News categories list

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The French retro video gaming channel Rewind has posted a new retrospective on Wing Commander (3). It's all spoken in French, but it's a cool cut of WC material no matter what language you speak. Although the focus is on WC3, the series at large gets included towards the end. Here's AD's translation and summary:

Video is kind of a retrospective. They approach it from the angle that WC isn't that well remembered, which I don't agree with though I do feel that it could be slipping out of people's consciousness in later generations.

It starts off briefly mentioning a few other games like Mass Effect, X-Wing and No Man's Sky before saying that the video is going to talk about Wing Commander 3. They briefly point out some of the Chris Roberts influences in making the series and the basic setup of the story. They run throught the cast (Ginger's porn thing gets a mention) and the budget gets brought up.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

EmuMusicFan has a novel new technical proof-of-concept that he'd like to share. He's leveraged the WC Toolbox to find out how to trigger custom speech files during Wing Commander 2. WC2 was renowned for its revolutionary spoken dialogue in 1991, but there are only a few minutes worth of speech in the actual game. The standalone speech add-on pack added it in for spaceflight, but the majority of movie clips are still captioned text.

Emu's put together a couple of example clips that show how new speech can be inserted. Obviously this isn't just a recording placed on top of the video - he's managed to trigger the sound file to natively play. If you'd like all the wonderful technical details explaining how this is possible, check out his full explanation here. It would be quite an undertaking, but this demonstrates how it would be possible to do a full audio mod for the game!

I have found a way to add

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Fans continue to do amazing things by digging into the earlier Wing Commander games' code. One of the latest findings has led to the manipulation of the screen transitions between segments of the Wing Commander 2 cutscenes. They've found that there are ten possible ways to wipe the screen and launch the next clip - variants of wiping side to side, diagonally and circular from the middle. This is just one of many findings that Wingnuts have discovered recently, albeit a more visible one that's easy for us to highlight. If you'd like to learn about even more detailed hacking that UnnamedCharacter, delMar and lskovlun have revealed, check out the

CIC Forums

.

As for the wipe index, the following values are possible:

0: wipe down; horizontal line wipe (from top to bottom)
1: wipe left; vertical line wipe (from right to left)
2: wipe up; horizontal line wipe (from bottom to top)
3: wipe right;

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is something I definitely was not expecting. ODVS is well known for upscaling the full motion video includes in Wing Commander 3 and beyond, but this time he's taken a crack at Wing Commander 2. This is more just an experiment than anything - there are no plans for a wholesale enhancement, but it is interesting to see what his AI/neural net tools can do. The sharp pixel edge is removed and some fairly decent smoothing is applied to get the clip up to 1080p. It's honestly better than I was expecting. Even when upscaled, the cutscenes still retain their vintage look!

I decided to follow EmuMusicFan's suggestion and see how the AI handles the cutscenes in WCII.

And the answer is.. it's OK.

It's better than I was expecting, in all honesty. It's not perfectly pin-sharp or anything; but once again, I'm surprised by how well the AI can calculate re-drawing shapes based on what amounts to a mosaic of

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Andrea Contato has a great surprise for everyone today. He's allowed us to share the Wing Commander 2 bonus chapter from his new book Through the Moongate, from Wing Commander and Ultima VII to Portalarium. It includes discussion about some of Chris Roberts' initial expectations for the game and draws heavily on extensive interviews with WC2 director Siobhan Beeman. The chapter provides some really helpful insight into how Origin and the game industry worked in the early '90s. You can grab it in PDF format and read for yourself here (350 k). And if you'd like to check out the rest of the book (or part 1 covering the pre-WC days), check out Andrea's shop here.

The Wing Commander II team was not satisfied, however, to simply improve on what they already had. Despite the limited timeline, there was also the intention to add features and expand the gameplay. Siobhan explains:

“We knew we wanted to

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Ever wonder how medals work in Wing Commander I? Well, I am putting together a guide anyway.

It's not uncommon for discussions at the CIC Forums to touch on the concept of "medal points" and how this influences whether you are awarded a certain star or sometimes nothing at all. It often shows up in the news and on Discord too. Many fans have had a general understanding dating all the way back to Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe, but what exactly are the details? How many points do you get for taking out a Dralthi versus a Snakeir? Certain missions each make a single medal available, but we realized we didn't have a nice concise article that spelled out what that threshold was and how you achieved it. So LOAF finally went and did it! This then naturally led into topics like the hypothetical maximum medal slate that a pilot can earn based on their path through the game, which have been noted

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Earlier this year we reported on an exciting project to incorporate full speech into the PC version of Wing Commander. The game only got such a treatment on the Sega CD edition originally. While extracting the audio for that port has been technically possible for some time, finding a way to get it to correctly link and play in the appropriate places in other versions of the game has been an enormous hurdle. Wingnuts have made tremendous strides in modifying the original engine lately though, and we're now seeing the fruits of that labor. That's not to say any part of this is easy: Destro has had particular challenges categorizing the thousands of separate audio clips into the right order (not to mention coronavirus issues we are all facing!), so the work has been slow going, but he's got a great update to share below. There's even a new teaser of everything in action!

Since the last update I

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

It’s been a while since we’ve gotten an update from Destro on Wing Commander Loader, but he’s back with some exciting news to report! You may recall that this is the project to integrate the recorded Sega CD audio dialogue into DOS WC1.

There have been lots of tweaks under the hood lately. By recoding and enhancing the project’s debugging tools, significant memory overload issues have been mitigated and the mod is more stable than ever. There are just a couple star systems left to go before the main campaign audio is linked up. Although this is very exciting, there are still secondary items with things like comms and the script font that need to be worked through.

It’s possible that we could see a preliminary release in the next few months, which would be quite a treat! You can find a more detailed breakdown of the latest info here. Stay tuned for more updates as they come.

Loader:

More stable that

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Thanks in no small part to UnnamedCharacter's WC Toolbox, we've seen lots of fans undertake some pretty amazing WC1 hacks from inserting new ships to whole language conversions. YPersonified has another slick project, which is a straight clean-up of the original game's text and dialogue. WC1 has a handful of typos, misspellings, mixed up grammar and odd formatting. You might not have even ever noticed it, but there's room for improvement, and (after more than 30 years) YPersonified is doing the improving! Some examples are included below. You can try out what he's fixed so far by unzipping the contents of this file (211 k zip) into your gamedat folder. Help share feedback or point out additional items here.

Wing Commander - Improved GAMEDAT Files

The project of fan-edited GAMEDAT files from Wing Commander for better gameplay experience. The work is mostly focused on slightly demanding but basic

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Howard Day

's

cockpit test

last week quickly turned into something much more. He's maintained the retro visual style plus added extra Hornets and Dralthi to contend with. The result looks like a really awesome Wing Commander shooter! The fun ship designs may look familiar as they are inspired by

Arne from Android Arts

. Click into each of the thumbnails below for an animated gif of the engine in action!

Hey, folks. Playing with some ideas in Unity. if I can get it working well, I'll release it to the community to make your own campaigns and games.

I'd much rather make a system that's simple to read and create with, lightweight, and easily used to make new stuff. You should be able to 1-1 remake the original, but some things... I would recommend against? Faster projectiles, multiplayer options, etc. Anyhow, I dunno. I'm definitely just screwing around at this point, we're a long way away from even my

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

There's a nice new update to the

WC1 Sprite Refresh

project. A lot of work has been done this year on the process for using Blender to create WC1-style sprite models. This should be broadly compatible with different versions of the software, and look for an update soon. Also to whet the appetite of fans anxious for more delicious goodness in the WC1 engine, Goliath has imported a test Piranha. It looks fantastic in the conversion to low-res. We're super impressed with the results!

I owe some long overdue thanks to the CIC and to Wing Commander fans for their consideration of this "sprite refresh" project for the 2018 Fan Project of the Year. Also, I'd like to give an especially huge thank you to my colleagues Howard Day and UnnamedCharacter for their work as their contributions were crucial in getting the results we did. There are so many neat fan projects out there and it is especially cool to

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Destro has posted an update on his exciting project to add official speech recordings into the original Wing Commander. The project began with the audio files off the Sega CD WC port, but he's since gotten ahold of the audio from Super Wing Commander as well. Although he's managed to get this to work, the Sega sound appears to be of higher quality and fit, so he'll plan to stick with that for now. There have also been a variety of coding enhancements made that reduce CPU load and improve overall functionality. The first two systems, Enyo and McAuliffe, are complete and Gateway is in progress. You can check out the full update here or the original prototype demonstration below.

Messed around with Super Wing Commander Audio files (Thanks GuybrushSF) and played around with getting them into the game. Was easy enough to swap and I might make an option to toggle between SegaCD and 3DO versions. They

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Destro has an update on the project to add Sega CD speech to Wing Commander 1. He's recently managed to make some significant improvements to memory utilization and thereby enhance performance. As far as matching up the audio between game versions, he's nearly complete with the basic shipboard audio and will soon be moving to inflight communications. Real life plans have slowed things somewhat, which is something that everyone involved with fan projects should be very familiar with. Nevertheless, fans like Destro continue to persevere and make gradual progress towards amazing things!

I have been picking at it on my free time, which unfortunately has been not much lately. I have fixed many issues including memory leaks and lowered the memory usage from over 5gb to a under a few hundred mb which is more in line with what it should be. I managed this in a few ways but most notably instead of loading

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Destro has an update on his impressive project to add speech into the original Wing Commander. He's carefully extracting the voice narration from the Sega CD edition of the game, but some unexpected challenges have arisen. Fortunately a workaround has been developed, although it's more time consuming than originally planned. The good news is that progress is back on track as he continues to march through the Vega Sector.

Quick update for you: I'm still here and working on it. I had some issues with the SegaCD and HCI's extraction tool. For one reason or another the debriefing audio for Gateway Mission 2 just isn't in the debriefing file. It plays in the game but couldn't find any reference in the Deb.dat file.

Also missing some other dialog like inflight comms and story narration. The files are there but just don't extract using the tool. So after some deep digging I ended up finding a program

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

UnnamedCharacter

has achieved another very cool technological milestone in the digital exploration of Wing Commander 1. Kilrathi Saga introduced invisible cockpits to the original games, but they were not particularly smooth implementations. Unnamed's advancements allow for properly overlays so that indicator labels are retained and the radar isn't transparent to the background. Compare the KS versions up top to the enhanced versions below! Along the way, he encountered some targeting issues due to where the game wanted to put the reticle, but those have already been

resolved

as well.

The Kilrathi Saga version of the game provides the option to remove the cockpit. This is done by simply not displaying the cockpit image, but it does have some negative side effects: all labels are missing, the radar is transparent, and there is no location highlighting on the radar sections when taking a hit.

We can

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

UnnamedCharacter has another new tool to add to his arsenal of powerful WC1 editing and informational programs. The new 'WC1 Inspector' app provides insight into what all is loaded into memory as a player goes through the game. This can help for modding, diagnosing issues or fulfilling simple curiosity. You can grab the file at the CIC Forums and just play around too. Here's more information:

I do not have an update for the Toolbox, but instead a utility program for viewing a snapshot of in-memory game data. It is an outgrowth of the WC1LiveViewer program, except not live anymore and with much more data. It is a bit slow, but it works for my needs.

The Data tab provides a fairly extensive hierarchical view of the game data set and can be filtered using keywords. The InFlight and Mission tabs provide a specialized view of a subset of the data.

As an example, let us enter an asteroid field. Using the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

UnnamedCharacter

has pulled off a very neat trick! He's experimented with higher quality ship sprites in Wing Commander 1 and managed to get them to appear as a sharper looking vessel in the game. It's an exciting development, but there's a couple of caveats here: a higher resolution Tiger's Claw happens to exists for cutscene use, but it's not carved up in various sprite angles and it's only one ship. And this only seems producible in the Kilrathi Saga rather than DOS, so don't expect a full HD conversion of WC1 to be immediately forthcoming, but this shows there's certainly some very interesting potential for future digital exploration!

Ships are represented as a series of individual sprites which are scaled as needed. This becomes obvious as you get closer to a ship since they become very pixelated.

This first row of images is the standard ship sprites.

This second row uses ship sprites which

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Wing Loader project to add full speech to the original (Kilrathi Saga) version of Wing Commander 1 has been out for a couple weeks now. In that time, Destro and a number of fans have been able to put the mod through its paces and play through the Vega Campaign. The time has been put to good use to fix a handful of minor bugs and also add some new features. The user interface now supports the pilot transfer program, has menu elements for launching WC3 now includes in-flight speech comms for The Secret Missions. You can grab the update here (345 meg zip)!

I've just completed a run of Wing Commander using Wing Loader and fixed any issues I encountered.

New in Version 0.82
- Fix multiple issues with lines not triggering, including the final winning cutscene.
- Added Wing Commander 3 to the list of games.
- Added in-flight coms to all the Secret Missions. (Testing Phase)
- Added Wing Commanders Pilot

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Plywood Fiend has created a nifty cutscene to share this weekend. The setting with an iconic Dralthi wing broken off is a cool piece of art on its own, but he also made a corresponding animation with music and captions to turn it into a WC1 style cutscene. This kind of 30-year-throwback creativity makes it so fun to be part of the Wing Commander community!

I've always wanted to make one of these. Alas my pixel art talents aren't quite up to the original game's standards, but perhaps this'll make for a nifty, nostalgic thing for some.

Bit of a headcanon scene here. It takes place during the winning path with the Tiger's Claw finishing the Kilrathi off in Venice and other Confederation ships vanquishing the feline menace in other systems.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

How about some vintage French mag scans? Guybrush_SF has you covered! I've also added English translations to make the reviews easier to read. I love the part where they gush about the game's rare beautiful and branching gameplay, but the text is only part of the appeal. It's also always such a fascinating time capsule to look at how an article like this would have been presented more than thirty years ago. We also have previews from each mag in our archive. Find the Gen 4 preview here and Tilt here (though for the Amiga version, so not a direct relationship).