I'll second that. I liked the ability to assign specific pilots for the mission (I made up a whole bunch of characters that I used throughout the whole campaign) and missed that functionality in later games. This seems like a nice way to re-implement it.

I think there may be a way to use VR and a keyboard at the same time:
Refitting the keyboard with Braille stickers and learn to read Braille so you could easily find the right key without seeing it. This way you could use VR with your keyboard while having the benefit of learning a new way of reading.
What do you think?

I think that is quite quite unlikely that someone bothers to learn Braille in order to play a game. :D

But it would certainly be interesting to try out, wouln't it?

I can see the marketing poster now:

New from Disney: Learn Braille with X-Wing!
Now you, too, can become a Jedi (braille) Master with the latest flight simulator! You won't need to switch off your targetting computer, or use The Force to find the keys by completing our comprehensive training - you'll sense their presence! You won't mind being told the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field, because with your accuracy, they'll be so low! Pick up Learn Braille with X-Wing today, it's our only hope (to learn braille)!

:D

On topic, I'm sure I've seen some peripherals in the past which are essentially mini keyboards with 18 keys or thereabouts, which can be mapped as desired, and with a grid-type placement - something like this would probably be suitable for someone wanting to use keyboard-style input when using VR.

That's a funny one. :D

The mini-keyboard sounds interesting to try out.
The question is how it would handle all those controls in X-Wing.
Perhabs if you use a joystick with at least 6 buttons and a hat, that mini-keyboard could handle the most important controls.

I've got a decent HOTAS setup myself - I'm pretty confident I could map all the needed X-Wing controls to the flightstick and throttle. Definitely the way to go if you're doing VR.

Hey there, im kind a new at the forum, however im working in a project.

I would glady join your development team, i mean i would help out if i can.

Hi! I saw your Unity Space Combat project video in YouTube. It is quite good! I think you have nailed the Battlefront 2 space battles gameplay and look.
What else are you attempting to add to that project? Planning also on ground combat, so that ships can land on hangars and the pilot can go out? Or that is beyond your goals?

This XWVM project is to remake X-Wing. The gameplay is quite different from that of Battlefront 2. It is much more focused on simulation and complex missions. Battlefront 2 is closer to the Rogue Squadron games, that were more arcade and action packed.

In any case, if you want to contribute, you are welcome.
I am the lead programmer, and I am stil gathering myself after a long trip to go back to 100% productivity mode. :) I am currently debugging some problem I introduced in the AI, but I hope to have it done this weekend.

We usually update this forum with posts about our latest progresses, and are all the time suggesting behaviours for the AI, features to improve over the old X-Wing (while retaining its spirit), etc.
Feel free to contribute with whatever you wish. :)

Fun what if post: Don't take this too seriously.

During my vacation, I have been playing a lot of X-Wing Miniatures game with friends and family.
It is actually that wargame that I started playing a couple years ago what rekindled my love for the old X-Wing DOS game, and made me start this whole project.

For those of you that don't know it, it is basically X-Wing vs TIE Fighter dogfight, but with miniatures and dice. Very tactical and, for what matters to this forum, is following both the old Expanded Universe and currently the new canon since Disney's acquisition. There is also one based on capital ship battles called Armada.

Many of the ships that appeared in X-Wing and TIE Fighter, as well as other games like Rebel Assault, Rogue Squadron, Galactic Battlegrounds, Star Wars Rebellion, Empire at War..., have been introduced to that board game. However, now that Lucasfilm has discarded most of the EU and is creating new canon ships to replace old EU ones, the game is favoring the new canon over the old EU.

The X-Wing computer game series is firmly established in the old EU. Many ships that in the games appear all the time, don't really appear anywhere else, or in the new canon, have been replaced by others.
Some examples come to my mind:

- Stormtrooper transport: This ship appears nowhere else than in the X-Wing games. In the cannon, the Empire uses the Lambda Shuttle or the Sentinel Shuttle to deploy troops (let's ignore the First Order here, as it is not in the same time frame). In the videogames, the rebels used the imperial Lambda Shuttle or the stormtrooper transport too. The rebels have not been seen deploying troops in the Original Trilogy, but it seems that in the Rogue One movie that will be on theaters next December, they use a ship called U-Wing for that.
- Corellian corvettes: The rebels have been using Corellian corvettes in the movies since always, and so they do in the new canon Rebels animated series. However, in the X-Wing videogames the Empire also used these ships, even when they didn't in the canon. It seems that the canon corvette for the Empire is this one, first introduced in the miniature game I mentioned above.
- Nebulon-B Frigates: Same situation, the rebels used these frigates in the canon, but the Empire didn't. However the Empire uses them a lot in the X-Wing videogames. It seems that the canon replacement for imperial frigates are the Imperial Light Cruisers.

I will stop here, because we can go on and on.
My point?
Should we add some "Canon mode" to the remake where old non-canon ships are replaced by canon ones?
I know this involves a lot of things, even beyond the matter of the models and graphics, the balancing of the game.
But I just want to test the waters here. What is your stance about this? Positive, negative, neutral?

In short, I'm positive towards this, as a secondary goal (as soon as I wrote that, all I could hear in my head was congratulations Alpha 1, secondary mission objectives completed, the emperor will be pleased...)

I'm quite fond of the Imperial cruiser design as heavily featured in Rebels - it shows firsthand what some of the leftover hardware and designs from the Clone Wars is actually used for, and it has nice echoes of the Star Destroyer without being as imposing or too derivative.

From an EU perspective, I was always comfortable with both the Empire and Rebels using Nebulon-B's, since it made sense that the Rebels would have a very limited ship manufacturing capability (not much outside of Mon Calamari, as I understand it), so most of the stuff they use would be stolen / acquired from defecting crews, etc.

Some considerations with having a toggleable option to change the craft:-

- Defining the ships to be roughly 1:1 in capabilities would not be terribly difficult - e.g. mapping U-Wing to Stormtrooper Transport; Imperial cruiser to Nebulon B; etc. From this perspective, balance wouldn't be affected much, if at all (make the number of gun emplacements equal, hull and shield strength equal, etc...)
- I expect changing the icons in briefings would be straightforward. However, changing the briefing text and voiceovers would be much more difficult, which would leave some options: leave the briefings untouched and have the setting apply in-mission only; replace only the briefing icons and any easy-to-replace labels as well as in-mission, this would be a halfway option that would not be entirely consistent, but would be coherent to experienced players; or advanced reworking of the mission briefings to change text and labels in the briefing as well - this would be the comprehensive option, although voiceovers might still refer to the EU ship class instead of the canon one... I don't see a way around that other than to re-record the dialog, which is a bigger task...
- I've not looked too closely at it, but I suspect that some ship scales will be sufficiently different to require checking of missions to make sure there aren't unintended collisions - particularly thinking of cases where the Imperial Cruiser is a lot wider than a Nebulon-B, for example. If there are waypoints bringing ships closer together, they might collide now but only pass close by in vanilla. From memory, I think this affects X-Wing less, but I know that it would be a much bigger issue for something like Tie Fighter, where later missions have capital ships fly very closely by each other (in some cases colliding already by accident!)

--
In unrelated news, I discovered an issue when building my campaign surrounding triggers - specifically, that the 'arrive x seconds after <ship> attacked' seems to be a bit bugged - in the first mission of the campaign, merely flying close by to the freighters summons Imperial reinforcements (instead of the intention, which is that it should only be if the freighters are actually attacked) - I don't yet know if this is an X-Ed bug or an X-Wing bug, but it seems to be reproducable in the 1993 and 1998 editions.

I would personally be opposed to the idea of replacing X-Wing's ships with "canon" ones. Seems like that energy could be better spent elsewhere, especially since both sides using several of the same ships made a lot of sense to me. The Rebels seem like just the type of group who would acquire most of their ships by stealing them or from defections. A couple missions even focus on this very concept - starting in the very first mission of the game.

Not to mention, of course, that as a remake of X-Wing, it only seems proper to keep it X-Wing - I'm not too keen on seeing what a project called "Disney's Star Wars: X-Wing" would look like.

You have a point, but then you could also say that the, I don't know..., the Mon Calamari senator probably traveled on a Mon Calamari cruiser, and so, Mon Calamari cruisers were imperial.

I was referring to the ships in the Imperial Navy, as opposed to civilian ships, even when those civilians worked at some point for the Empire.

It'd be cool as a mod, and to have enough modding capability to support that would be nice.