17
Dec
Oh man I never noticed how obvious it was that the Axius corridors were the Lexington set relit.
News categories list
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13
Jul
…The WCRespace team is back with a new update on the WC4 Fan Remake. There's a whole new article by Pedro that goes into great detail about the game's user interface. He says it's not the most glamorous subject, and it might be tedious to design and program, but I love these liminal console screens. They're critical glue that helps sell the total experience. An especially big deal this time around is the adjustment to accommodate 16:9 widescreen settings. It takes some finesse to make them look authentic compared to the original 4:3 shape. The fourth and fifth images below are especially stark - they compare the original loading screen with today's update!
Now brute forcing in new UI wouldn’t be impossible but that removes some of the nostalgia. No problem, we’ll just upscale them like we do the rooms… except we optionally support 16:9 by zooming in on the gameflow rooms, and there is no way
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09
Oct
ODVS has a nice treat for German Wing Commander fans (of which there are many!). With the help of Bernd Vollbrecht and Dr. Gerd Naumann, he's redone the audio for the WC4 Remastered trailer. It's a wonderful video, and now more people can listen to it in their native language! You can download the playable demo for the WC4 Fan Remake yourself here (900 meg exe).
Here's a little something for German-speaking Wingnuts, courtesy of MrCoffeeee:
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27
Feb
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The WC4 Remastered team is back with a big new update on the significant progress that the team has made over the last couple months. Although they haven't formally published any updates, they've been very busy at work on several fronts. Some key menu / interface tasks and video integration have been completed. The team has made some excellent asteroid fixes and fleshed out the first few introductory missions. There's even a beautiful new Clarkson class transport model. Head over to WCRespace for the full article on what's new!Over Christmas and the early part of this year progress has been excellent, not only have we added all the missing UI menus but two more missions are now fully playable. Unfortunately it’s now ODVS’ turn to be overwhelmed with work so we will hold off showing those menus until he can replace my programmer art with his usual high standard.
For this article we will take a look
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27
Mar
…We've got a delicious update today on WC4 Remastered. Pedro reports that the team is digging deep into the ground missions of the game. As is usual on a project like this, once they started peeling back the layers of the original, things got complicated. This has necessitated some clever solutions, which have been detailed in a new WCRespace article. A few options include taking some artistic license and deviating from the original experience slightly, but this should produce a more engaging product overall.
The first issue was to add support for loading the terrain and we had to ensure that the models which we had full transforms for lined up exactly as they did in the original game.Classic buildings and terrain.
We have accomplished this and added support for terrain collisions. The ~1 million vertex original terrain can be rendered on modern hardware in a single draw call – but still that’s
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11
Jun
…We're happy to kick off the new week with another exciting update from the WC4 Remastered team! They've posted a new article where they dig into the development of the game's third mission. It's the first time players get to experience a new fighter, so this includes deploying a second cockpit and implementing alternate HUD locations for certain items. There's also new information about the ability to play bespoke music at certain contextually relevant points during a mission. There's even a video about this in more depth! Check out the full article here.
Getting the new cockpit in wasn’t smooth sailing, though. The Hellcat cockpit was held together by a number of hacks from our first trailer. Now, everything is data-driven and reusable, with no hardcoding in sight, making future cockpits much easier to implement.
Each ship can now have its own custom HUD layout, necessitated by the different
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15
Aug
…This is a big one, folks! After years of hard work, the WC4 Fan Remake team is super excited to finally unveil the first playable demo for Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom Remastered. Today's release is a fancy update to the original WC4 Demo released on October 19, 1995. As we've seen through their many technical articles released over the years, it takes a lot of foundation building (design, art, sound, coding, user interface and much more) to reach a milestone like this. Detailed instructions have been published to help people get things going. There's even a snazzy demo trailer below! You can grab the installer package here (900 meg exe). Keep in mind that this is still a beta level artifact and the team very much appreciates your feedback. Give it a try and have fun!
We are supremely proud to announce that the first playable demo of Wing Commander IV - The Price of Freedom:
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12
Dec
We're at that time of the year when most Wingnuts get busy with holiday business and fan project activity briefly slows. Nevertheless, Pedro managed to share this new screenshot of the WC4 Fan Remake going ultrawide. It looks pretty darn sharp, and all of that gorgeous screen real estate will come in extra handy during a dogfight!
Been out of action with flu, work craziness and most significantly moving, I haven't even had chance to set up the server again yet so I'm afraid I've made very little progress... but with the extra desk space I got a new monitor so I can start testing Ultra Wide resolutions and HDR.
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25
Oct
…Pedro reports that work steadily continues on the WC4 Fan Remake project. Although he claims that all of the various technical hurdles they're facing aren't news, I would argue that this provides important context to just how complex managing a modern fan project can be. A great many projects hit a wall and fail to progress beyond this point when the excitement of a flashy launch fades and the technical foundation work grinds on, so it's wonderful to see that the team is facing these challenges head on. What they've already accomplished is pretty neat too! Check out the trailer below for a sample.
Wing IV is fighting a lot of unexciting battles on multiple fronts - loading gameplay scripts to in order to load FMVs you've already seen, which requires loading subtitles, and branching options - which you've already seen but need to be implemented anyway. And then there are tasks like updating the
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25
May
…Development on the WC4 Fan Remake has been generally slow of late, but Pedro has a few neat updates to report. He's done some testing with ODVS' fantastic enhanced video with great results. It'll be a perfectly complement to the gameplay updates that have been at the forefront so far. There has also been some discussion on new features like modern gamepad controller support as well as improving some of the development tools as well. There's still quite a bit of work to go, but it's good to hear the team is still on it!
To be honest development paused for a while, but I came back to it last night, did a few fixes; tested it with ODVS' AI upscale. It looks good, don't worry we'll be incorporating the best possible video when the time comes. I did make some progress on a particle editor, but Rear Admiral Tarsus is offering to help out with tools (which I am super grateful for). We have a potential
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16
Mar
…Here's a potentially promising teaser of what might be possible for the WC4 Fan Remake. Pedro's recently done some experimentation with AI-assisted video enhancement, and the results are surprisingly positive. He reports that the ability to upscale still images is fantastic, so this will help sharpen up the game flow sets at least. There's a lot of work yet to be done to refine the video elements, but this promising technology will likely improve by the time the remake is ready to go. What's already possible seems to border on something from Star Trek, so we can't wait to see how it develops!
For stills it's excellent, we can definitely use this tech to up res the room images. For motion a lot of artifacts creep in.Still by the time WCIV is good to go I bet this technology will be good enough.If they can fix eyes in motion it would be useable; currently it's recognising shapes rather than features.
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14
Apr
Today's we've got a meaty new article with some exciting content updates for the WC4 Fan Remake. The team is currently working on recreating the WC4 demo, which is notable for including a Stormfire cannon pickup floating in space. Unlike in the full game, this gives the Hellcat a unique special weapon for the mission. They've also spent considerable time working out how the spaceflight physics will work. It will incorporate some interesting inertial cues from WC1, WC2 and Prophecy. You can read all about it at WCRespace.com here.
As we work towards the demo release there are three main areas to focus on:
- Applying all the now-known stats values to the game objects
- Running the mission scripts for all of the objects
- Improving the AI
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29
Nov
…The WC4 Fan Remake team is back with a new report on the steady progress they have been making in recent months. DefianceIndustries has implemented a fantastic update to the Caernaven frigate - just look at that thing! Pedro has also upgraded the game's physics engine, better integrated menu updates and added improved video features. You can read all about these updates and the path towards a playable demo in their new WCRespace article here.
Until now we had been in what I would describe as pre-production. When we wanted to show off a new ship I would make a new entity definition by hand, completely ignoring the ship stats, missile stats, manually setting what classic model to use.
Now I intend to turn that process on its head and start dynamically generating entity definitions based on the data when you load the game. This is an involved process but if goes to plan it should mean that the manual
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01
Jan
Dominus of Exult spotted another uncommon Wing Commander collectible, and he pinged LOAF for the scoop on its origin. "I believe it’s an Australian retail promo sent to stores to promote the release." We don't see this shirt very often, but it's a definite treat each time! And congrats to Dominus on the find - it's good to see you'll be entering 2022 in style!
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09
May
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
When we picked up the Wing Commander IV Polaroids this was one I was sure we'd never figure out. It wasn't labeled and the picture wasn't especially clear. She could be a patron in the bar on Nephele (few of whom are visible!), a reporter or a politician from the Assembly scenes... or anywhere else! It turns out I did not need to fear: she's actually a character with a fairly major scene... the comm officer who sends a distress message from the Telamon System. Blair and Sosa listen in horror as she reveals the Black Lance attack:
If you can hear this, it might not be too late. Unmarked ships are attacking and many people are dying! We know planet FT957 is far from any other colony, but, if you have any Humanity, please, send help immediately! Otherwise, our world
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07
May
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
Today we're giving you two Polaroids for the price of one! What's going on here? You're seeing two different pirate characters--Pirate and Pirate Ace--played by the same actor for their video loops. In the game, these appear as a total of six different video loops (three for each) that can have any pirate dialogue played over them (taunts, death screams, etc.). We can't confirm that the voice work, recorded later, was actually the credited actor, Todd Kimsey (despite being labeled 'Pirate #4' on both Polaroids, he's listed as only Pirate in the game's credits and no others appear in live action footage.) It's amazing how the amount of costume work you see in those photos ultimately becomes about five seconds of monochrome footage that ends up intentionally
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27
Nov
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
Our Polaroid research continues to produce surprising stories: this time, we've found a justified star. Or at least... the star of Justified! While the label on the photograph reads "BW Pilot Garret 'Moose'", the actor in question is none other than Walton Goggins (credited as Walt Goggins). Moose appears in the Peleus jamming scene, one of the three Border Worlds Banshee pilots that are ambushed and shot down by a flight of Excaliburs. The Polaroid gives us a great look at a Border Worlds flight suit, which the production dyed grey from the original tan Confederation suits with some minor alterations (like the Union of Border Worlds patch on his left shoulder).
Credited as Border Worlds Pilot #3, Mr. Goggins would quickly go from nearly faceless tertiary
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29
Apr
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
Last Thanksgiving, we wrote about a Polaroid of Moose and how the character represented three different people at once: the actor who played him in a cutscene, the member of the development team whose name and photograph were used for his wingman selection screen and finally the member of the Playstation team whose name replaced them in that port. Now, we've found a polaroid that represents FOUR different people! Meet Miner.
Unraveling the Polaroid meant once again dealing with a small problem: Miner is in full Confederation fighter pilot costume (next to the nose of the famous Confederation shuttle set!) and so his face isn't very visible. Luckily, the "Mike" and "Confed Pilot" scribbled at the bottom were enough to move the needle: the game's printed credits do
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02
Dec
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
You knew he was coming! Today's Polaroid is Border Worlds Pilot #2, Lester Barrie. Like Moose and Bob-O-Matte, Hacker appears briefly in the Peleus jammer introduction where his Banshee is shot down by a group of Excaliburs. His continuity Polaroid gives us a great look at a grey Border Worlds flight suit and a bit of a cheat the production used frequently: since Hacker was only ever seen from the shoulders up he doesn't have a full flight suit... just the top!
Mr. Barrie's story is a little different from many of the actors we've previously identified: while he had several guest spots in TV and small film roles in the 1990s, he gave up acting in favor of two other passions: standup comedy and preaching! Today he is Reverend Barrie, assistant pastor at the -
18
Nov
…This is part of a series analyzing newly discovered Wing Commander IV continuity photographs. You can find the previous posts collected here.
Today's polaroid led us to several interesting stories. Pictured here as "Confed Cap #3" is actor Charles "Chip" Esten. Since appearing as a featured extra in Wing Commander IV, Esten has gone on to a considerable amount of success including appearing as a series regular on ABC drama Nashville, playing Josh Porter on The Office and on multiple iterations of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Mr. Esten is very active today and even retweeted our request to help identify his polaroid!
The polaroid gives you a good look at a Terran Confederation Navy jacket complete with a name and rank that aren't visible on screen (JARVIS and Lieutenant Commander, respectively). Wing Commander Prophecy would later establish a different canonical rank for Lieutenant Commander (three
