We’re going to have to fight through several waypoints

In the previous post we discussed the tasks ahead of us. With the original data now successfully being used for all of the stats, the next task was to run the mission scripts.

I’ve been collecting mission data, coded transmissions, and tracking fleet movements

A huge part of the work we were doing which wasn’t sexy enough for any updates was matching the commands and arguments listed in the mission editor document to the codes we have found in the missions. Now finally comes the reward for all of that preparation; hooking them up to the game (aka the fun part!).

There was just one problem: all the action takes place at the second navpoint and we have to get there first! Unfortunately in Wing Commander IV the decision was taken to make space vast. Flying between waypoints manually isn’t the practical option that it was in WC1-2. There was no way around it; we had to implement the autopilot before moving forward.

We’re so close to that missing data, I can taste it

I knew where the camera commands lived in data, but my initial reaction to trying to support them was “oh no, why do the cameras have another scripting language??” (the third encountered so far) – and this one wasn’t helpfully documented. So I put in a place holder camera… but there was no denying it didn’t feel like the original. Fortunately, there are only so many bits of data you can send to a camera; offsets, time, distance etc. By running the original game and comparing with those scripts I was able to get a close approximation. The original demo doesn’t actually feature a take-off or landing sequence. We may include the take-off anyway, but in any case it’s good to have support for all the sequences.