You can find a PDF Mission Designer Guide written by Christian Schock . And [url=http://www.rebelsquadrons.org/xwing/tools]Rebel Squadrons has links to a whole bunch of XW tools/editors along with documentation. Hope that helps!

PS: Dropped by from the XWAUP forums. :)

Thank you! That definitely helps point me in the right direction. While I definitely realize I can get access to all the mission info via the old mission editors, I have a crazy idea to come up with a method to automatically parse .xwi and .brf files and spit them out as .fs2, ready to be opened in FRED and modified for our engine. It's the curse of being an engineer - why do by hand what I can automate? :D

While I think adding new ships into XWVM is beyond the scope of its current phase (ie. replicating the vanilla XW gameplay while inserting basic additions here and there), I do feel though that a lack of ship diversity makes X-Wing feel all the more dated. While I understand why the original XW devs had to be thrifty in their ship selection back in 1993, having the Rebels and Imps share everything from Lambda Shuttles on up to Nebulon-B Frigates is a bit silly in the current SW canon. And let's not forget how a double-decker freighter passed for a repair dock back in the day.

Therefore, although I'd rather see the XWVM crew focus on TIE Fighter once their work on XW is complete, I do think it would be neat if custom ships could be added into XWVM without much fuss. That way, other dedicated fans can take it upon themselves to increase the XW ship variety and rework the new ships into the vanilla missions. The way I see it, ensuring that the Rebels, Imps, and Neutrals each have a shuttle/transport/freighter/corvette/frigate type of their own should be more than enough. If there's interest, I can compile a list of era-appropriate ships and stations to include in such a future project.

PS: Thanks to Rogue One, a good chunk of the story behind XW Tour of Duties 2 and 3 no longer fits within the official SW cannon. Updating XW to fit the current cannon would be neato, but admittedly, also far beyond the scope of the current XWVM project. In fact, a faithful-to-cannon remastering of XW probably won't even be feasible until the XWA phase is finished (I'd eloborate more, but I don't want to spoil RO). Maybe in several years though..... :P

Wasn't there a running joke in the EU among Empire officers, complaining that they were always destroying their own stuff (because the Rebel stuff was mostly stolen?)

The lack of ship diversity in the original game is difficult to deal with - I put together a new campaign earlier on in the year, and had to constantly rewrite and scale down my ideas to fit the very limited options available. I ended up shelving the planned full-scale campaign on the basis that it was too difficult to do something truly original (even compared to the vanilla first game) with the restrictions in place.

It's just my opinion, but I don't think those objectives are mutually exclusive. The TIE Fighter shipset is already much, much larger than X-Wing's - this is the first time you start to get stuff like platforms, different container types, transport ships (including YT-1300s), civilian ships, and so on. Even sitting and clicking through the Tech Library in TIE Fighter can take a while!
If/when that set was available in XWVM, it opens up a lot of options for mission designers.

Still, having an option to have stuff like U-Wings would be cool.

Yep, the original X-Wing campaign is very much Legends material these days - even various aspects around A-Wings and B-Wings have already been contradicted by the events of Star Wars Rebels.

Modifying the original X-Wing to fit the current canon would be a huge project on its own. If I was more inclined to do a re-write on that scale (writing mission dialogue for the full original game is plenty for me right now, though), I'd probably build the structure and story in XvT or XWA first, and port it over later (either directly or by re-creating) for actual gameplay balancing.

There was a discussion a few months ago in this forum about having a "canon mode" for the game, where every faction would get their own ships based on the new "Disney canon".
For example, the Empire would have Acclamators instead of frigates, Gozantis instead of freighters, and Raiders instead of corvettes. They are not 100% equivalent, but it could work.

Also, as much as I hate the idea of it, it doesn't seem like the Assault Gunboat is coming to the new canon, so it would have to be replaced with something else like TIE Advanced v1 prototypes, TIE Strikers, or who knows.

At the same time, the Rebels shouldn't be using so many stormtropper transports or imperial shuttles. Instead of the shuttles, they could have U-wings.
Instead of the bulk freighters, they could use GR-75 medium transports. And so on.

Obviously, the whole timeline is altered. Now the rebels have A-wings and B-wings before they even have X-wings, while in the old canon it was the other way. Tour of Duty V could, perhaps, still be called B-Wing, because the Alliance had only a few Blade-wing prototypes until then.
At least, now it makes sense that rebels get the A-wing from the beginning, so the new canon has kind of fixed that anachronism in X-Wing.

All in all, this can be done once we enable the addition of extra ships and missions. Because at some point we are including extensions to current missions (for adding in-flight dialogs), we could also use these extension files for replacing ships in existing missions for other, canonical ones.

Ah, interesting. Being the nitpicky Fleet Junkie that I am, I'd say that the [url=Gladiator-class Star Destroyer]http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gladiator-class_Star_Destroyer[/url] is a better fit for the Imp frigate role than the Acclamator, but that's a debate for another time. I should go back through the thread when I have some free time and see what was mentioned the last go-around.

PS: Even back in the old EU, the Assault Gunboat hardly got any love outside the X-Wing games (even though I love the Gunboat's design). Still though, I feel the Gunboat (along with the Missile Boat) will appear in FFG's miniatures game one of these days, given the love they've given to past EU ships so far.

The Gladiator-class is really rare. In fact, it only appears on the Droids cartoon from the 1980's, and in miniature game Armada. The Acclamator-class is much more widespread, appearing on Episode II and III, Clone Wars, and Rebels, if I am not mistaken. You think the Acclamator is weaker or stronger than the Nebulon-B?

True, the Acclamator is a ship that appears relatively frequently in more noteworthy SW material. However, I must also emphasize that Acclamators in those works are always used as planetary assault ships that ferry entire army battalions into combat zones. They were certainly not intended to carry out convoy escort duties like the Neb-B... or any fleet combat roles for that matter.

As for comparing the Acclamator to the Nebulon-B, Acclamators are considerably stronger at 12 quad turbolaster turrets and 24 laser cannons. Neb-Bs meanwhile only have 12 turbolaser cannons and 12 laser cannons. Acclamators are also more than twice as long and six times as wide as Neb-Bs.

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The larger point I want to make though is that if your team (or another group) wants to provide a remastered version of XW incorporating greater ship variety for each faction, sure it'd be nice to include new ships based on how visible they are in the Disney cannon..... but other considerations ought to be used as well. :)

Our main goal is to update X-Wing original assortment of ships. But we are going to do it in a way so that everyone can, afterwards, easily add new ships. There will be no need to replace ships, or meddle with binary files. So our personal opinion is truly irrelevant. Everyone will be able to add whatever ship they want as long as they build the model and the definition file that describes it.

Roger roger!

In any event, I'll jot down notes in my spare time of craft and other gameplay elements to potentially include in remastered/alternate campaign missions. And once I finally finish playing through all the X-Wing games (which could take a while), I just might start dabbling with a XW custom mission designer. I was always curious about that sort of thing, so perhaps now's as good a time as ever to start learning. :)

I must admit that I have never been such an expert ot telling apart the ISD-I from the ISD-II. Probably there are clear differences that I have not realized.
In any case, it is again a similar case as with the canonical ships. It's mostly cosmetic and really something that could be done by a third party (a modder or group of modders) better than by ourselves.
We need to have a clear set of goals for our team. And our first goal is to bring X-Wing back as it was (with a few upgrades here and there).

After that is done, then we can think on goals beyond, like adding different timelines and alternate shipsets.
But that is really something that doesn't required coding or redesign of the game flight engine, so it's better to leave that task to other enthusiasts, while we focus on stuff that modders cannot do, like adding more features to extend the engine and prepare it to evolve into TIE Fighter, or other game modes that require proper engine redesign and extension.

I've been meaning to start work on something just like this but it looks like you beat me to it. I'd love to help out in any way that I can (geometry, textures, ui graphics, Star Wars research, etc.) - I've spent a lot of time in the past researching and reconstructing the original filming miniatures in 3D, part for part (can't seem to attach images, sorry), and some of that work might be useful here. Let's chat.

They show up on FB just fine and are very impressive!

Loved the video, lovely to see the old game nicely tarted up and yet retaining the wonderful iMuse music. (I love JW music but the CD tracks on the Windows versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter really killed those versions for me)

Looking forward to hopefully one day trying this out.