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You are in for a very special treat tonight.
We tried to improve upon the excellent Freespace series in every respect. Pre-mission elements such as the briefing session, where the player gets information on the background and objectives, were completely redesigned. Wing Commander Saga's briefings are brought out via pre-rendered cutscenes with a lot of details. They can be captivating, especially because outstanding voice acting makes them as absorbing to watch as real-life actors in Origin's Wing Commander series.
The cutscenes are unfortunately missing in the first iteration of the beta.
Amazing.
They really are very captivating. I didn't quite expect them to be THIS good.
Honestly, I really didnt expect this kind of quality... very good job!
That is the reason for my constant uneasy voyages into the limits of sleep withdrawal. Briefing cutscenes are leaving me a quivering, red-eyed, coffee-chugging mess. Meaning that this comment will be read just by you two, given that I lost the power of sight about thirty minutes ago.
Amazing job, but one suggestion. At 0:30 in the video, when you see the 3 dimensional map you put the Y coordinate on the vertical axis while in Cartesian coordinates in three dimensions you generally put Z coordinate on vertical axis, while the horizontal plane is composed of X and Y coordinates, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_ ... ate_system
I know that in space there is no fixed "top" or "bottom" - it all depends on the reference point of view. Nevertheless the coordinates on the axes looked weird to me.
It's everything I used to imagine it being haha. Now it's real. =D
damson wrote:Amazing job, but one suggestion. At 0:30 in the video, when you see the 3 dimensional map you put the Y coordinate on the vertical axis while in Cartesian coordinates in three dimensions you generally put Z coordinate on vertical axis, while the horizontal plane is composed of X and Y coordinates, see here.
Hehe, Tolwyn and I are both academics so don't worry: We know this. (At least I should, one of my specializations in my Computer Science degree was Computer graphics ^^) however it is also a fact that most rendering and game engines and even a few modeling tools switch the Z and Y axis. In several game engines the Z axis points forward and the Y axis points up. This often turns a rigth handed coordinate system into a left handed one and DirectX even has some built in functions to handle both types of systems, so you see this is quite common.
We pretty much used a template from the Wing Commander 4 briefings to do this and they already had the Y axis in place so I guess the WC4 engine was just one more of those engines using the Y axis for vertical. (Our Freespace2 engine also uses y for up and z for forward. You'll notice this if you ever work with the mission editor or let the game display debug information about object locations to you)
So it's all working as designed, and although methematicians by default use Z as the vertical axis, nearly everyone in gaming or computer graphics uses Y as the vertical axis. It's just one more thing to confuse you and the poor guy writing exporters and importers for modeling tools, which need to remember this and always switch the two axis 😉
I will read through this with great interest... Thanks
-EDIT Greywolf sounds like another "Mainiac"! I am sure Friendly Fire will get him! LOL
Tolwyn wrote:You are in for a very special treat tonight.We tried to improve upon the excellent Freespace series in every respect. Pre-mission elements such as the briefing session, where the player gets information on the background and objectives, were completely redesigned. Wing Commander Saga's briefings are brought out via pre-rendered cutscenes with a lot of details. They can be captivating, especially because outstanding voice acting makes them as absorbing to watch as real-life actors in Origin's Wing Commander series.
The cutscenes are unfortunately missing in the first iteration of the beta.
Upgraded preview is available. Take a look!
Very nice! ➡️ One question - Will there be a option for showing subtitles in briefings/cutscenes?
Just WOW! Has every mission in Saga Final that Briefing?
alex1975 wrote:Just WOW! Has every mission in Saga Final that Briefing?
Obviously. 21 sequences are done by today (and I have to tell you, they are driving me crazy).
damson wrote:Will there be a option for showing subtitles in briefings/cutscenes?
That is not possible. Unless, of course, they are embedded in the video file.
The Freespace engine doesn't support subtitle rendering right now, and I don't know enough about how the video is rendered to implement anything. I just tried rendering some text on the video frame but it seems the current font rendering functionality of the engine interferes with video displaying, probably because they are using different renderstates or different render targets. Working on that would require implementing a whole lot of new OpenGL stuff and we neither have the time to implement that nor to test it properly, not to mention that we don't have any subtitle files.
KeldorKatarn wrote:The Freespace engine doesn't support subtitle rendering right now, and I don't know enough about how the video is rendered to implement anything. I just tried rendering some text on the video frame but it seems the current font rendering functionality of the engine interferes with video displaying, probably because they are using different renderstates or different render targets. Working on that would require implementing a whole lot of new OpenGL stuff and we neither have the time to implement that nor to test it properly, not to mention that we don't have any subtitle files.
If so, will the cutscene briefing will be the only available source of information about upcoming mission? Or will there be additional Freespace-like briefings along?
BTW, I know you can check your objectives during flight. 😉
damson wrote:If so, will the cutscene briefing will be the only available source of information about upcoming mission? Or will there be additional Freespace-like briefings along?BTW, I know you can check your objectives during flight. 😉
Aside from the mentioned objectives list, yes it is the only source of information. Is that a problem? We know the briefings are in English but the entire game is in english and you will not be able to follow the game properly anyway without a good understanding of English unfortunately. The in-mission comms just happen too fast and often in the middle of action to be able to always read it back.
Anyway, If you think the briefings might be a problem then please tell us whenever the mission objectives do not contain enough information to let you know what to do. THe briefing cutscene is mostly about telling the 'story' of the mission, and only in part about telling you what to do. That's really what the objectives are for.
The lack of subtitles is sad but we cannot really do anything about this. Freespace simply doesn't have subtitle support and we don't have subtitle files with time stamps nor time to create them.
very very very sweet 😁
KeldorKatarn"]The lack of subtitles is not a problem for me, just was curious if they will be included or not.