Wing Commander: Standoff

[Herbarius]

I've always been a huge Wing Commander fan and recently I finally got myself to download Wing Commander: Standoff, a fan-made Wing Commander game, based on an enhanced Wing Commander 5 engine. It is set chronologically after Wing Commander II, but before Wing Commander III.

 

If you haven't seen it before, take a look:

Wing Commander: Standoff

 

Here some video footage from the game, taken from the first FlightSim mission.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRlNWh8oGKA

In the video the game crashes at the end, however that recording was made with an earlier version of the game. It didn't crash on me yet.

 

However, if you've got an older graphics card, you may need to disable the HDR feature and/or Enhanced Lighting in the Standoff options, which you can open from the Standoff Launcher (via the Button "Options"). That's what I had to do, unless I wanted to fight against invisible ships

 

 

Well if you know it, feel free to post your experiences with the game. I've already completed the first campaign mission and also played some rounds in the FlightSim, my first impression is, it's really excellent: There is a wide variety of ships in there, and they're all faithful 3D recreations of the old fighters. It appears the game is made with a lot of attention to detail, for example after the first mission, in which one of my Wingmen lost his ship, I got an e-mail from the technician, complaining about me not bringing the ships back

That's a good example for my second first impression: I must say I find it quite difficult. I just barely survived the first mission; reaction of the board technician to the state of my ship after return: "Whoa." I made two attempts on the second mission, but was shot to pieces each time. However, this propably will get better when I get the feel for the game. After all, I'm playing on the default difficulty level of "Ace" (which is the middle one of 5 available levels) and am too proud to lower the difficulty

Edited April 3, 2010 by Herbarius

[kool kitty89]

Huh, I'd have though they'd use the open sourse Frespace 2 engine like a number of other homebrew titles have. By Wing Commander 5, do you mean Prophecy? I wasn't aware that the engines of any of the Wing Commander games had been made open source, plus WC prophecy is a fairly old game. Then again, some other older games showed that the engines supported far more detailed graphics than the games used (albeit requiring newer hardware to play at full speed), like X-Wing Alliance did with darksaber'ss craft pack mod.

[Herbarius]

To be more specific, it's a Total Conversion of "Wing Commander: Secret Ops", the free-to-download Prophecy spin-off (which used the same engine as Prophecy - hence I just called it WC5 engine). As I already said, they enhanced/overhauled the graphics engine...

 

I don't know if the engine was made open source, I don't think so. Propably all done by reverse-engineering.

Edited April 3, 2010 by Herbarius

[Philip Hollis]

To be more specific, it's a Total Conversion of "Wing Commander: Secret Ops", the free-to-download Prophecy spin-off (which used the same engine as Prophecy - hence I just called it WC5 engine). As I already said, they enhanced/overhauled the graphics engine...

 

I don't know if the engine was made open source, I don't think so. Propably all done by reverse-engineering.

 

 

 

 

It wasn't open source but the original maker of the game had given them permission to make the mod using his engine. He also allowed them to redistribute the ENTIRE Secret Ops game in its entirety given that E.A. don't care about it and it was free anyway.

 

Standoff is a SERIOUSLY kick ass game that has one MAJOR element that none of these FS2 games have...........a PROPER cockpit view. The graphics on this game are just as good as the FS2 engine, once bloom/hdr is enabled but they do need a half decent system to run without stutter or slowdown. Anything above a 3 gig p4 with a gig ram, 256 gfx will be fine.

 

Its taken 6 years to finish this mod and its definitely payed off. VERY nice game and one that puts that puny piece of crap on the 360 to shame. If this had been released for the 360, with online capability, people would have been VERY happy, instead of VERY peed off.

 

ps. I had invisible ships to, so I changed my gfx drivers to older ones, not newer, and it now works great with bloom etc. I use an nvidia 7600GS and downgraded my drivers to v.86.47 I think. May have been 47.86 but either way, its great.

 

ESSENTIAL FREEWARE GAME.

[Herbarius]

Well things haven't gone very well for me in the campaign, I ended up in a mission with 2 Gladii and 2 Stilettos (of which I flew one), against an overwhelming pirate force, it was just not possible to succeed. Even when I managed to survive the initial attack, the mission gets aborted because we lost too many fighters (as in: I'm the only one still flying, and my ship barely holds together ).

 

 

It appears they really mastered that semi-dynamic and branching campaign thing.

 

I'm now backtracking to the previous mission, and trying harder not to lose the valuable fighters. It will be hard, too, as - again - the enemy numbers are overwhelming. If this fails, I'll start over, and maybe I'll lower the difficulty level.

 

 

Until then I'll play the Simulator to better familiarize myself with the game and the fighters I have to fly in the initial missions (Stilettos and Gladii).

 

One little hint if you try to get high scores in Simulator missions 1 and 2: During the first wave (consisting of only one enemy ship), fly into the asteroid field. (Although the "playing field" is randomized, there should be always asteroids there, and you should be able to spot them from you starting position.) Then stay between the asteroids for the rest of the mission. This will come in handy especially in the later waves, when you face greater numbers of enemy fighters at once, as the asteroids can provide you with partial cover and also the AI isn't too great maneouvering the asteroids, so you'll get some "free kills" that way

Edited April 7, 2010 by Herbarius