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Scout recently found this spicy post on the Game Collecting Reddit. A user named charitysmyth1 had just acquired a copy of Wing Commander 2. Much to their surprise, it contained a collection of vintage early '90s adult media. These look like rather tame items all-in-all, but they might have been considered pretty racy before the internet age. Although not pictured, it sounds like the box did include the WC2 disks at least!

Scored some big box PC games over the weekend. What I found in Wing Commander II completely caught me off guard.

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Nightball06 has been on a load road to go from 2D sketches to 3D model. After a couple years refining the design, the digital representation is nearly complete. He's spent a lot of time working to get the shape close to the original, but one area that he has taken some artistic liberties on were the engines. They look pretty cool! Now that he's got a file that can be manipulated, he's exploring where to take it next - either through 3D animation or maybe a physical print!

Some final updates. Haven’t gone far on the animation part yet & I am still looking for someone who could turn the Blender file into a 3D-printable file.

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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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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.

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We are off and running well into the 2024 now, so it's time to conclude our annual new year's poll. We've swapped in a new one about stealth fighters in Wing Commander. The question this time asks which craft you think sowed the most chaos, did the most damage and wreaked the most havoc over the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list of cloaking fighters. In order to make the list of options more concise, we've narrowed the field to generally "enemy" presenting ships. So you won't see Blair's Excalibur that destroyed Kilrah, Earth's defensive screen of cloaking Arrows, the Recon Excaliburs that first scouted the Nephilim or the 28th Century Arrow Eclipse. But there's still some fun picks to choose from below!

We've had a great run of impressive fan projects this past year, and we expect that to continue well into the future! The results show that most fans are eagerly anticipating what's

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Sorting through Wing Commander Prophecy's cutscenes means stopping everything each time I come across another exterior shot of the Midway hidden in a longer cutscene.

Where ya goin tonight???

In response to your many cards and letters:

• The G'wriss jump doesn't have text
• The G'mar jump isn't on the DVD (everyone boos forever)
• There's no H'rissith jump scene

Visit the massively expanded Prophecy Holovids video archive here!

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Found a Wing Commander III bug! In the first scramble mission (B1 or C1) you are automatically assigned three wingmen: Weasel (a scripted death) and then Maniac and Mitchell. If one is shot down, they're replaced by a rotation: Vagabond, Bacon Boy, Hobbes, Flint, Cobra, Vaquero, Maniac, Vagabond. But it doesn't check for duplicates, so you can end up with two Maniacs or two Vagabonds! It's unlikely to ever happen during regular gameplay because there isn't really anything in the mission that will kill six of your wingmen.

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It's autumn now where GOG is based, but they've already run their lengthy autumn sale. That's not a problem though, because they've just launched a big sale to celebrate their 15th anniversary! The Wing Commander series is discounted once again, and this is a "proper" across-the-board markdown. Each title is its customary 75% off, which means less than $12 for the whole series! Now's a great time to digitize your collection. Thank you to Drachenhannes for the tip!

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AI chatbots, AI generated art and AI everything else are super hot this year, and the CIC is always working hard to keep up with the latest trends. So we've put our best engineers and computer scientists (Kris) on developing our own Wing Commander generative art engine (beta). Type a Wing Commander topic in the box, hit the button, and see what you get! Keep in mind, there may be a few quirks...

 

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I think I might have found a neat reference. Ultima fans, follow me for a moment. Here are screenshots of (some of) bartenders from Privateer. The heads are animated in front of a background that was rendered in 3D Studio.

A larger version of each background is actually stored in the game which gives you a better view. They're for a cut feature so don't ever actually display. But if you look closely there are four different labels for the liquor applied to a variety of different bottle shapes.

But we can get even more detail because the original 3D models and their textures have survived all these years in dev material we've recovered at the CIC!

So Ultima fans: is that last bottle not a map of Britannia?!

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One of John Nelson's original Wing Commander designs a while back was the sturdy Border Worlds Avenger. Although it's super impressive what people can do with Lego bricks, there's always room for improvement, and he's taken a second run at tightening things up a bit. The results look really solid. Most of the hull plating is a bit darker and the major structural elements are bit thicker with more mass. Hit the comment link to let him know what you think!

The last of my Lego updates, the Avenger. I went ground up to give it a more game accurate boxy and thicker look and the front cockpit cover had to change and I found the parts to do it. Enjoy.

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We are very excited to finally unveil the finished version of elend's physical Dralthi model! As you can see, it's absolutely exquisite - just a sight to behold! The detail is completely next level. All of the angels, curves, panel lines, intake serrations, tubes and more have been carefully sculpted and assembled by hand. The paint has been layered for rich dimensionality and there's even a Kilrathi pilot in the cockpit! All told, it likely took some five hundred hours to complete, and it's an amazing counterpart to the Banshee that he built a number of years back. Enjoy the pictures!

This is a scratch built Dralthi from the Wing Commander games series. More specifically, this is a reimagination by "Hangar B Productions", which I used as inspiration. I started this last year in June and basically worked daily on it, probably 2 hours on average. In hindsight I should have planned some things

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Today marks twenty-three years since the Wing Commander Movie was released! It's hard to believe it's been so much time since we - and many of you - lined up at theaters. A lot has changed since then. Sure, there are still plenty of snarky podcasts that do their thing with it, but I've also noticed a big shift in the last few years. Lately, a lot of people have given it a second chance and can appreciate it for what it is. While the film remains hard to find on physical disc, it's also nice to see that it's once again easy to rent or buy on various streaming services. If you're checking it out again, let us know. We're always down for a rewatch or discussion!

Also if you missed it from a few weeks back, I wanted to point out Klavs' clean-up of the movie's universe map. It's pretty slick!

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Scriveners Clan's legal ownership of their dredger has been supported by the civil rights organisation Advocacy.
The ancient Dredger-class bulk cruiser, currently located in the Oochost PC-C c29-0 system, is inhabited by a nomadic tribe descended from the vessel's original crew. Orion University claims that the cruiser is its commercial property, but has failed to make contact with its occupants.
Rhiannon Grady, director of Advocacy, explained:
"For centuries, there has been widespread legislation to protect remote communities from cultural contamination. These laws apply to micro-societies, such as those found aboard generation ships, that evolved in isolation."
"Therefore, Orion University should not presume to deprive over ten thousand people of the only home they have ever known. Unlike cases such as the Golconda, which requested emergency assistance, in this case we are legally and

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The spacefaring tribe that lives aboard an ancient dredger has refused to allow Orion University to take possession of the vessel.
Vox Galactica published an eye-witness account by freelance reporter Casey Kilpatrick from the Oochost PC-C c29-0 system:
"Once the Scriveners Clan was found, it wasn't long before Orion University arrived. Their megaship, Scientia Aeterna, remotely disabled the dredger's hyperdrive using a series of override codes. These had been unearthed from the university's archives, along with evidence that the ship – commissioned in 3088 as Dredger J-403 – legally belongs to them."
"Despite being unable to escape, the Scriveners have made a stand. All requests to communicate were roundly ignored. I've watched several craft try to dock with the dredger, only to be met with sealed airlocks and an electrified hull."
"It's clear that these people are unwilling to give up their

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LOAF followed the Bricks with Wings instructions that we posted about last year, and I'm in love with the results. I don't actually see the plans available on the BWW site anymore, but fortunately LOAF was able to source all of the necessary pieces and make a tiny squadron of Confed fighters from the WC1 Vega Sector fleet.

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Today marks a whopping thirty years since Wing Commander 2 first shipped to stores! WC2 was the first game I played on a brand new shiny 486 back in the day. I learned how to install a sound card just so I could hear the glorious full speech intro, and that opening theme music still gives me chills. This remastered WC2 soundtrack by Jason Walton is still as one of my favorite fan creations of all time:

For many years, I could just fire up any random mission at any time and just lose myself for hours. I'd invite everyone to do the same to celebrate, but if you're not in a position to jump in the cockpit, re-watching out 25th anniversary livestream is the next best thing! Here it is broken up into several parts. That was a long night, but it was super fun!

Happy birthday to Wing Commander II, one of the greatest games ever made! Thirty years ago today we learned that our friends were all dead and

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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

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When ODVS first set out to remaster the video from Wing Commander games, the DVD source footage for WC4 and Prophecy was an obvious choice. It wasn't clear whether the very low quality WC3 material could be significantly upgraded. But not only was Owen able to pull together a complete cut back in July, but now he's taken it up another level and made version 2.0 available! Everything is here in 1080p at 30 frames per second, and the overall contrast has been fixed throughout. Check out the trailer and grab it below! Note that there is not yet a way to integrate the clips into the game, but this pack solves a big chicken-and-egg problem. If enhanced videos didn't exist, fans wouldn't have a reason to figure out how to include them. Now they do!

• Wing Commander 3: version 2.0 (3.7 gig zip)

To celebrate Wing Commander CIC's birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the Wing Commander franchise, I'm

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eddieb is back with an all new Flight Commander! The original was a very popular Wing Commander-themed modding engine that formed the core of multiple fan projects about a decade ago. It ran its course with the technology available at the time, but now Flight Commander 2 is here and ready to give budding modders a brand new platform to launch from! It features advanced support for shipboard sequences and a slick recreation of the Vision Engine. It even runs in a web browser! It's still in the basic stages, but you can walk around, jump in a fighter and take pot shots in space. Jump straight in via the weblink here. Currently, you must use Firefox for the web demo to work. You can also download a Windows standalone version from the CIC forums here.

Flight Commander 2 is in the works. It's still very early, but here is the first demo. You can walk around on foot on your carrier. Fire guns,