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We've got another exciting update to share regarding the Originator universal extraction tool. AllTinker has been hard at work this month building out features and better support to get the most out of Privateer 2 assets. This is a huge boost to people like LOAF who are spending lots of time researching The Darkening lately. Today's update allows modders and curious fans greater ability to pull both images, audio text out of the code. Grab the update here!

I'm chipping away at some longer-term features (and Confederation), but here's a new version (0.3.04) which is mostly focussed on Privateer 2.

I've added support for "BASE" images, which allowed me to complete the remaining palette hook-up logic. The major text formats used by the game are also now supported. I've added support for the IFF-nested sample sets, which gives access to the majority of the remaining (non-movie) audio. IFF shapes are

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LOAF recently ran across this nifty issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus. It's positioned as a preview of Privateer just prior to its imminent launch, but the "article" is provided by Origin itself. I wonder when it was written, because it's pretty aspirational for being published just a few weeks before the game shipped. It's interesting to spot the differences between this and the final game!

Did we ever figure out ethics in game journalism? Here's a case where the magazine just let one of Privateer's designers straight up write the preview... and it's totally reasonable and promises only what they end up delivering.

Here's a nice visual comparison of when CGSP also had covers of Privateer 2 and Privateer 3!

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President-elect Felicia Winters has delayed the start of her term of office, in response to devastating earthquakes on the planet Rhea 3.
The following statement was delivered by her office to a special session of Congress:
"The terrible events on Rhea 3 have not only demanded President-elect Winters's full attention, but also brought personal tragedy. It seems that most of the Winters family, plus many close friends, lost their lives when the capital city of New Greenacre was levelled by the earthquakes."
"The president-elect therefore requests permission to temporarily suspend the inauguration ceremony. This will allow her to focus on coordinating emergency operations, and also process the unexpected loss of her nearest and dearest."
President Zachary Hudson agreed to a short extension of his presidential term, thereby allowing the motion to be passed by Congress. Vice President-elect Isolde

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ParadiseRegaind has posted an extremely cool and unique collectible. He worked with apesincaves to commission an awesome diorama cube of the key original Wing Commander art and Hornet cockpit. The artist also makes them for Tie Fighter, Doom and many other franchises. You can even pick one up for yourself for about $42!

Picked up these really cool diorama shadow boxes on eBay recently. The maker/seller is great and made the Wing Commander one at my request. I’m trying to get him to make a Descent one now!

He has a ton of these for various classic games and series. Well worth a shout out!

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Knight26-77 has a new 3D print to share. This time it's the Class A Space Superiority Fighter F-109 Vampire. It's a little hard to see without zooming into these pics, but the shape is pretty spot on, all the way down to the nose guns and blister fairings on the rotating engine pods. As Knight himself admits, the paint job could use a little work, but that time lapse video is extremely cool. Be sure to check it out!

Not the best painter I know, but from a distance... LOL

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AllTinker has a couple of fantastic extra wide art pieces to share from his Confederation mod of WC1. I really really like that extended view of the Tiger's Claw with bridge and gun turrets visible.

Here's another couple of things for the heck of it; the extended 'Claw for the landing animation, and the victory animation (the first frame of it at least; the whole animation is good to go though).

Some scenes are going to be easier to draw than others. The victory sunset is a relatively simple background to flow out. On the other hand, coming up with the visuals for the back half of each fighter are proving to be more of a challenge!

In terms of stuff I haven't done for the widescreen mod, there's only one thing now: the side views of the ships in the hangar, and they're very difficult. I experimented with some cheat methods, e.g. a big clamp holding the ship, or other stuff in the foreground to hide

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Hey, you made it through the week - congratulations! Now it's time to relax. Celebrate your victory with this ten minute loop that Vinman made of the Prophecy victory music. Or if you're already suffering from the Sunday scaries, use this clip to help calm your nerves ahead of the coming workweek!

This morning I grabbed a shirt out of my closet, saw it said WING COMMANDER on it, and got a bug up my butt to do a Wing Commandery thing today.After a morning of screwing around in Audacity, here's almost ten minutes of the mission accomplished music from Prophecy, for when you want to reward yourself for doing a good job.

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We recently spent some time dissecting and analyzing the Wing Commander preview for the Amiga. Now we've followed that up with the same treatment for the Wing Commander II rolling demo! The Wing Commander II demo was put together by Origin for Winter CES 1991 and was first shown on January 10 of that year. It was the first Wing Commander to include speech (featuring voices recorded by the developers) and remains the release with the most time between the demo and the final product (roughly eight months). It's most famous for some of the wonderful extra graphics it contains, including an alternate model for the Bloodfang, a closeup of a Kilrathi guardsman and an animated scene in which Prince Thkrahath enters the Emperor's throne room. We've collected videos, assets, history and even hehind the scenes stories from the development team!

There's even a new patch available for download for the community,

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Last week, we talked about Privateer 2's palette feature which allows any ship to appear in the livery of any of twelve factions. We didn't mention that this was being noted in the service of helping AllTinker add the correct default style for every ship in a future release of the incredible Originator. There were actually two additional options we didn't show in the last post: the Heretic's actual color yellow and blue scheme and this final seemingly unused one (note how this one also changes the color of the cockpit glass from green to blue).

In this process of studying this, we did manage to find somewhere in Privateer 2 that the system is actually used: for generating the 'booth database' images of ships! If you look closely at the different registration entries (and a few other places) you'll see different ships appear in all sorts of different colors! The system isn't actually used internally but

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

*Pilots' Federation ALERT*
Deliveries are urgently needed to begin manufacturing a new weapon capable of causing severe damage to Thargoid Titans.
Professor Ishmael Palin has been leading on the project, using theories developed by Ram Tah. Aegis released an official statement on all newsfeeds:
"We can now reveal the results of Ram Tah's experiments into Guardian relics. These ancient objects were crystalline supercomputers that relayed data across the Guardians' information networks. His theory was that their transformation into Unclassified relics at Thargoid surface sites was caused by an inbuilt defence mechanism, which could perhaps be weaponised."
"Ram Tah discovered that exposure to certain electromagnetic frequencies caused Guardian relics to open and activate clusters of microscopic nanites. These react aggressively against Thargoid biotechnology by disrupting it on the molecular

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WARNING: This update contains imagery which may not be safe for work. We've redacted any thumbnails to remove nudity but there will be text links to the original images.

Back in 2019, we published a Visual Guide to Pin-Ups in Wing Commander which remains, as you might imagine, a popular resource. Last weekend, we received a question from ParadiseRegaind about the two Strike Commander pin-ups: they looked to be photo-realistic... were they based on real pictures?

We agreed that at least the female pin-up seem to be a paintover... but of whom? Our collected knowledge of early 1990s cheesecake was extremely limited and so I put the call out on Twitter: did anyone know this woman? A user named TNEQL answered the call: it's Pamela Anderson! Ms. Anderson had been a Playboy model in the early 1990s who became a massive international star after leading Baywatch. TNEQL had found the exact photo in an August 1994

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Knight26-77 is back with an impressive new set of 3D prints - plus the time lapse videos to go along with them! The first model is the fantastically large Midway class megacarrier compared to variety of other large capital ships. We also get to see his new Piranha side-by-side with a handful of light fighter favorites. It's very cool to see how everything comes together on the printing pad!

DefianceIndustries gave me permission to do some test prints of a couple of his WCP Model upgraded designs. We have started with the Piranha and the Midway. DI warned that they were but under-detailed, but I decided to give it a try anyway. We'll start with the Midway.

Flying alongside her Kilrathi War contemporaries, you can see just how much of an absolute unit the Midway is.

Next up the 1:72 F-106 Piranha alongside some of her Kilrathi War era precursor light fighters, most by the super talented Klavs and one

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A favorite Wing Commander legend is currently making the rounds again: the claim that a programmer hex edited a memory manager's crash message with 'Thank you for playing Wing Commander!' so it wouldn't be visible when quitting the game to DOS. The story is not completely true -- the hack happened during development but the bug was fixed before the game shipped -- and we have previously published an in-depth look. But why do people remember 'thank you for playing Wing Commander' so clearly when the game didn't actually say that?

To answer that question, we thought it would be beneficial to conduct a survey that would list out EVERY English-language quit message displayed by a Wing Commander game in MS-DOS. None of these are the result of memory errors, they are simply the executables telling DOS to print text upon exit. Before Privateer, games only displayed a message when they were quit through the UI

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

A series of high-magnitude earthquakes on the planet Rhea 3 have caused widespread devastation and millions of casualties.
Massive seismic activity across the northern continent has effectively shattered dozens of towns and cities, including the capital New Greenacre. The intense tremors also triggered tsunamis in the surrounding oceans, which have wrecked coastal regions on other land masses.
Local journalist Len Kennelly published a summary for Vox Galactica:
"The only disaster on this scale that we've seen in Rhea was when NMLA terrorists bombed Ito Orbital. This time, however, the death toll could run into tens of millions. Urban skylines have crumbled like sandcastles, with vast jagged pits opening up to swallow entire neighbourhoods."
"Federal Liberal Command has declared the highest state of emergency, calling for volunteers to help rescue trapped citizens. We're seeing direct support

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It was a crowd funding project very similar to Star Citizen that was launched by Piranha Games way back on September 9, 2014. At the time, the game's director claimed that Electronic Arts had given them the Wing Commander license but that they had opted to turn the game into an original IP instead. This story didn't pass the smell test but it did seem clear that Transverse had, probably recently, been developed as a Wing Commander game: the space combat-filled trailer had little to do with the setting described by the crowd funding website and concept art and other behind the screens details revealed Wing Commander terminology throughout the material that had been created. Now, thanks to the website of art director Christopher M. Hunt we have better information about what really happened behind the scenes:

Electronic Arts contracted Piranha Games to create demo re-envision the Wing Commander franchise

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We noticed something very special in an unexpected eBay listing about two week ago: an account listing deleted materials from Pinewood Studios which had posted a used copy of the script to "Darkside". Darkside is the little-remembered original name of Privateer 2: The Darkening, the one it had when the live action film shoot began in 1995. Material from behind the screens of Privateer 2 is rare and special so we were anxious to win the auction and scan the script for the community. Luckily, it worked out!

We have previously preserved a nearly-complete Draft 7 script donated by Erin Roberts. This is a slightly earlier Draft 5 script and it is complete, including the introduction missing from the last version. We've noticed a number of other smaller changes (like missions being set at different bars) but have not had time for a thorough comparison yet. Watch this space!

You can download a PDF of the

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Fan art from 1994! Found while digging through Amiga history for that demo writeup. Looks like it was done in a package called "Real 3D".

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Some cool bespoke menus from Wing Commander IV for the Macintosh.

I was surprised to realize tonight that the gauntlet demo for the Mac is actually different from the PC version... it's ALL Arrows!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

*Pilots' Federation ALERT*
Chemicals harvested from Thargoid spire sites have accelerated Aegis's development of a weapon to destroy the Titans.
Professor Ishmael Palin requested samples of coral sap, impure spire minerals and semi-refined spire minerals, which were delivered to the Arque system. These will be used to produce an armoured layer to protect the weapon against the Maelstroms' anti-Guardian zones.
Professor Alba Tesreau, head of Aegis, explained more at a press conference:
"I am well aware that obtaining these substances from the Thargoid spire sites has doubtless cost lives. But the importance of this work cannot be overstated. Without resistance to the Maelstroms' electromagnetic fields, the weapon based on Ram Tah's theory is doomed to failure."
"The Alliance, Empire and Federation have all agreed to redirect the majority of Aegis funding to the anti-Titan project. We have also

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Huh, a tweet from dancingcrab just made me realize how similar the Ultima VIII CD-ROM and Kilrathi Saga boxes are.

... and we simply rotate Bioforge for the alien hand trifecta??

The Kilrathi Saga hand was made by photographing a prop Kilrathi paw. Not clear whether or not Origin also had a severed Guardian arm and glowing Bioforge guy segment laying around.