I'm in favor of the extra displays as well!

I'm an ardent traditionalist, so I expect to play without the screens, but I don't hate them or anything: I really, really appreciate that effort went into making them look part of the cockpit rather than having a floating HUD like in X-Wing Alliance. I really hated X-Wing Alliance---took all the joy out of flying as a rebel.

The ideal outcome for me would be an ability to make XWVM mechanically exactly like X-Wing for DOS, except with the addition of TIE Fighter-style target boxes.

I started a poll in the Facebook group, for those that would like to vote on this subject.

I also did that, all the time.
I remmeber my start of mission ritual was to press the L, G, D, K keys. That opened the Message Log panel, the Goal tracker panel, the Damage assesment panel and the Score panel.
The score panel was only because the last opened panel always got a bright highlighted border that obstructed vision a bit, and the Score panel was usually tiny and unobtrusive, to it was there just to get the hightlighted border. :D

Yeah, and replaying the campaigns recently I did the message log display too since the mission-specific comm chatter isn't voice-acted, it's been quite a departure from the Tie Fighter campaign I had finished replaying shortly before, damn stingy Lucasarts, couldn't they get a couple of people to read the lines for the campaign? :(

Edit: ignore the below, it refers to the original game instead of XvT.

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Original reply:
Having been looking at this area recently, I think I know why.

To write the dialogue after the fact can be a time consuming task, plus there is the time involved in going back and re-editing every mission to then use the new lines of dialogue, and setting and testing the appropriate triggers.

That said, not to worry, I think we should be able to address this issue in due course... :-)

You mean that in XvT the written lines and the spoken dialogue had different triggers that had to work in unison?
Weird, one might think that after the extensive voice acting of the Tie Fighter cd rom (that has been partially reused for the tutorials of XvT) they would have used a more streamlined system.

X-wing fortunately didn't have any custom scripted lines during missions apart from the "mission accomplished" blurb.

I just realised that I misread what you were talking about and got mixed up - I thought you were talking about the original X-Wing, but now I realise you meant XvT - doh, sorry!

I seem to remember (and am happy to be corrected), that the dialogue triggers in XvT are reasonably similar to TIE Fighter, at least where they exist.

As you say, in the original game, there were no dialogue messages at all, except for up to 3 messages that repeat when a mission is completed. This creates a very pure experience, but can also be a bit frustrating as it makes it harder to track what's going on with the mission. Audio messages, even generic "mission-critical craft under attack" messages, provide very useful player feedback. Between this and the game's refusal to display the exact victory conditions, it can be a difficult experience at times.

There is an effort underway to script the original TODs and historical missions in a manner similar to the later games, as a first step to a potential future (and optional) enhancement for the original game.

IIRC some of the generic messages were voiced in the CD version of X-wing, though perhaps not the ones regarding critical mission crafts.

Clearer victory conditions will be a great improvement for X-wing, it's one of the things I think aged worse of that game, Tie Fighter is leaps and bounds better.

I am in the process of integrating those voice messages into XWVM at the moment.
There are very few of them. Not even close to the amount that TIE Fighter had.
There are a couple of variations that weren't actually used in the game. I think there is a "Form up!" and a "You have one on your tail!" that I don't remember ever hearing before while playing the game.
There is also a "Help me!" that I don't think it was ever used either. It sounds like it was something your wingmen should have said when under attack. Perhaps it became too spammy and they removed it.

Also, there are a "Red leader..." and a "Red two..." couple of clips that seem to serve as starting of a sentence that says something else. Something like "Red two... incoming missile", or "Red two... you have one on your tail!".
There aren't versions for 3, 4 or later numbers, so I guess the devs restricted themselves to the player being either the first or the second ship in any flightgroup.

There aren't any "update" messages like there were in TIE Fighter. No lines like "Message from mission critical craft... they are under starfighter attack".
The only ones that update the player about what is going on are the "docking operation complete", "target disabled", "target repaired", "target destroyed" and "target captured".

About the victory conditions, we already display them in the left monitor. What else would you like added or changed to make them clearer?

I remember these ones clearly.


That was just me using the conditional instead of the future, I'll edit it right away.

Our MajorParts has finished the next ship model to join our ranks. This awesome TIE Interceptor!

Excellent!

Looks great! I'm honestly not sure if I'm more eager to play with the new shiny improved models or the retro X-Wing style versions. Both will be fun.