News categories list

  • 03

    Aug

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    Aug

  • 01

    Aug

    Attention Captains, the Elachi are pouring into the Alpha Quadrant from previously undiscovered Iconian space gates in order to abduct helpless people! The Elachi have been doing with their captives, we need every Captain at the ready to help stop their forces. For a limited time only, the Elachi Alert queued event will return to Star Trek Online. From Thursday, August 2nd at 8AM PST til Monday, August 6th at 10AM PST, close these doors to subspace and receive bonus mark rewards. A joint fleet has gathered here to stop them. The fleet consists of science ships that have disabled their weaponry in order to divert all available resources to disabling the gate. We’ll need to protect them from the Elachi until they finish their work. Remember that the science vessels efficiency will drop as they lose crew members to the Elachi. Defend the joint fleet from the Elachi in order to ensure their success.

  • 02

    Aug

    General: Resolved an issue in the Gamma Battlezone when players did not respond to the accept/decline dialog, the match would automatically decline. Resolved an issue that blocked Dominion faction characters from accessing various systems within the game. Resolved a typo in the Gamma Recruit reward which was referencing receiving two boxes when the reward is actually only 1 box when getting an R&D school to 10.

  • 02

    Aug

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    Aug

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    Aug

  • 02

    Aug

    The Alliance has announced that its appeal for mined resources has reached a successful conclusion, having received an overwhelming response from the galactic community. Huge quantities of raw material were delivered to California Gateway over the past week, which will be used to construct an Ocellus starport in the MEL 22 Sector GM-V C2-8 system.


    With the campaign at an end, Alliance official Torvan Dast issued the following statement:


    "We are grateful for the efforts made by those pilots who helped bring this initiative to fruition. Construction of this starport will make the long journey to the California Nebula safer for traders and colonists alike."


    Construction of the new starport is expected to begin soon. Pilots who contributed to the initiative can now collect their rewards from California Gateway in the Synuefai EB-R C7-5 system.

  • 02

    Aug

    Aranbarahun Purple Creative, an independent organisation based in the Aranbarahun system, has announced plans to build a massive cargo ship to transport goods out of the booming system.


    In support of this goal, Aranbarahun Purple Creative has placed an open order for various commodities, and has promised to reward pilots who deliver these commodities to Barnes Terminal in the Aranbarahun system. The organisation has also placed a kill order on all ships on its wanted list, to ensure that those contributing commodities to the campaign can do so safely.


    The campaign begins on the 2nd of August 3304 and will run for one week. If the final target is met earlier than planned, the campaign will end immediately.

  • 02

    Aug

  • 02

    Aug

    Ace1000ks1975 recently posted the endgames for Secret Missions 1, and that led me to an interesting discovery. Most people are very familiar with the winning endgame to SM1 where the Emperor executes Prince Gilkarg for his loss of the Sivar Dreadnought. What happens when you lose? There's a devastating cutscene that shows enslaved humans working away at the Kilrathi Illudium Mines... "forced to work in misery until dying from the radiation in the ore... their toil fueling the Kilrathi advance towards the Human homeworlds." Yikes!


    But what the heck is illudium, and where else do we see it in Wing Commander? It's actually first referenced on the blueprints included with WC1. Our missiles are powered by an Illudium PEW 36 warhead. Neat. I dug a little deeper and found a third Wing Commander reference in the most unlikely place: one of the Privateer 2 news bulletins references mining for

  • 01

    Aug

  • 02

    Aug

    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.

    wc_toolbox1t.gifwc_toolbox2t.gifwc_toolbox3t.gif

    This second row uses ship sprites which
  • 01

    Aug

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    Aug

    Pix

    recently managed to locate a really awesome

    review

    of Wing Commander 3 from the magazine PC Zone. In line with the game's branching paths and dialog choices during cutscenes, the article actually lets you read through and jump to individual subsections based on what you think. In the end, these choices lead to two different conclusions and review scores! That's pretty clever. And there's a bonus interview with Mark Hamill afterwards. For more awesome finds like this for Wing Commander and other Origin series, check out Pix's

    Origin Adventures

    website.

    pczone_wc3_review1t.jpgpczone_wc3_review2t.jpgpczone_wc3_review3t.jpgpczone_wc3_review4t.jpgpczone_wc3_review5t.jpgpczone_wc3_review6t.jpg

    I love this Wing Commander 3 review from the February 96 issue. It’s written in the form of a choose your own adventure complete with a choice of final scores. As much as I like the game, the comments on performance on lower performance machines are fair enough.