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Star Wars™: X-Wing and TIE Fighter seriesXWVM - Any interest?(1272 posts)(1272 posts)
(1272 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted February 03, 2015
I played around a bit: DS00 seems to be a good transition from Dogfight. The rest are fine left as they are, I think. But I'll play around more and see what I would change.
Posted February 19, 2015
This is not dead. I'm just pretty busy in real life. ^_^
I put some hour or two into the remake whenever I can. Stay tuned!
Posted February 19, 2015
Roger that. Take all the time you need. :)
Posted February 28, 2015
This is a pretty cool project from what I've read so far. Will there be any plans to re-imagine some of the missions by keeping the same root concept, but making them more dynamic and with a higher diversity of in-flight craft. There were several ships either mentioned (Z-95 Headhunters in the Farlander Papers), or relegated to cutscene use only (Rebel Medium Transports, Interdictor Cruisers, and the Executer).

Would there also be an attempt at fixing continuity problems, like TIE Interceptors and RZ-1 A-wings being around before the Battle of Yavin?

I'm sorry if I'm getting a bit carried away. I love X-wing to death as it was my first Star Wars sim, but I've been spoiled by the advancement made in the later games.
Posted March 01, 2015
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amajewski1983: This is a pretty cool project from what I've read so far. Will there be any plans to re-imagine some of the missions by keeping the same root concept, but making them more dynamic and with a higher diversity of in-flight craft. There were several ships either mentioned (Z-95 Headhunters in the Farlander Papers), or relegated to cutscene use only (Rebel Medium Transports, Interdictor Cruisers, and the Executer).

Would there also be an attempt at fixing continuity problems, like TIE Interceptors and RZ-1 A-wings being around before the Battle of Yavin?

I'm sorry if I'm getting a bit carried away. I love X-wing to death as it was my first Star Wars sim, but I've been spoiled by the advancement made in the later games.
My intention is to make first a faithful remake to the X-Wing Collectors' CD-ROM edition, only with hardware constraints loosened (resolution, 3D models, joysticks and alternative input devices, digital music, etc).
At the same time, though, the way I am implementing the engine is totally moddable. The Tours of Duty will be editable, both in amount of them, initial crawl text, number of missions, etc.
I see no point on not doing so.
Second, missions were once already "patched" to make them easier or to solve bugs. In the Collector's CD-ROM, you could play the original set of mission, or the "New" missions.
What I plan is to have a easy, human readable, mission patch files. This is not an independent remake. This is meant to be a "community patch" to the GOG edition of X-Wing. I have my reasons for that. That is why we will have mission patch files that will allow to modify the original missions.
These mission patch files will be probably either XML or JSON text files with overrides to the flightgroups in the original files. This will allow us to fix bugs, tweak the difficulty or reimagine some missions with better assets.
For example, you very well mention the absence of the Z-95. It should be there. It just should. Problem is that replacing an A-Wing or an X-Wing with a Z-95 would greatly modify the balance of the mission.
One easy way to have Z-95s in X-Wing without messing with the original balance would be to introduce TIE Fighter's Shift+S command "Request for reinforcements". If you want the original difficulty, you won't use it. If you don't mind some help in a mission, you can summon a little squadron of Z-95s. What about that?

The presence of medium transport could be "patched" in to replace some Freighters where the ships geometry doesn't matter much. That is mostly everywhere where the Freighters aren't used to build up platform or research stations Lego-style, like in the first B-Wing historical mission.
The interdictor cruiser is one of my favorite TIE Fighter imperial ships. I would love to see it retrofitted to X-Wing. We could do it by adding alternative missions in the same way that Imperial Pursuit and B-Wing TOD provided some alternative missions (mission A and mission B). Then the player could choose to play the original X-Wing mission, or play an alternative B mission with interdictors, Z-95s, ATRs, escort shuttles, R-41s, T-Ws, or even proper platforms from TIE Fighter, instead of those arrangements of containers or freighters that X-Wing made us of to "fake" platforms.

TIE Interceptors and A-Wings are trickier. They were supposed to be developed between Yavin and Endor, but X-Wing starts way before Yavin, and you cannot remove their interceptor class fighter from the Rebels when they have only 3 ships to choose from for 4 TODs of 5.
There is that retcon called Arrowhead that, sincerely, sounds really stupid. It looks like an A-Wing, behaves like an A-Wing, and everyone call them A-Wing, but it's not an A-Wing? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and everyone call it duck, maybe it's a duck, man.

What about the T/I? The Empire also needs an interceptor class fighter. You cannot replace it with T/F, T/B or T/A. T/D and T/P are out of question too. And the gunboat is no interceptor. I cannot think on something simple to solve this inconsistency, other than calling it TIE Interceptor Prototype or something.
Posted March 02, 2015
I just noticed this thread for the first time and think it sounds awesome!

Since I'm new to the thread, I was wondering if any of this is in a playable state?

If it is, I'd love to try it!

Keep up the cool work!
Posted March 02, 2015
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RvengefuLobster: Since I'm new to the thread, I was wondering if any of this is in a playable state?

If it is, I'd love to try it!
No. Not yet. Just the music system is "playable". Ship AI, control and goals are still being built.
I am having more problems with real life duties than with the game itself, though.

However I have found some roadblocks on the game that I will comment now that you ask. :D

- Physics:
X-Wing is quite, let's say, loose with physics. I have been playing X-Wing Collector's CD a lot lately to get as many details about the implementation. I noticed that AI ships can happily fly thru other ships without getting damaged.
I was quite proud of the code I wrote that makes all ships cleverly avoid colliding with each other if they are in danger of doing so. Now I see that in the original game, even when ships seem to have some will to avoid colliding (try to make one of your wingmen collide against a freigther when they fly in formation with you; you can't!), some other times they will just glitch thru other ships with no problems. In particular, I have noticed that ships in process of docking other ships, or when attacking other ships, they will fly thru their targets without receiving any damage.

- Flight group/Ship duality:
I am still not at ease with the modelling I have made of AI behaviors. Some times it feels logical that it is an entire flightgroup that has a particular behavior. In some other cases, it is individual ships where behaviors feel more natural.
For example, FG Alpha (that has order "Attack Enemies", and Primary Target is CON Xi, and Secondary Target is X-W Red) might attack FG Red. Then the whole FG Alpha will move in formation towards Red as a single unit. (You can see this much clearer in TIE Fighter's map. Sometimes FG are shown as single icons when acting as a single unit).
Then soon after, the FG seems to divide in smaller components, the ships, and every ship starts acting more or less independently. For example, Alpha 2 and 3 focus on FG Red 1, that is attacking Alpha 1, that in turn is attacking container Xi because it is one of it's objectives. (In TIE Fighter's map, now there is an icon for every member of FG Alpha).
Guessing how this exactly works is great part of the work I have, because if I don't get it right, it won't matter how well the ship will control or how good the models look. It won't feel like X-Wing. Then, I end reaching many dead-ends, when I realize that AI in X-Wing doesn't really behave like what I just programmed.


I hope to have something playable before May, because I will leave for a several weeks trip then and I won't be able to work at all on the engine until almost June. So, stay tuned. :)
Posted March 04, 2015
Azrapse -

Thank you for your response to my questions.

As for the issues with the A-wings and TIE Interceptors, a suitable work-a-round for the alternate missions (I guess the Mission C option if you were to consider it), would be to use the R-22 Spearheads (they are close to the A-wings, but are based of the Ralph McQuarrie concept art which sometimes serve as the basis for retcons, such as the Z-95 Headhunter designs and Victory-class Star Destroyers). The TIE Interceptor could be replaced by the TIE Vanguard (which fit one of the Interceptor's profiles as a recon craft). Though these would have to come in much later and probably need to be added in by modders after models and textures have been created (these ships don't exist in any of the X-wing series games, so there aren't any temp retail craft).

My apologies for beating a dead horse on that note. It sounds to be a very promising and ambitious project!

One last thing of note, Unity 5 just came out, and Unreal Engine 4 had gone free (though read the fine print on both if you plan on using either of these for development concerning royalties).

Thanks once again!
Posted March 06, 2015
Be wary of Unity 5. I updated mine and had my x-wing thing loaded up and converted and they have changed things. The thing that broke mine was to do with mesh colliders that are triggers now having to be convex or something. The radar code I was using doesn't work exactly as it did before either.
You may not use those, but there may be other things that break in the conversion.
If you go to unity 5, back up your entire project so it can still be opened with whatever version you are using at the moment.
Posted March 08, 2015
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Azrapse: Hi, all X-Wing fans.

I'm a X-Wing enthusiast and hobbyist game developer.
After trying to find the perfect X-Wing edition and realizing that the closest one to perfection is virtually lost to us (the 1996 Mac PowerPC edition cannot be run at a decent speed on modern x86_64 machines), I started looking for the best way to improve X-Wing to get the best of all the editions.

There is the option of importing X-Wing mission to XvT or XWA, and it has been done already before.
However I have found this approach subject to many compromises:
- You lose the setting context of the game (Ackbar or Dodonna talking to you, the concourse music and animations, Tour of Duty roll texts missing, etc). Playing the campaigns in these games feels almost selecting an entry on a list and hitting Launch. Quite immersion breaking.
- Missions must be reworked because of the different simulation rules in these newer games.
- XvT and XWA are old games by now anyway. In the end we are importing the missions to a 14 years old game engine (18 in the case of XvT) that doesn't work very well without extensive modding. Modding itself involves a lot of hexediting in these games, as of course, they are closed-source and not mod-friendly.

And above everything else, that would require you to own another game. GoG doesn't even sell those games right now. And buying them off Amazon (or even pirating them) still has a lot of problems when installing them on modern systems because of the old DRMs or 16Bit installers they had.

So instead, I propose to build a remake of the fligt engine, to start with, that reads the original XWing resources (music, graphics, missions) in your GoG XWing game folder, and uses them to play the mission, allowing for modern resolutions, input methods, and even usability improvements that were later added to TIE Fighter and XvT.

The task is complex but not impossible. It's not at all that hard considering that I'm using Unity3D for the framework and most of the resource file formats have been described in the past. Also, there exist many 3D models created and freely available for most of the ships in the game. The XWAU project has good material, but we aren't restricted to use XWA OPT model files. Or even better if we don't.

I chose the name XWVM inspired on ScummVM because:
- It will be a free utility that includes no copyrighted material.
- You need to own the orginal game, encouraging sales in GoG or other media.
- I will be multiplatform, as Unity3D targets Windows, Mac, Linux and even Android and iOS.
- It will make use of the original resources, but some improvements can be added where it makes sense.

Also, unless I'm horribly mistaken, I believe ScummVM is open source project and we could reuse some of their work to implement some systems in this one, for example, all concerning the iMuse system.

Some improvements I have been thinking on/have done already:
- Of course, any resolution and screen aspect ratio. That comes for free with the framework.
- Mouse input support, both in X-Wing DOS fashion (absolute mouse movement), and in Freelancer fashion (relative with dead zone).
- Joystick support with ability to map any number of buttons and axes.
- Other kind of input support? Touch screen support for cockpit control toggles (ELS system, throttle, shield angling, power transfer, etc).
- Remove roll/pitch/yaw limitations when flying in particular directions (in special, when going "up" and "down" the vertical axis)
- Retrofit X-Wing with TIE Fighter's and XvT targeting improvements. That is, holographic model of the targeted ship on the cockpit monitor, along with basic stats, cargo and directional indicator. Maybe also the target information screen (Z key in TIE fighter) either as a different screen/window, or integrated into the monitor.
- Goal completion list.
- In-flight voice hints for events and status of critical crafts ("Message from mission critical craft: Their hull is damaged!")
- Directional hits for events and important craft. An arrow-like icon on the border of the screen pointing on the direction of some important craft, or the selected target.
- Virtual cockpit a la XvT/XWA.
- Choice between original cockpit interiors a la XW/TF/XvT or 3D interior like in XWA.
- Choice between original concourse navigation a la XW/TF/XWA or a 3D concourse in the style of the base in XCOM.
- Optional mission extending patches: Little editable files that apply extensions to original X-Wing missions, like in-flight messages (possible with voice), rebalancing passes, enable hangars in allied spaceships where to get repaired or refilled during battle, etc, in order to make X-Wing missions as rich as TIE Fighter's ones without having to rebuild them from scratch. Also making the game more accessible for today's audiences.
- Cooperative play: Up to 3 players can join another and select a ship on his flight group or another allied flight group to attempt some hard mission together. Deaths aren't permanent for coop players. Progression is recorded for all involved players.
- Online leader boards with hiscores.

What is your opinion/interest on something like this?
Yes please I'm begging for an upgraded version of the X-Wing game.

Question: Any ability to allow for triple screen resolution? I can't imagine the whole cockpit feel for an X-Wing if it could be similar to my racing sim setup.
Posted March 10, 2015
Sorry for the delay on the response, but for some reason I cannot get this forum to notify me on new posts... It's rather annoying...

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amajewski1983: As for the issues with the A-wings and TIE Interceptors, a suitable work-a-round for the alternate missions (I guess the Mission C option if you were to consider it), would be to use the R-22 Spearheads (they are close to the A-wings, but are based of the Ralph McQuarrie concept art which sometimes serve as the basis for retcons, such as the Z-95 Headhunter designs and Victory-class Star Destroyers). The TIE Interceptor could be replaced by the TIE Vanguard (which fit one of the Interceptor's profiles as a recon craft). Though these would have to come in much later and probably need to be added in by modders after models and textures have been created (these ships don't exist in any of the X-wing series games, so there aren't any temp retail craft).
I am totally in for replacing ships in a "Canon-friendly" optional mode. We can probably find replacements for the ships if we need to. But my main concern is actually two different points.

- Availability: We would need someone to make the models for those ships, if we cannot reuse them from somewhere else. Just in case something goes totally wrong with my spare time, I prefer noone to start that work until I have something playable. This is belonging more to a polishing pass on the game, rather than to this early phase.

- Purpose: We can replace the A-W with an R22. The problem is that those two ships are virtually indistinguishable from each other. An R22 is just the concept art for an A-W. In fact, the wiki even comments that all pilots were informally calling the R22 "the A-Wings" to go on with the trend of nick naming their current T65 as "X-Wings" and their BTL-A4 as "Y-Wings". Then, Dodonna designs the RZ-1, and it's given the "A-Wing" nickname in an "official" way. In the end, we could say, that they had the A-Wing all the time. At the beginning, it was R22s, afterwards, they were RZ-1s, but they were always "A-Wings".

Maybe you are familiar with the Fantasy Flight Games' "X-Wing Miniature Game". There, they solve this problem in a somewhat different, and simpler way. Instead of distinguishing between R22 and RZ1, they call them A-Wing Prototype and A-Wing. This is not so wrong. In any case, they have basically the same stats. And we need the R22s to have the same stats as the RZ1, otherwise, it will break many missions in the game.

To actually make them look a little bit different, we could have the R22 look slightly different inside the cockpit; with the instruments arranged differently, maybe in a worse or more inconvenient way, then have it later replaced and improved to the familiar A-Wing layout when the RZ-1 is deployed. Or maybe other minor stat changes, like acceleration, turn speed, shield or laser recovery speed, etc.

Much different is the case with the TIE Interceptor.
The wiki implies that it was deployed 1 year before the battle of Yavin to counter the X-Wing, that triggered, in turn, the development of the A-Wing to counter the T/I.
Do we have a time frame on when does TOD 1 happen? If I don't remember wrong, there weren't so many TIE Interceptors in TOD 1, and they start appearing more often from TOD 2 and on. We could go the easy way and call them TIE Prototypes, or reuse the "Advanced TIE" moniker as a mysterious new TIE of which the player knows nothing during its first appearances.
The TIE Vanguard has a totally different weapon loadout, and I don't think it would work very well in order to replace the T/I.
The TIE Advanced x1 (the one that appears in X-Wing), was the seed of many other TIEs that came afterwards, including the TIE Interceptor, the TIE Avenger (TIE-Advanced in the X-Wing series of games), and even the TIE Defender. I guess we could reuse the TIE Advanced x1 model and re-stat it so that it matches a T/I (4 laser cannons, no shields, lower top speed). I think that would be the closest to the canon, and also the easiest solution. What about that?
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MjrParts: If you go to unity 5, back up your entire project so it can still be opened with whatever version you are using at the moment.
I have upgraded to unity 5 already and everything seems to be okay. It's quite convenient that the Personal edition now includes all features. I spent the weekend programming the targeting computer screen, and the Render To Texture feature was quite handy for making the targetted ship be displayed on the targeting computer's monitor on 3D space (as it will be used for the cockpits instruments).
I know that I shouldn't spend time on this, when there are more important stuff going on, but I have been playing around with shaders to make the targetted ships look more like they did in the original X-Wing.
I mean, when you target a ship in the original game, you don't get the nice 3D textured model as in TIE-Fighter and later, but you get like a static schematics view of it, right? Well. I am testing with the idea of displaying a 3D model like in TIE Fighter, but with the looks of the schematics in X-Wing. I think it can make it outstand from TIE Fighter and make Rebel fighters look like they use more obsolete technology than the Imperial ones. And it makes sense to be so.
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ncasolobp: Question: Any ability to allow for triple screen resolution? I can't imagine the whole cockpit feel for an X-Wing if it could be similar to my racing sim setup.
I would be surprised if I couldn't do this with Unity really easy. I can select any aspect ratio, and the resolution and FOV seems to be dead-simple to change. If this supports VR headsets like Rift and Google Cardboard, why not?
Post edited March 10, 2015 by Azrapse
Posted March 24, 2015
Lol I read your post, and realized you switched to Unity 5. I can't delete this post now. Stupid me.
Post edited March 24, 2015 by Altureus
Posted March 24, 2015
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Altureus: Lol I read your post, and realized you switched to Unity 5. I can't delete this post now. Stupid me.
I am so glad that Unity 5 came out. It updated the project with no problems and now I have access to all the "pro" features without having to spend hundreds of dollars on it.
I plan to use the new toys it comes with as soon as I can. The new AudioMixers could be really nice for our iMuse implementation.
The render-to-texture and camera postprocessing effects are already in use for the targetting computer.
I am creating a 3D UI for the cockpit. This means that the instruments wont be a 2D layer placed on top of the 3D action, but something more like an actual fligh sim looks like.
When something more of the AI is working, maybe I will pick up Sketchup and sketc a Y-Wing 3D cockpit to use in the test "Rescue Ackbar" mission.
I have zero interest on using the 3D cockpits from the XWAU project. Instead, I prefer creating 3D versions of the orginal X-Wing game cockpit layouts.

And the new physical could make the ships look much cooler than they look in the XWA engine. I'm no shader expert, so I probably let someone else with more knowledge tweak with the models and shaders.

By the way, I have created a repository with the code in BitBucket. It doesn't have the latest code yet, because I am working locally most of the time. When I have something playable, I will share it so that other people can mess with it if they wish to lend a hand.
Posted March 25, 2015
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Altureus: Lol I read your post, and realized you switched to Unity 5. I can't delete this post now. Stupid me.
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Azrapse: I am so glad that Unity 5 came out. It updated the project with no problems and now I have access to all the "pro" features without having to spend hundreds of dollars on it.
I plan to use the new toys it comes with as soon as I can. The new AudioMixers could be really nice for our iMuse implementation.
The render-to-texture and camera postprocessing effects are already in use for the targetting computer.
I am creating a 3D UI for the cockpit. This means that the instruments wont be a 2D layer placed on top of the 3D action, but something more like an actual fligh sim looks like.
When something more of the AI is working, maybe I will pick up Sketchup and sketc a Y-Wing 3D cockpit to use in the test "Rescue Ackbar" mission.
I have zero interest on using the 3D cockpits from the XWAU project. Instead, I prefer creating 3D versions of the orginal X-Wing game cockpit layouts.

And the new physical could make the ships look much cooler than they look in the XWA engine. I'm no shader expert, so I probably let someone else with more knowledge tweak with the models and shaders.

By the way, I have created a repository with the code in BitBucket. It doesn't have the latest code yet, because I am working locally most of the time. When I have something playable, I will share it so that other people can mess with it if they wish to lend a hand.
Awesome! Why not Github? Is bitbucket better? I guess I'm just more aware of Github. I know a few people who are good with the shaders and 3D stuff if you need help, I'm sure they'd be willing to help out. I'm a part of the Star Wars Battlecry team responsible for voiceovers and sound, and sometimes music but it looks like Laserschwart has taken care of that already. Anyway, that's where the majority of my contacts are from.
Post edited March 25, 2015 by Altureus
Posted March 25, 2015
I've been following BattleCry for some time now. It looks and sounds promising. I saw the screenhots of Cloud City today. :)
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This is my favourite topic
Community
Star Wars™: X-Wing and TIE Fighter seriesXWVM - Any interest?(1272 posts)(1272 posts)
(1272 posts)