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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

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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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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;

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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

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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.

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Here's another glorious pair of scans that LOAF just made. It's the advertising slick from Japan. This sell sheet would have been circulated to stores and other outlets in mid 1996 to promote the Japanese language conversion of the game for Playstation. It was apparently scheduled for a September 13 release (compared with March 27 for the English version). There's some absolutely gorgeous Excalibur art here along with plenty of text highlights. This would have certainly hyped me up for the game!

The live image Google Translator on this is pretty wild:

A huge story that takes place in space. A dogfight fighter that flies in galaxies. Bring your life to life with SFX Creatures that show strange movements... If only I was able to participate...

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If you have “Dick Clark” on your WCNews bingo card, today’s your lucky day! Ripplin spotted this gem in a Classic TV repost of Dick Clark’s The Return of TV Censored Bloopers. These are well known outtakes that show up in various compilations, but it’s pretty awesome to see they were broadcast to a huge audience here. In the mid 1990s, Wing Commander 3 and 4 were rare success stories to cross over to the television circuit like this. Long before tech stations like G4 and modern steaming, this was a rare mainstream glimpse into the digital world. It’s kind of a reverse time capsule: for some of our younger fans, this is what passed for prime Sunday evening TV!

Dick Clark presenting what he says "might be the world's first CD-ROM blooper" featuring Hamill in Wing Commander III.

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Dave's garage has hosted an interview with Raymond Chen, one of the developers of Windows 95. He has a fun anecdote about Microsoft's mission to minimize compatibility issues with the operating system. When testing Wing Commander 3, they detected an error that would occur when pressing Control+C to cloak at the end of the game. The conflicting behavior highlighted some broken logic around accepting keystrokes, which spurred them to change how Copy/Paste was interpreted behind the scenes. It's a cool story! I'm not sure who managed to stumble across this scenario: WC3 DOS didn't really run in Windows - it was a classic "Reboot in MS-DOS Mode" game, but this could have come in handy by the time The Kilrathi Saga came around!

Microsoft developers once drove a truck to Egghead in order to buy ONE of EVERYTHING! Dave interviews Raymond Chen, Win95 developer, about the time they took a truck to EggHead

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Today we've got a video about graphically impressive videos from the 1990s. It includes a pretty straightforwards clip from Wing Commander 3. While I never get tired of an opportunity to watch some WC footage, I think the interesting part here is seeing so many of its contemporaries side by side. There's some great and great looking games in this clip, but it also really makes you appreciate how Wing Commander was so ahead of its time! WC3 is the finale chapter at 15:30.

I thought I would spoil you guys with something bigger than usual - an impressive list, if I don't say so myself. A lot of research went to this. The editing was a pain in the rear, but ultimately I think you will find it informative.

----

During the nineties pc gaming was king, pushing the boundaries of what we considered to be cutting-edge. MS-DOS was still the predominant operating system for gaming, only to be superseded by

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CountvonSchnaps has sketched out a wonderful take on the Southampton class destroyer. It's a very sturdy and recognizable design, and the artist has accentuated the iconic features really well. We get an aft view here, so the turrets, engines and small flight deck are in view. It reminds me of the familiar perspective we would see from the Victory's bar or bridge. This is their only Wing Commander designs, but they have many more sci-fi ships in a gallery here.

Another universe (game) I recall with fond memories is the Wing Commander franchise so did my take on the already interesting WC3 Southampton Class destroyer. I made it an upgraded version but kept the general feel and structure intact. It is still armed with 9 dual turrets: 2 heavy anti matter turrets (dual barrel) and 7 laser cannons. It has also a heavy missile launcher and is capable to carry a half wing (2x Arrow light fighters) or a

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Destro recently launched a big update to his Wing Loader program that adds speech to WC1. In preparation for a future update that would aim to add high quality videos into WC3, Destro made this simple patch to upgrade the commercially available GOG DOS edition into an updated Kilrathi Saga Windows version. I think a couple iterations of this have been made by various folks over the years, but it's still good to have a modern update handy. You can grab the patch here (51 meg zip). You can also learn more about and download the current edition of Wing Loader here.

Also on another note, I made up a little patch that will upgrade the GOG version of WC3 to the Kilrathi Saga version. Trying to make Wing Loader work with current purchase options available for the games.

WING COMMANDER 3 GOG TO Kilrathi Saga

1) Install Wing Commander 3 via GOG.
2) Right Click DATA.DAT inside Wing Commander III and use

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AD has done a little digging and found some interesting new aspects to a wild Wing Commander 3 promotion. We've previously reported about the contest to win a flight aboard a "Russian fighter jet" that was part of the WC3 marketing campaign. It was apparently an even larger event than we knew with French adverts to fly a MiG rather than the Su-27 called out in English fine print (despite them using the same fighter jet image). They do seem to refer to separate trip rewards, however, based on slight differences in what the prize packages entail (different date ranges, mention of spending money, supplemental US trip details, etc). The images below also show how there was a red box sleeve band around certain copies of the game to advertise everything, which is pretty neat. These copies are still listed on eBay for collectors out there! English & French

And here's more detail from our previous posts!

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Today we have a new set of scans from the Spanish OKPC magazine. Maxi de Sokar sent us the WC3 Preview about a month ago, and now we have the full review. It once again features that crazy Spanish WC3 art front and center and it also reuses the "La X Continua" theme. There's plenty of glorious screenshots throughout, and the game gets a whopping 96%. Check it out below!