And several downvotes! You aren't anyone until someone hates you in the Internet. :D

Heads up. XWVM now has its own ModDB-page:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/xwvm

Funny thing is that I didn't want to give it any publicity either.
I uploaded the demo video to YouTube to share it here. Then it basically took off by itself and ended in a lot of online magazines, especially European ones.
Certainly, I didn't have any interest on poking sleeping dragons.

As I have a bit of time over the holidays, I downloaded the latest version of Unity to start playing around with it - not sure I'd be able to build anything in it for a while, but it's a start!

If there is anything else that I could possibly help with, though, please do let me know.

In the meantime: Merry Christmas to all, and if you haven't seen it already, please enjoy Chewbacca singing this Christmas classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd79mpzBnJ4

Merry christmas!
Do you have access to the repo to build it?

I've not got access yet - if you can ping me the details I'll try and pull and build tomorrow.

Edit:
Just as a side note, not sure if people have seen this yet (sorry if it's already been discussed and I missed it - I don't game on consoles, and it wasn't on the PC sadly :'( ) - the Rogue One VR concept mission for Battlefront.
While very arcade-y, it's obviously quite well done and could perhaps be an interesting source of inspiration? Certainly, observing their mission structure has been giving me ideas for my next full-scape campaign concept, to be built at some point in the future once XWVM has matured (I've also made some additions to the wishlist Goggle Doc accordingly ;) )

I'm also interested in building it and possibly contributing at some point. I've played around a bit with Unity. Are there any additional dependencies at this time?

We are obviously missing the Christmas release. It didn't help that I traveled to visit the family during that time.
There are a few features that would better get fixed before doing a release, because the game is currently in a really rough state. It totally is a pre-alpha build, and I cannot stress that enough.
It's a proof of concept, basically.
I say this because most comments in those websites complained about it looking bad, missing features, or not being everything they expected.

About the Rogue One VR mission, I need to say the same I say when people compare or expect XWVM to be much like the Rogue Squadron games, or the Battlefront games: XWVM is X-Wing, and X-Wing isn't at all like that.

The Rogue One VR video looks super cool, but it is basically a hybrid between the Battlefront ship combat mixed with the on-rails gameplay of the old Rebel Assault games.
Whoever is expecting XWVM to be like that is in for a huge disappointment. Neither we have the resources and the team of animators, voice talents, and artists to gather such visual fidelity, nor the game will be as approachable as those other games. X-Wing was a game about mastering the ship controls, then mastering ship-to-ship combat, then mastering mission events to react to the battlefield and protect your critical goals.
Battlefront is nothing like that. It's just aim and shoot at stuff. The game even corrects your shooting aim to hit the enemies!

Very true - it's very much at the 'Arcade' end of the spectrum, unlike X-Wing which is at the opposite - simulation - end. I also agree that drawing the comparison can be a bit dangerous as it could set the wrong expectations, since they are very different by nature -- sorry about that, I should have been clearer about the specific elements I was comparing.

The reason I brought it up was to draw attention to the cockpit design, just in case there were any elements which might be of interest when implementing our own - obviously the front part is going to be very different due to the instruments involved, but it's interesting to see what they've done with the rest (obviously they've gone for function over form with the buttons they've included - only a small number of buttons and tied to the very small set of in-game actions -- X-Wing would probably need a full virtual keyboard by comparison!).

I also thought it was interesting to see the VR approach with free movement as opposed to rails or a static position, as this had been the case the last time I'd tried VR (playing EVE Gunjack via a Rift). I note they chose a floating HUD, but kept it in a static position in the cockpit - a curious decision, that to my mind, acknowledges that whether or not their cockpit model is screen-accurate, it isn't terribly functional (not something that can be said of the original X-Wing series cockpits) - seemingly validating the discussion on this thread some months ago around this very topic.

Enhancing the original X-Wing missions to use in-flight voiceovers would be a full-size project on its own - by my reckoning, it would need a full rewrite and rebuild of the missions to include trigger events for messages, plus most of the dialogue would need to be written from scratch, since the original X-Wing mission format really only allows mission designers to specify up to 3 in-flight messages on mission end -- all in all, a major undertaking and probably best not included in the main XWVM effort?

XWVM is able to read the original X-Wing files, but that doesn't limit it to only read those files.
One secondary goal I have had in mind since the beginning was to "decorate" old missions with extra features, without modifying the original mission files themselves. Initially that would be useful to us for offering translations. But we could do much more.
So to speak, we would have the original .XWI and .BRF files, plus some extra file made by us that adds stuff on top of those.
If I am not mistaken, didn't the team that create the total conversion to XWA already add voiceovers and extra dialogs to X-Wing missions?

About the VR cockpit, we could assign floaty tooltips next to buttons to remind what the are for the most non-descript actions. Very much like in the Rogue One VR video with the floaty-but-static HUD, but making ours contextual.
Or make the floaty tooltips appear or disappear while holding some button in the controller.

For all actions that have a related instrument on the dashboard, we could have the instrument itself as activator for those actions. For example, pressing the E, L or S letters on the dashboard, could toggle the power setting, touching the shield instrument could angle the shield into the direction touched. Pressing the "armed" lights on a weapon could arm that weapon. Pressing it again, could toggle the fire setting. Etc.
For all other actions that don't have a clear related instrument, the player could have a panel of buttons to the left or right, where there could appear tooltips indicating the buttons that give orders to wingmen, or that store targets in memory, etc.

About the arcadey thing, it's just the kind of comments that are coming to YouTube and some web magazines that make me think that people want to shoehorn their preferred gameplay into XWVM, and if they can't, then "it's crap".

I thought that it was mostly a straight-up conversion to XWA - I haven't tried it yet, but poking around the downloaded rar file, it looks like there are inflight messages for the death star missions based on ripped audio from ANH, but I didn't see anything else for the original X-Wing missions (other than the Ackbar/Dodonna briefings as WAVs). FekLeyrTarg could probably confirm if this is the case?

Having a supplementary file for the original missions, specifying the new messages (with links to the appropriate audio files) and triggers, could certainly be a good approach to take, rather than having to make changes to the original files directly (this also helps with the requirement of using the original mission files as a check that the original game is owned).

Given that the actual lines of dialogue do not exist yet (to my knowledge), there would be a task to go through the entire X-Wing mission set and write appropriate mission dialogue to have included. I need to replay the original campaign set anyway, and quite enjoy writing, so I'm happy to take a crack at this in my spare time.

That sounds excellent!

Yes, I imagine there is a lot of that: you've got a generation of people who are probably not very familiar with the simulation genre - let alone X-Wing - given the popularity of the more action-y games like Rogue Squadron, Battlefront, et al. Ultimately, you have your own vision of the project, and should absolutely follow through with that, regardless of what random internet commenters (myself included :-) ) say!

Some of these commenters do not understand that there is a difference between making a version of X-Wing that's more accessible (i.e. optional features like the improved HUD/targetting computer, voiceover messages, inflight goal tracking and display, ...), and an arcade/action game that relies more heavily on scripted events and less realistic game mechanics -- the latter is well-catered for by modern games already.

Your work is awesome. Looking forward to seeing more

No idea how I missed this until today, but I have been hoping for a modern graphical remake of the classic games for ages. The DOS versions of these games (with the dynamic music still working) and XWA were officially the best and some of my still favorite space sims to this day. Keep up the amazing work and I look forward to playing the originals once again but this time, in high graphical beauty or if possible finally, VR. :)

So I sat down last night and wrote some dialogue for our favourite mission, Y-Wing Historical Mission 6, to give an idea of the type of writing and changes I think would be required.

In this example mission, I've broken the speech parts down into two VO characters involved: the captain of shuttle Hasti; and a character I have currently titled "the briefing officer" - in my head, this is a Guy Siner-like character who would have a recurring voice part in a lot of missions (i.e. like the TIE Fighter briefing officer, and also similar to the officer in XWA).

I've tried to keep the feeling of the original games intact; i.e. each individual message is a phrase comprised of one or two sentences. In some cases, there will be a chain of multiple messages which will follow one after the other - e.g. the ones marked as triggered by the mission intro - this would mirror the original series in style.

The Google Doc is linked here - I'll update it as I play through the other missions.