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Mash stunned fans earlier this year when he released a fantastic enhancement patch for Wing Commander 3. His program scales up the possible resolutions for gameplay and allows integration of ODVS' high quality video files. In the ensuing months, Wingnuts have been forthcoming with feature requests and bug reports to make the program better. Mash is back now with a status update on future development. Additional enhancements have been slow in coming, but it's great to hear he's still dedicated to making things even better!
About time for a progress update. I haven't been moving along with this as quickly as I would have liked. Apart from life in general getting in the way, there have been a few hurdles and setbacks.I wanted to fix the strange behaviour when making small movements, where the ship would turn in the opposite direction and or get stuck completely. These issues are exacerbated at higher frame rates which is a pity as the game looks much better at a higher frame rate. I spent a fair amount of time finding where controller movement is processed into ship movement. And eventually discovered the function where most of this takes place. Unfortunately I didn't get much further on this. Movement is multiplied by the turn-rate of the ship and then by the time since the last draw, which gets smaller the higher the frame rate. It's then scaled down to some really small values before being manipulated in ways I don't really understand. The end result being that small movements get lost or turned into garbage. Anyway I've left this for now as to get on with other things, but do intend to come back to it at some point.
I'm currently working on overhauling controller/joystick configuration. I have a couple of motives here. First is to make it easy to set up axis and button actions and the second is to set things up to add force feedback support which I hope to add at a later date.
There are several ways to add joystick input, WC3 uses Windows Multimedia input as is. I played about with directinput, rawinput and xinput and had a mixture of all three going at one point which got complicated. I eventually settled on Windows Gaming Input, It was a bit of a pain to get working but once I figured it out things have been progressing.
Here's a pic of the external configure program as it currently is at the moment. I still have a fair bit of work to do but it's coming along.
