It's May now...?

Yet again, we've managed to go several months without an update. Honestly, every time we celebrate the release of another episode, it gets a little harder to get back to work ;-). Still, once more into the breach...

That's not to say we have not made progress, though. Although things have been all too quiet lately, Standoff continues to make small steps towards completion - and this time, we're really talking about completion, since finishing this episode means finishing Standoff entirely. And about time :-P.

So, what have we been up to this year? Well, since most of the other graphics are done (you won't see much in the way of new ships this episode :-P ), I've been concentrating on pre-rendered cutscenes. Episode 5 has quite a few of them - indeed, even the intro this time will be pre-rendered, as there was no way this particular intro could be created as an in-game cutscene in any reasonable amount of time. This one will be particularly interesting, you'll see... :-)

In the meantime, Quarto, Pierre and Pedro have been working on missions. I'm actually rather disappointed in their progress - Quarto keeps promising me that next update, I won't have any red left on the progress chart, but... well, see, it's still there, next to in-game cutscenes and fiction :-P. Still, there is steady progress. Just, you know, not much of it. So, if you want to see Standoff's Episode 5 out this year, feel free to drop by the forum and let those lazy bastards know what you think about that... :-P

Oh, and since we don't at the moment have too much to post in screenshots, we've finally updated the characters page, adding profiles for the last three cutscene characters - Saxman, Popsicle and Henderson. That's gotta count for something. :-P

Happy new year!

Happy New Year to all wingnuts out there! Yes... yet another year has come and gone, and we are still around and working on Standoff. I remember when me and Quarto used to come up with work schedules that would let us be free of Standoff before 2005! And then in 2006! And then in 2007! Indeed, all of those were reasonable schedules... there was a time when the though of working on Standoff during all of 2005 seemed like a worst-case scenario. And here we are now, January 1st, 2008. The good news is that today we can finally assure ourselves and all of the fans out there that this is the last year of Standoff development. The game will finally be completed sometime during the next 365 days, then you'll all be able to play through it as a finished game! And we'll be able to do something else with our spare time, like, get lives! :-P To celebrate our progress, the sucess of Ep 4's release, and the start of the last year of Standoff development, I've rendered yet another of them pretty WC2 ships as a wallpaper. Go to the downloads section and check out our Rapier, available in literally a dozen different resolutions. I've tried to render this one in a different style than the Sabre from two years ago in hopes that we now have different enough a wallpaper selection to please most wingnuts. Huzzah!

What success?

The success of Ep 4's release, which I mentioned above, is not something I made up during my delusions of grandeur. No sir! It is evidenced by the fact that we've been voted best fan project of the year at the Wing Commander CIC's annual awards, once again! This year we tied with Wing Commander Saga, like in 2003! That's right, 2003 - this is also a sign that we've been taking too long to finish Standoff, but I'm rambling again already... here's our nifty award graphic:

Thanks to everyone who voted! I should point out that the award for this year means more than ever for us, because Standoff went through a period in which it almost died off in 2006... and also because the number of amazing WC fan projects has been steadily growing over the years! Everyone should definitely head over to the CIC right now and check out all of the other contestants... you really don't want to miss out on the new life fans have been breathing into WC!

In other news...

Now for an actual Ep 5 progress report - I know we haven't updated the website in a long time, but this was one of the good silent periods, not one of the bad ones. We have done a fair amount of work on Episode 5, with more than half of our voiceover lines already processed, about a third of our talking head scenes already rendered and ready to be musicized, and three new scoreboard-enabled sim missions (out of a total of 6 which still weren't score enabled in Ep 4) undergoing testing and balancing. So even though we still have a long way to go for our final episode - specially considering it is our final episode, and we will want to perfect the game as much as possible - progress has been steady and at a good pace!

Episode 4 is out!

Well, things were looking real nervous there for a while, but we made it - Episode 4 is out at last. As always, you can download the game from the Wing Commander CIC, or from Boomtown.net... and as always, Boomtown.net will only become available in a few hours, since I have to get them to upload the new file first :-P.

Episode 4 is definitely the biggest, most challenging - and by far the most troublesome - episode we've done so far. Hopefully you'll enjoy it ;-). This release also adds scoreboard functionality to two more simulator missions - that's missions 9 and 10 - for the remaining six missions, stay tuned for Episode 5 :-P.

As always, we've released the current episode in two versions. If you've already got Episodes 1-3, you'll want to download the Episode 4 package, which takes up 82 MB. And if you've missed out on any of the previous episodes, you should download the Episodes 1-4 package. Naturally, the latter package is just a tad bigger, weighing in at 264 MB.

Even closer now... and so much prettier!

As you can tell from the increasing frequency of the updates, things are heating up over here. In fact - fingers crossed - we'll most likely be announcing an imminent (and I really do mean imminent) release date for Episode 4 in the next update.

In the meantime, we have finally selected the new testers that we recently asked for at the CZ. The unlucky (believe me, testing a game with me and Quarto breathing down your neck, constantly demanding more feedback, is not exactly what I'd call a good time ;-) ) pair are Dundradal and QuailPilot. Now, depending on how things go, we may still ask another one or two people to participate as well - after all, if we want to finish both remaining episodes this year, we'll need to step things up quite a bit, and that means more intensive testing, too.

Now, as far as actual progress is concerned, we now (finally!) have all missions on both paths. Those last two missions from the losing path took a while because of the minefields mentioned last update, but it's all working now, and apart from a few briefings, the episode is now only missing music and voiceovers.

...In fact, my to-do list has gotten so short, that I've made three new cockpits in the last few days - the Arrow, the Hornet, and the Broadsword (all of which can be seen in the latest batch of screenshots - in fact, the Arrow cockpit can be seen in two versions, because after I took the first screenshots of it, I went back and added some stuff to the VDU and other displays in the cockpit, to make it less empty). And hey, if I get bored, there may be one or two others, before this episode is done :-).

In other, also very important, news, progress on Pedro's OpenGL patch continues. We uploaded some screenshots showing this patch in action last update... now we've got a few more to show. In particular, these latest shots show off the new starfields, which replace the little random dots WCP/SO used to draw. The result is extraordinary, especially when you combine it with high resolution and anti-aliasing. Just look at that 1280x1024 shot of the Guadalcanal from the Episode 1 intro - it's just plain magnificent.

Close, but not quite there

With just over a month since the last update, we've been able to make quite a significant amount of progress. Episode 4 isn't done yet - we still have some mission tweaking to do, a lot of voiceovers still to be added (a small amount needing to be recorded, first), a lot of cutscene music to be done, and a few FMV scenes (but all the complex ones are done, the remaining few are just the usual talking heads convos). In short, it's highly unlikely that we'll release Episode 4 in August - but, fingers crossed, we should at least get to the point where we can announce a release date we can keep.

Finally, we've added a bunch of new screenshots - nine of them, to be exact. First, there are two shots with the Hakaga (which, if you look closely, has sustained a bit of damage). Then, we have three shots of a minefield - but a real minefield this time, with hundreds and hundreds of mines! And finally, we have four shots from FMV scenes. Enjoy! :-)

A little more progress with voices

I was going to wait with the next update until we had some more significant progress, but I might not have time to update again for a few weeks, what with finals coming up and all, so...

Most important of all, we've managed to re-establish contact with Andi Kravljaca. He's already sent in most of his lines - we still need another four lines from him for Episode 4, and just under half of his lines for Episode 5, but we're obviously much closer now than before :-). We've also received all the remaining lines for both Episodes 4 and 5 for Bradshaw. In the meantime, Tempest reports that he's received a number of lines from other actors with smaller parts. So, once Tempest finds the time to process all these lines, I do believe the voiceovers for both Episodes 4 and 5 may well reach "green" status on the progress page :-).

Apart from voiceovers, I've been continuing work on putting together cutscenes, while Pierre and Quarto continue working on the missions. So yeah, slowly but surely, we're inching towards release. It's still going to be a while, but this year has definitely been more productive for us than the last :-).

Another bit of progress

Just a small update this time, to let you know that we are indeed still making progress. It's only been two weeks since the last update, but there's actually been quite a bit of progress. That's the good news - the bad news, I suppose, is that most of the progress has been on Episode... Five :-P.

Let's start with Episode 4, though. The missions continue to move towards completion at a slow but steady pace. There isn't anything major to report here, but progress is being made.

In the meantime, we continue to add voiceovers into the game. In the case of Episode 4, we currently have almost half of the voiceovers implemented in the game, and a number of others are expected to arrive soon. Voiceovers are also the area in which Episode 5 has moved a big step forward, too - we appear to now have a third, possibly more, of the voiceovers for this episode. It's worth noting that we expect all the Episode 5 voiceovers to be done at the same time as Episode 4 - these days, when we send our actors their lines, we send all their lines through to the end of the game. That's the way we should really have done it right from the start, and it would have saved us a huge, huge portion of problems (fan project leaders, take note!)... but the truth is, it wasn't until just a few months ago that all the remaining Episode 5 scripts were finished, so we couldn't send them out earlier :-P.

In terms of voiceovers, there is also one other minor, but extremely neat bit of progress. We thought about keeping this one secret, but ultimately decided that it might go unnoticed in the game itself - and in addition, by mentioning it on the website, we are able to give public thanks to Marten Davies.

That's right - Marten Davies, the man who used to be the VP of Sales at Origin, and then the Chairman at Digital Anvil, has been kind enough to record a voiceover line as Tolwyn for Standoff! In case some of you are confused as to why we'd seek out him in particular to do this - Marten Davies also played Tolwyn in the WC2 intro. So, Admiral Tolwyn in Standoff is literally the original WC2 Tolwyn :-).

It's really an amazing thing how great and supportive former Origin staff are (and have always been) to the WC community - thanks, guys!

However, apart from progress, we also need to mention a serious problem we're having - also with voiceovers, in fact. For the past two months, we've been unable to get in touch with Andi Kravljaca, the man who plays Commodore Reismann in Standoff. Quarto's emails have bounced with some weird error, and Tempest - although his emails appear to be getting through, have not yielded a response. This is an especially critical problem, because... well, Reismann is the guy you hear in almost every briefing in Standoff, so you can imagine how many lines he has, and how much we'll need to change in the game if it turns out that we can no longer get lines for him :-(. Ironically, the last thing we heard from Andi was that he'd finished recording his lines, and would send them soon... anyway, Andi, if you're reading this, please get in touch with us! We really, really need you!

Limited progress - but still progress

Well, we really did intend to do an update sooner than May - honest :-P.

Anyway, without wasting time on excuses, let's get to the progres. As you can see on the progress page, Episode 4 missions have shifted from yellow to green. I'm still a bit uncertain whether they really deserve green, or if they're more of a greenish yellow, but it's close enough :-P. We still have two missions which haven't been started, and some of the others haven't got proper briefings yet. Most of the missions are at least fairly bug-free, though - and, since the missing missions are only on the losing path, the winning path is already completely play-through-able.

Other progress - the Episode 4 fiction has jumped all the way from red to blue. That's really not a big deal - getting the fiction done is easy, so we're literally talking about one weekend's worth of work. Still, it's one thing less hanging over our heads, and one step closer to completion. Finally, game engine cutscenes have gone from green to blue. Visually, they're done - the music isn't done yet, but that's a different category on the progress page :-P.

(On the subject of music, we do expect some progress in a few weeks - Michael has just started his summer holiday, though he's away in Europe for the next two weeks)

The worst part is that I still haven't been able to make much progress on the remaining graphics-related tasks, and especially the videos. This is partially because, unlike the game engine cutscenes, the videos can't really be considered complete until the music is in there, because it's only then that I convert them into the game's file format - so, just as soon as Michael returns, we'll hopefully see a lot of progress in the video department.

So, that about concludes this update. Just one other thing - we've added a few new screenshots. They don't reveal any new ships or anything like that, but they offer some hints about what you can expect in Episode 4. The first shot shows the objectives screen from the first winning path - Bradshaw is a busy, busy man :-). The remaining three shots show Bradshaw fighting to save the TCS Reims. The significant thing on these is the damage report with no percentage values - it's one of those tiny little changes we sometimes make to bring the game just a little closer to WC2. It's really remarkable how much of a difference this makes - it used to be that you could fly around with 85% core damage without too much worrying, because you knew that it would still take several shots before you died. Now, you no longer have the comfort of knowing your exact state - so when your core reaches "severe" (red) status, things get real nervous out there ;-).

New year, new update

It seems that once again, we've let three months go by without a news update. On the bright side, though, at least that gives us a lot of stuff to talk about :-P.

First things first, a little summary of what the year 2006 was for Standoff.

For some reason, the word "disaster" comes to mind :-P. We've let an entire year go by without releasing a new episode - and after that year, we still aren't in position to even give a decent estimate for Episode 4's release. The year went so badly for us, that in the end, we didn't win the CIC's Fan Project of the Year competition... or even get nominated. And, to be honest, I'm actually rather grateful for that - we wasted a year, we got punished for it, and now you can be certain we're not gonna let it happen again. We're going to do everything we can to make this a great, great year for Standoff... and preferably, it's last. So, thanks for the kick in the backside - we deserved it, and we've taken the lesson to heart :-).

So, how about some progress already? Well, as a matter of fact, January has seen a lot of progress, and February's started out rather well, too. In terms of missions, we're now almost halfway through Episode 4's winning path, and Quarto claims he's going to get ALL the remaining winning path missions done in February. I'm a little sceptical, all things considered, but we'll see how he goes... I guess he's planning on giving up the last shreds of his social life to achieve this :-P. In the meantime, cutscenes are also doing very well - in fact, they've been notched up to green status on the progress page. Mind you, "cutscenes" on the progress page refers to game engine cutscenes - FMV status is shown under "additional videos", and remains more or less unchanged (...but I'm working on it). In addition, the splash screens you'll see at the end of Episode 4 are also done now.

And that's not all - we've also been making a lot of progress in the voiceover department. At long, long bloody last, all the lines to be recorded have been sent out to the actors. One or two people haven't gotten back to us yet, so we may end up having to look for a few additional folks for minor roles (capship comm officers and the like), but most of the others have been promising to deliver their lines in a few weeks at the most. And we're not talking only about Episode 4 in this regard - Episode 5 is being done, too. Hopefully, this will reduce the waiting time between Episode 4's release and the final episode considerably.

New update, new ship

Well, as you can see, our efforts to turn Standstill back into Standoff continue. As I'm sure is fairly obvious from the lack of updates, we haven't been doing too well in the progress department lately :-P. However - fingers crossed - things are now starting to pick up once again. It's clear enough by now that we won't be able to release even Episode 4 this year. Still, we're more or less certain that at least next year, you will see both remaining episodes before Christmas.

Anyway, one very neat bit of progress to report is a new capship - a frigate, no less. This actually posed something of a problem, since there's no visual references for the frigates in Fleet Action. Still, Quarto kept on whining about how they have frigates in Fleet Action and we don't, and besides that, we could use a light capship that only takes a single torpedo to kill, so finally I had to make something :-P. The ship is based on the Kilrathi transport from Armada - as anyone who's watched Academy knows, the Kilrathi are big fans of using the same basic shape for multiple different ship classes, and we figured this would work better than pulling a completely new ship model out of thin air. Anyway, we've added five new screenshots showing off the frigate, and we've also added its profile to the ships page.

Finally, we've added a new character profile to the characters page - it's everything you wanted to know about Trigger, but were afraid to... well,actually I suppose nobody really wanted to know anything about Trigger. Still, he's up there :-P.

More progress

As promised, we're trying to keep the news updates more frequent than once every three months. Of course, this does mean that there isn't as much progress to report in individual updates as there would be otherwise, but at least you know we're working. So, what's been going on with Standoff lately?

Well, first up, the Ep 4 missions continue to develop, and their pace is starting to pick up. That doesn't mean we're anywhere near release (...not by a long shot), but at least we've finally reached that point where our testers have some actual campaign missions to work on. By the way, if you're wondering how long it might take to develop all the missions in this episode, here's something to put things into context - this episode has more missions (including the usual ship selection-based variants, mind you) than Episodes 2 and 3 combined. Don't worry, though, it definitely won't take as long to develop as those two episodes combined :-P. We are still hoping to get both remaining episodes finished this year, after all...

The other thing I should mention is some further simulator changes. When released, Ep 4 will add scoreboard-capabilities to a few more missions (we're not currently sure if that will include all of them, or if some will remain to be done in Ep 5, however)... but that's not all. Pierre has also been working on implementing more DLL hacks to improve the system overall. So, first up - you will never again have to use the 'alswantsmoreships' cheat. All fourteen ships will now be selectable in the sim at all times. The second, and even bigger, change is the addition of further explanatory captions during the battle. Every time you get a special bonus of any kind, the game will explain how many points you got, and why. This will be especially important in the non-gauntlet missions, which will feature a number of special bonuses other than the quick-kill bonus you're already familiar with.

To finish off the update, we've added four new screenshots. The first shows off the Broadsword in the sim, now easier to choose than ever :-P. The other three shots show off some of the new information features - there's a Kamekh giving you 5x the normal kill score (by virtue of being a corvette), a quick-kill, and finally, a piece of information unrelated to the scoring system, but equally vital - info about which wave you've reached (obviously, only visible in the gauntlets).

Episode 4 progress continues

Well, it might not seem like it, judging by the frequency of our news updates, but Standoff continues to make progress... or rather, has started making progress again :-P. The last few months have been pretty quiet, it seems like everybody had something to do other than Standoff. Things are getting back to normal now, though. I personally am still pretty busy, so the pre-rendered cutscenes haven't advanced too far, but the rest of the team has made a great deal of progress the past two weeks. The missions are moving forward again, Quarto's finished one of the game engine cutscenes, and Michael has been working on a new musical track to be used in the Ep 5 missions. On that note, Michael has also recently purchased some new music software, and the music he's been putting out with it is really great. Hopefully we'll have a sample for you soon - maybe next update :-P. Oh, and you can check out a screenshot from the Ep 4 intro on the screenshots page. Just one shot - it's getting pretty hard to find anything new to screenshotise these days, and we don't want to give away too much from the cutscenes :-P.

Episode 4 progress report

So, here's a long overdue news update about the current status of Ep 4. The bad news is that I've been pretty busy, as the lack of website updates shows, but the good news is that my Ep 4 to-do list is still pretty small, anyway. :-P With most of the graphics done and most of the cutscene voiceovers still missing, I've only had to fix a few graphical glitches (like on the Arrow's HUD) and work on the occasional new ship. Everyone else's been working hard as usual, though, and you can check the progress page to learn more about that. We already have a few missions underway, and Tango is once again able to help Pierre with the coding, which should help us progress faster specially in the debugging stage later on. We've also done a few tests to see how many capships we could put in the same battle without killing the framerate, and it seems like it might take a bit of creative coding to allow big battles to take place without making the game unplayable. We're still trying to figure out what the critical factor is here, though, so that we can keep the game playable without sacrifing the original plans we had for these battles. Apart from that, a few of the voiceovers have been delivered already, so I've already been able to start working on some of the pre-rendered cutscenes. Unfortunately, I still don't have a whole set of voiceovers for any one scene, so right now what I have is mostly a few monologues that make no sense. :-P

Episode 3 issues fixed / say hello to a new ship!

Today we're releasing a patch that fixes some bugs that showed up in Ep 3... the full list of fixes is below - there's nothing major, except a particular bug that was making some valid simulator scores be discarded... that's what bothered us enough to warrant a patch. Oh, and we've added a new ship to the simulator, replacing the Tarsus. Why? Because we think the scoreboards are too full of Wraiths right now... we think the Arrow has the potential to make things a bit more interesting! So, go get the patch from our downloads page, and take a look here for the full list of bug fixes:

     - Fixed a bug that made certain missions crash when too few wingmen were available;
     - Fixed a bug that prevented the player from returning to the flight deck after going back to the recroom;
     - Fixed a bug that prevented the player from using autopilot to land, even when the AUTO light was on;
     - Fixed a bug that occasionally made valid simulator scores be discarded;
     - Added a permanent score display in the scoreboard-enabled simulator missions;
     - Made military transports act as corvettes (corvettes use different radar colors and collision detection);
     - Made the mines trigger on proximity instead of on collision;
     - Fixed the mine 3D model so that it no longer has engine flares;
     - Added a new cockpit mesh for the Ferret;
     - Replaced the Tarsus with the Arrow in the simulator (this Arrow is based on the Armada version).

We've also taken a few measures to try to eliminate a crash that might happen at the start of a new wave in the gauntlets, as well as the infamous "mis-matched VDU" bug. However, we can't be sure we've managed to completely fix either of those bugs since they both were much more frequent on some systems than on others. We *hope* they've been fixed, but if you have any indication to the contrary, please contact us.

Happy new year... with wallpapers!

Just dropping by to wish everyone a happy new year! The upcoming release of Ep 3 is surely a good start to the Wing Commander happenings of 2006, so let's welcome the year properly. I've added a wallpaper to the downloads section to celebrate the occasion... it's available in four different resolutions, ranging from the one that fits my desktop to a few others that fit monitors which I'll never be able to afford. :-P This should make up for those low res graphics I've put out in the past. Go check it out, and again, have a happy new year!