scrap. I could go on and on, eg. completely retooling cry-engine to use 64 bit floats. Which must have been a gargantuan task + also completely unnecessary if you plan out your game right. (eg. look at Kerbal space program)

everyone 9y ago
Compare it to Elite dangerous which started development at the same time. It was made pretty much on schedule. Its been at version 1 for a couple years with many people enjoying an extremely solid game. Star citizen has been in development hell for years. It looks like theyve reached the Sisyphusian point where X amount of work creates bugs that will take > X amount of time to fix. Still I would love to be proved wrong and it comes out and is the best game ever of my fantasies. (Elite dangerous is too MMOey for my tastes)
- ivraatiems 9y ago
  In fairness, Elite: Dangerous was much, much less ambitious than Star Citizen. No out-of-ship experiences, no planet landings or exploration out of the box (that has been added now), not even any character customization in the initial release. Even now, with much more than the initial launch featureset added, E:D doesn't have anything close to SC's scope. What E:D does have is an amazing flight model, great visuals and a genuinely well-made physics engine that offers a surprising amount of realism. It's the most "you are a real pilot in a real spaceship" feeling game I've ever played. It just needs more depth to the actual game beyond that.
  - sundvor 9y ago
    You forgot the ridiculously detailed, rich and vibrant sound! That soundscape as you undock is just nuts, on a good set of cans. The best I've ever heard in a game. Love ED! Edit: I played on a 34" ultrawide with TrackIR and the Warthog HOTAS. The immersion is staggering. Sadly my throttle has died so it's on hold until I can get a new set.
pvg 9y ago
None of this is in any way related to Wing Commander II, a game that came out in 1991.
- shmerl 9y ago
  Except for Chris Roberts and his interest in space games.
  - pvg 9y ago
    Barely. It's thread rage-jacking and is bad.
    - metric10 9y ago
      Star Citizen is “Wing Commander but we couldn’t/wouldn’t get the naming rights from EA, so Star Citizen wink-wink.” It’s the modern day continuation of Wing Commander. Edit: Maybe minus the space tigers...
    - everyone 9y ago
      Thats fair. I have loved wing commander, privateer and freelancer. I hence followed SC development closely, and hence have been cognizant and baffled by these issues. I was too curious what the HN community would have to say in response. I'm frankly hoping to be slammed on my technical comments and have someone prove that its all gonna be ok!
      - pvg 9y ago
        You can always write a thing about SC and post it or post a thing about SC and comment on that. But hijacking posts with an unrelated thing you'd like to discuss or complain about just poops all over the ongoing on-topic conversations, please don't do it.
    - pheldagryph 9y ago
      The rage yes maybe, but Star Citizen is definitely not off topic. Article mentions WC1-3, it's a franchise article. SC is Origin's canceled Privateer Online [:)] without the license. For the Wing Commander community, they're inseparable despite the licensing. [:)] http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml http://www.wcnews.com/privateeronline.shtml
shmerl 9y ago
It feels like vaporware honestly, but I still hope they'll release Linux version eventually (using Vulkan). I never backed them, so it wouldn't be as upsetting if they won't, as to actual backers.
acemarke 9y ago
I'm a Star Citizen fanboy, and have kept a close eye on the development process. Yes, the development has been full of fits and starts, but they've also solved some amazing technical challenges. The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer. The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal. Also, they were able to pick up many of the core CryTek engine developers who had built the engine in the first place, and that's paid off with the rapid development of their procedural planet generation technology. Sure, the development has been repeatedly behind schedule, and we've learned to pretty much ignore any projected deadlines they announce. But, they've got several hundred people working full-time on a pair of AAA-class games and the current alpha versions _are_ playable, so it's not just vaporware. They also have been posting the current project task planning info on the website for about the last year, with info drawn directly from their internal JIRA, and the community is watching that eagerly to calculate weekly progress update diffs. Supposedly CIG is aiming for quarterly patch releases this year based on what's ready at the time rather than a specific feature list target, with 3.1 due out this month. We'll see how that pans out, and if they can actually manage more consistent releases. I pitched in for them to make the game of Chris Roberts' dreams, and I'm enjoying watching the development process. As long as they continue to make progress, I'm quite happy to sit back and wait for them to get it "right".
- everyone 9y ago
  "The 64-bit map size aspect was critical for having solar-system-sized maps with proper precision for multiplayer" No. When something is very far away from you, it will probably not even be visible, if it does appear it will be very small. You will not be able to interact with it. From your perspective its position does not need to be precise. With a sane game architecture for this kind of game you dont need higher precision floats. This has been done in loads of games. I mentioned KSP because a tiny team did this in Unity (not even their own engine) Considering how it will instantly double all the payloads, this is something you'd particularly want to avoid for a multiplayer game. I can only guess that they did this because they used cryengines built-in physics, and every ship in an instance is in the same phsyics 'world' (which is insane) "The independent physics grids per ship implementation was a big deal" Thats not a big deal. Its relatively trivial to do imo. You just have multiple physics 'worlds' and any bodies which protrude into another system are represented by kinematics in the other system. Transitioning from one system to another could look very weird, simply because the fantasy of the game does not cog with consistent physics, but they have not overcome this problem either. I imagine implementing it whilst using cryengines built-in physics system may have been the truly colossal task. But why in gods name are they using cryengine (an engine strongly geared towards making crytek fps games) to make space game?
Raphmedia 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/ is a good community to find out negative information on the project.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Star Citizen feels like a bit of an off-topic diversion for this thread, I guess. But see, the shear ridiculousness of Star Citizen's scope is the only reason I backed it. ...I've always dreamed of a hyper-realistic space simm that allowed you to do whatever you wanted. (Even in the alphas that have been released so far, I can do so many things that simply isn't possible in any other space game, ever made. In Elite: Dangerous you can't even get out of your seat.) Of course, knowing that scope when I backed it, I understand the risk. I won't be shocked if it fails. And I won't really feel like I was slighted, or cheated. I put the money towards a thing I hope can be a thing, and maybe it will be. Maybe it won't. That being said, the current lawsuit with Crytek is a super good reason to withhold funding them until it's resolved. There's so much shiftiness in there, and it's probably the first thing I've seen that could prematurely abort SC. It boggles the mind that they went the way they did to dodge licensing.
jdlshore 9y ago
For some reason, Star Citizen attracts a lot of armchair project managers. From where I sit (not a backer, but a curious observer), it looks like a pretty normal large-scale project: full of decisions that are questionable in hindsight, but sensible if taken in context and assuming normal, fallible people following a—neither brilliant nor terrible—iterative and incremental process. One of the things that people seem to miss is that Star Citizen development functions a lot more like a SaaS, with recurring revenue, than a traditional game project, with a big-bang release. CIG (the company behind Star Citizen) averages about $90K PER DAY in backer revenue. This has been consistent for years. [1] The money comes from ship sales which, at the time of nearly all the sales, are nothing but polished art assets in various stages of development. Given this context, their decision to produce polished art assets and prioritize playable releases over rewrites not only makes sense, it's smart. [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD... Edit: I've read your other replies in this thread and your dismissive attitude towards software development challenges looks a lot like inexperience. Since you offered your credentials as a "game-maker," I have to ask: is your game development experience as a professional software developer, working in a large team on commercial AAA products? Or is it smaller scale? I ask because decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale.
- everyone 9y ago
  Ive done both. Based on what Ive seen, star citizen, as a piece of software, seems to be a total mess. Theres no excuse for that imo, if its the result of bad project management or whatever then so be it, its still a mess. "decisions that are obvious and trivial for a hobbyist solving small problems look a lot different at scale." What scale? Users? team size? Also, I dont see how either makes it ok to write crummy software. Give me an example. Also in what way are the hobbyist problems small? Tiny teams (eg. the Dwarf fortress guys) have done some of the most groundbreaking plain old technically difficult work Ive seen.
  - jdlshore 9y ago
    Team size. (Although, at scale, you're actually talking about dozens of teams.) The problems that occur at scale have to do with dividing work, cross-team collaboration and coordination, and the sheer volume of work being too large for any one person to fully track and understand. I'm not saying Star Citizen development is perfect. They're doing a lot less automated testing than I prefer, the code they show in Bugsmashers isn't particularly well designed, and they would have benefited from adopting feature teams and timeboxed releases much sooner than they did. But software development always looks easier from a distance than it is in reality. The problems are fractal, and don't make themselves known until you're deep in the middle of implementation. (This is why so many projects are under-estimated.) Your criticisms lack that nuance. You say they're writing crummy software, but you offer no evidence other than 50,000-feet hand-waving assertions. It comes across as either inexperience, or an axe to grind.

platz 9y ago

my favorite space sim game was Star Wars: TIE Fighter (1994). I think they got the graphics just right in that game (lol, "Gouraud shading"!). It was minimal yet expressive, and felt immersive & real. * note - I wish development had been completed on 0x10c - I think that would've been a good spiritual successor to TIE Fighter, aesthetic-wise

mutagen 9y ago

Ahh, memories of playing this after work on our owner’s 386 because it ran so much more buttery smooth than on my 286 EGA computer. Calling the ATI BBS in Canada to download updated drivers after hours so the call was cheaper and hopefully Wing Commander ran or ran better.

ggambetta 9y ago

I remember playing and enjoying Wing Commander (and possibly Wing Commander II) back in the day. But just a few short years later, X-Wing came out and blew Wing Commander out of the water. True 3D (flat shaded, but still infinitely better than sprites), and of course, set in the Star Wars universe :) Followed shortly afterwards by Tie Fighter, which introduced Gouraud shading IIRC. Then X-Wing vs Tie Fighter came out, it was the first to use a 3D accelerator so the graphics were better, but it wasn't that good compared with the previous one. The series kind of recovered a bit with X-Wing Alliance (back to a mission- and story-driven campaign, and with much better art). And then it stopped. TLDR: I miss X-Wing and Tie Fighter and wish there were new games like that with 2018 technology :(

ahartmetz 9y ago
Yeah, I started with X-Wing and Wing Commander always looked like a step back regarding the actual game mechanics and graphics style, too. Shooting at enemies was more fun in X-Wing and TIE Fighter because everything seemed to move faster (except the laser bolts, see next point) and you had to aim with much greater lead, one of the most important skill elements. The production values of X-Wing and TIE Fighter were incredible, whereas the style of Wing Commander felt generic (I and II) or like Starship Troopers (III).
Zardoz84 9y ago
There is a guy that is updating XWing game to use modern 3d acceleration with detailed 3d models and FX. https://youtu.be/TLrqtmKazpI https://youtu.be/TLrqtmKazpI Also, try Star lancer. I think that is the most modern game that follows the lineage of XWing and Wing Commander, and had a decent history.
astrodust 9y ago
There's dozens of current free-to-play games out there with that sort of technology, plus others like Elite Dangerous that even do it in VR.
- ggambetta 9y ago
  But has any of them really captured the feeling of the originals, in your opinion? Not to mention not being set in the Star Wars universe... I have a similar problem with FPS, after playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, I haven't been able to enjoy any other FPS :( They're good, they're OK, but they're not quite ET.

cheschire 9y ago

I think I was one of three people that enjoyed the Wing Commander movie, even though it had very little relation to the game canon.

taeric 9y ago
The games had a somewhat fun story already. Why the movie decided to completely throw them out the window was baffling.
- astrodust 9y ago
  Books aren't treated well by adaptations, so how can we expect games to fare any better?
  - taeric 9y ago
    With the coming Rampage movie, I'm again excited for silly movies based on games. Clue is one of my all time favorite movies. :) That said, your point is fair. Most book to movies, I though, typically strip out a lot, but don't fundamentally change the story. Do they? Of course, as this article points out, the story for this game wasn't nearly as good as my rosy glasses give it credit for.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      Ask Stephen King if they fundamentally change the story. He's still upset about The Shining.
      - taeric 9y ago
        Touche. I felt that one at least kept many of the same events. Just omitted things in a way that changed the theme. That said, I can see the err in that way of looking at it. Wing Commander felt different because it was basically keeping a few of the names, but a completely different story. Not even the same mechanics, since there was no magic to the main character in maneuvering through space in the games. That just came out of nowhere.

edgesrazor 9y ago

This was the game that taught me what system requirements were. My parents got it for me for my birthday or Christmas - went to install it and my Leading Edge purchased from Crutchfield just laughed at me.

acemarke 9y ago

I remember getting it into my head one day as a kid that I _had_ to have WC II right away. Would probably would have been several years after it came out, though - I think I might have gotten one of the later re-releases. I also remember being deeply moved by the story of Spirit and her captured husband, and her suicide run on the Kilrathi starbase at the end of WCII. The article has some valid critiques of the merits of the story and the gameplay, but I've always had extremely fond memories of the game.

m_mueller 9y ago
Funny, I had a similar experience a few years later. Saw the WC4 box in a store, very imprssive looking - I knew I had to have this. That was back when I had to save two months worth of allowance to afford it as a kid.

rhacker 9y ago

Loved the Wing Commander universe and specifically Privateer of all things (not Privateer 2 sadly). I think my fav of most of the games was Wing Commander III - I suspect many people thought it was cheesy having video integrated like that - it was becoming more popular in a certain timeframe in 90s video games, but man they did a good job.

dwringer 9y ago
I thought of Wing Commander III as the game demonstrating that video could be integrated into a game and it didn't have to be cheesy. The cast was top notch and for what it was, I really enjoyed the story (and even read the novelization). I can't think of many titles outside of pure RPG's that drew me into the characters and their interactions in quite the same way.
aidenn0 9y ago
I was seriously bugged by the regression of Tolwyn in WC3. In Spec Ops, he was a fan of Bluehair, but they retconned him back into not liking Blair (nee Bluehair) in WC3 and he seemed gratuitously cruel towards; I was totally find with the characterization of him being a hard-ass and extremist, but it was out of character for him to not like Blair who was well established as a hero by this point. But McDowell played it well as written and if you put John Rhys Davies in something, I will like it.
jat850 9y ago
If anyone could point me to a spiritual successor to Privateer, I would be so extremely happy. Does such a thing exist?
- larrik 9y ago
  There's a ton of them. The "official" one was Freelancer, though.
  - larrik 9y ago
    To expand on this, I feel like there's a lot of Privateer successors, but few-to-no WC successors.

cydonian_monk 9y ago

I deeply miss games that had massively branching storylines. I understand why gamers dislike them (especially the completionists), but the branching gameplay was what set the first three WC games apart. (And maybe WC IV? I don’t remember much about branching in IV....)

gavanwoolery 9y ago

Privateer was my personal favorite because of the exploration / trading / upgrade system. There are similar experiences today, but most of them fail to replicate what was special about this game (maybe I am just wearing nostalgia goggles though)

SliderUp 9y ago
No, nothing has managed the same combination of exploration, trading, ship building, and combat skill, plus an over arching slow burn story. So good. I loved WC 1-4 (hated Prophecy), but Privateer was the best. I will not speak of Privateer 2.

corysama 9y ago

btw: We collect material along these lines over in https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

ScoJoh 9y ago

I grew up on Wing Commander! I had WC1 and got all the add-ons. I guess I'm one of the few who LOVED the branching missions and even played through the game so many times and purposefully lost at certain times to make sure I'd experienced every mission. Heck I even created a branch diagram for all the missions. I was only 15 at the time! I then played through the game with such "anal" tenacity. I had to have EVERY kill for the killboard that was possible. If my wing man ever got any.... I'd dump out and try again! Then WC2 came out... holy moley! Yes I had to have it all, and as the article pointed out... I also promptly saved my pennies until I could afford my first sound blaster card and picked up the Voice pack too! Played and loved and enjoyed EVERY WC game in the series. The sense of wonder that I got... I wonder if kids have anything even close to those experiences today.

GordonS 9y ago
I loved Privateer as a kid too. I made a massive chart of buying and selling prices for different goods to and where just about everywhere. I need to see if it's on an abandonware site somewhere!
larrik 9y ago
I got into Wing Commander very late (WC 4), after having spent probably thousands of hours in the X-Wing series. So when I failed a mission and the story kept going, I was blown away. It's THE feature I remember most fondly, looking back. And this was a game with branching paths in full motion video! I was blown away.
fhood 9y ago
Don't worry, they do. Hell, so do adults. Dark Souls pretty much redefined my standards for great single player games.
vlucas 9y ago
> The sense of wonder that I got... I wonder if kids have anything even close to those experiences today. I have 3 kids, and I can honestly say yes, they do. Minecraft. It has simple mechanics, but can be pretty deep too if you want it to be. You can also build anything your mind can imagine. Add on all the fan created stuff, mods, etc. and it definitely provides the same stuff for the new generation.

brandonmenc 9y ago

Be sure to find or download a copy of Wing Commander I & II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide [0] because about a third of the book is a great set of interviews with the development team about the making of the games, and the company culture at Origin in the late 80s and early 90s. A fascinating snapshot! [0] http://www.amazon.com/Wing-Commander-II-Ultimate-Paperback/dp/B010EWDOE2 http://www.amazon.com/Wing-Commander-II-Ultimate-Paperback/d...

nsxwolf 9y ago

I will never forget the first time I saw Wing Commander in a magazine and the sinking feeling that set in when I realized I needed a new computer to play it, but I was 13 and had no money.

indescions_2018 9y ago

Before my time, sadly. But am familiar with the title from Masters of Doom, the id Software story In 1990, Richard Garriott's company Origin, released a space-themed combat flight simulator called Wing Commander, which became a favorite around the id lake house. Carmack figured he could do better. Flight sims, he thought, were painfully slow, bogged down by their heavy graphics and leaving the player to snail through the game play. What he and others preferred was the fast action of arcade games such as Defender, Asteroids and Gauntlet. Carmack tried to see how he might do something that hadn't been done before: create a fast-action game in 3D

stephenhuey 9y ago

One of the Wing Commander developers visited our computer science class at Rice in the year 2000 and I'll never forget him mentioning how 80-hour weeks became common leading up to a release and they even hit 100 hours for a couple of weeks and he had to be hospitalized temporarily. I know the long hours are common in many game studios but I wonder how many get that bad.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
Wow. This makes me not want to buy them. Why reward slave drivers? Unless it was an employee owned business.
- e12e 9y ago
  Reminds me of: https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

s-macke 9y ago

Thanks to web emulators you can play the game online. Try it. https://classicreload.com/wing-commander-ii-vengeance-of-the-kilrathi.html https://classicreload.com/wing-commander-ii-vengeance-of-the...

leonroy 9y ago

Whilst Origin likely used Wing Commander II as a huge cash cow to subsidize Ultima VII - much to WC2's detriment I distinctly remember a few short years later Origin gave Wing Commander III a lot more resources. At the time (1994) the gaming press declared Wing Commander III the most ambitious and costly game ever made at $4M. Its sequel upped the ante even further with a budget of $12M which made headlines beyond the gaming magazines and actually into the newspapers. Both good games incidentally and well worth a play.

jonplackett 9y ago

Surprised Noone’s mentioned privateer. I loved that game so much. Had to make a special boot disk to free up memory on our 386SX

GordonS 9y ago
Hah, I remember fiddling for ages with autoexec.bat and config.ini for ages trying to free enough memory for WC to run with sound!

mdb333 9y ago

anyway you slice it, this was and will always be the golden era of PC-gaming!

mickrussom 9y ago

I played wc, wc2 and all the special missions until my fingers bled without cheating and without fearing the 486-dx2-66. i played that game and i never cheated and I made medal of honor on all possible missions. it was the best game ever!!!! :)

outworlder 9y ago

From the article: " Like so much else about Wing Commander II, the speech, voiced by members of the development team, is terminally cheesy today, but in its day the Speech Pack drove the purchase of the latest Sound Blaster cards, which were adept at handling such samples, just as the core game drove the purchase of the hottest new 80386-based computers." I am pretty sure they got some deals for that too. I got Wing Commander as part of a "Multimedia Kit" from Creative (CD Drive, Sound Blaster 16, Speakers), which bundled Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Syndicate Plus and Ultima VIII. All excellent games.

lerno 9y ago

I can’t believe no-one is mentioning the difference between Elite, WC and X-wing in terms of flight controls. If you know your classic Elite, it’s basically roll and up/down. WC had (as basic controls) left/right up/down. Easier to control but felt very artificial. X-wing was the best of the three, where we had up/down and then left-roll-move and right-roll-move. Not only did it look much like in the movies, it was also excellent for actually dodging people on your tail.

digi_owl 9y ago
And then came Frontier: Elite II, with its Newtonian physics...

digi_owl 9y ago

I seem to recall coming across an article on how to properly engage the enemy in the original game in some magazine back in the day. The still images alone captured my imagination for weeks.

csmark 9y ago

Everyone thought I was some self taught computer genius. The reality was I wanted to play Wing Commander without having to choose between having sound or a using joystick. Autoexec.bat, config.sys, and himem.sys and an insane amount of time is all it took.