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DefianceIndustries

has revisited the two iconic Confed heavy fighters of Wing Commander 3. Both the Excalibur and Thunderbolt have been retextured, and the results look great. Thanks to the new normal maps, they have excellent detail without overdoing the greebles.

So I was looking over my stuff on lunch break the other day and realized that I hadn't done any WC3 skins for my Tbolt or Excalibur. I am pleased to say this has been rectified. I also did a few small tweaks to the normal maps to make a few things pop (pun intended) that wasn't as obvious before.

As a side note: a few folks have asked if they can use my renders in their personal projects. My thoughts on that in general are that if I post it up here on the forums the community is perfectly welcome to them. Go forth and be creative! I only ask that if you do use my renders I get a nod somewhere in the credits is all.

As always fellow wing

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Christopher Lee has been learning how to use the Maya and After Effects programs for graphics animation, and here's one of his recent tests. He used the Wing Commander 3 introduction as a model to emulate. The results are pretty close! Of course, this also gives us an excuse to post the fantabulous actual WC3 intro for comparison, so enjoy that too. It never gets old.

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During the CIC 20th Birthday celebrations we

launched

our

Game Cabinet

feature. This allows you to try out the WC1 and WC2 rolling demos from within your browser - no installation required! By tweaking a few things, we have been able to unlock a bit of extra performance so those demos now run more smoothly. But more importantly, we have been able to add the WC3 playable demo to the collection! The demo features a trailer cinematic followed by a playable mission, although it requires a fairly beefy machine to run completely smoothly. Check it out

here

!

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Today we have a gorgeous Wing Commander 3 spread posted by the Spanish magazine PCMania in 1994. It features a lot of familiar prerelease art, plus gorgeous renders of the Thunderbolt, Longbow and Arrow. Gunnery and flight control are looking good too. The game flow backdrops in WC3 are some of my favorite in the series. At the conclusion of the six page article, the reviewer gives the game a 92% score. Thanks to Maxi de Sokar for the find!

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LeHah is back with yet another fantastic Wing Commander collectible! Already the proud owner of such artifacts as a signed movie soundtrack and double-signed movie poster, he's set a new standard for impressive Wing Commander autographs. Here is his Wing Commander 3 poster with (clockwise from top right) Tom Wilson, François Chau, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and Mark Hamill all-in-one. Rhys-Davies was his latest addition, and the actor even added "Paladin" to it unprompted. LeHah has been hitting up various conventions and sending away merchandise for years, but it's getting increasingly nerve-wracking to make progress with this one. While the various autographs have cost some $600 in direct money to obtain, the associated time and effort makes it increasingly priceless. I don't know if I'd be able to put this one in the mail and hope for it to return with a sixth signature!

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Some silly developer jokes slipped into the Wing Commander III PSX credits!

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Symphonic Remakes is back with a new reorchestration of a classic Wing Commander track. Up to this point, their focus has been on WC1/2, but now they've jumped forward for a new take on one of George Oldziey's famous WC3 creations. Strike and Escort mission music is first up. Enjoy below!

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The team behind the WC4 Fan Remake has put together another informative article on some of the unexpected bonuses that have spun off from their core efforts on The Price of Freedom. While working with WC3 assets to better prepare for their WC4 adventure, they've learned a lot about the game's background formats and FMV integration. Some of these experimentally upscaled WC3 artifacts are below. They've even made a high quality Arrow, since that ship also appears in WC4, and they naturally wanted to see what it looked like in WC3 colors! (Spoiler alert: it's gorgeous!) Check out the full article at the WCRespace.com site here.

It was not our intention to port Wing Commander 3 yet, but rather unintentionally we’ve ended up with a bunch of Heart of the Tiger updates.

EXCUSE ME, SIR. DID YOU SAY THE VICTORY?

“Wait what? Wing Commander 3?” I hear you asking.

We don’t want you to get the wrong idea –

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OurStorySoFar

has posted a video review of Wing Commander 3. This one focuses on the Playstation port. While this is decidedly not the best version of the game, there's some neat things such as color VDUs and other interface changes that are interesting to see if you're most familiar with the PC version. The author specifically cites inclusion of the Hobbes explanation clip as one of the reasons to play it on consoles and describes their exclusion on PC as a 'bug'. Amazingly, this was a conscious decision due to disc space limitations, but being able to see all of the extra scenes is definitely a plus here. You might consider going for the 3DO version if you're going to try a port out though. The game was actually enhanced in a variety of ways to better suit the console pacing there - in addition to the extra video content.

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It's Friday, so listening to some grumpy gripes seems like a fitting end to a rough week.

Gray Ghosts

Old Grizzled Gamers

has written a quasi-review of Wing Commander 3, and as you might expect, they have some strong thoughts about it. The author is actually harkening back to the 3DO version of WC3, which has some

exciting differences

compared to the PC and Playstation editions. He starts off making fun of all the repetitive transitions, and while most of us quickly turned these off, I don't actually recall off the top of my head if this option was readily available on consoles. Of course, even those transitions were jaw-dropping back in 1994. Despite a few other aspects that haven't aged particularly gracefully, it's clear that they have a soft spot for the game and all its everlasting charm. Check out the full article

here

.

The space combat is what made the game engaging, but it isn’t what made the

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Docteur J from Oldies Games TV is back with a new Wing Commander series. He's covered a number of Wing Commander games on his French YouTube channel over the years, and now it's time for a playthrough of Wing Commander 3. As a special bonus, he's manually splicing in the dramatically enhanced HD videos from ODVS so everything is super sharp. When he started all of this, the audience was mostly limited to French speakers, but YouTube's auto translate feature opens the world up to everyone. Hit the closed captions icon in the bottom and the gear logo for your preferred language. If you're only used to hearing Wing Commander in just one language, it can be a whole new experience to hear a new dub!

Hi all! Here is the start of Let's Play on Wing Commander 3 with the videos in 1080p. Bravo to Owen Davies for his work on the videos.

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ODVS has a new visual treat for everyone. Even though there's not currently a method to swap the videos into the game itself, he's taken a shot at upscaling the intro cutscene to Wing Commander 3. He recently had tremendous success performing a massive enhancement on the WC4 and Prophecy clips, and this builds on those techniques. Fortunately in this case, he did have the slightly higher quality Playstation clips to work with, although they're still only 320x160 res at 15 fps. It's not too clear if there's a path forward from here with The Heart of the Tiger, but it's still awesome to see! Definitely check out how much more detail there is with the ships and faces.

Hello all, it's been a while since I showed you all something (I've got another project on the go), but I just put this together this evening, tinkering around and experimenting - I thought you might like to see it

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AD found this one on a new YouTube channel, 3DO World. It's a trailer for the 3DO version of Wing Commander from an in-store video sampler tape. Like the full version of WC3 on this console, the video quality depicted here is pretty good with minimal artifacting and solid colors. The trailer is fairly short overall, and you only get a quick shot of the gameplay at the end. Although the engine might look low res like the Playstation port, a handful of missions and features have been jazzed up in a very compelling way. It's definitely worth giving this one a try if you get an opportunity! You can find our collection of different WC3 trailers in CIC Holovids!

This is a trailer of the 3DO game, Wing Commander 3. This appeared on a VHS tape titled "3DO Video Sampler 5" that was distrusted with retailers circa 1996 in the US.

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Cloud_Man has created a neat Wing Commander 3 tribute trailer. He's put in quite a bit of work to edit the clips in such a way as to create a slick mini narrative. It's great to see people still experimenting with these elements and having fun like this more than twenty-five years later. Check it out below!

Wing Commander 3 - Heart of The Tiger (1994) - Tribute Trailer. Squadron 42 is currently my most anticipated video game. The said game is planned to enter beta stage later this year, and probably scheduled for full release sometime next year. In its anticipation, I decided to go through previous games made by the same team. Wing Commander 3 is easily my most favorite of em all. Played the whole game again and recorded footage to create little tribute trailer that covers some aspects of the story. For full experience of this timeless classic and emotional roller coaster ride, find the game on

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Swizzley has posted a vintage video review for Wing Commander 3. This might not sound like a big deal, but in February 1995 this would have been on the bleeding edge of multimedia technology. A full ten years before YouTube first came online, something like this was a very rare treat. Video downloads were painful on dialup, so these were distributed on disc with Interactive Entertainment Magazine. They were one of the first to include CD-ROMs with material like this, so we got some really cool features such as this video review of WC4, an early '90s Richard Garriott interview and neat Privateer 2 / WC4 high tech previews. Today we're used to carefully timed embargoes lifting days before a global launch, but this would have represented a lightning fast turnaround at the time (recorded in December to hit newstands in January). The humor doesn't always age well, but it's still a fascinating time

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Pix

has expanded his Wing Commander archive with a scan of the relatively rare

Wing Commander III: The Ultimate Strategy Guide

. It's decidedly the fourth best guide book for WC3 after

Origin's Official Guide

,

The Authorized Combat Guide to WC3

and the

Japanese Guide to WC3 on Playstation

. But while the other two English books are included freebies with the game on

GOG

, the Ultimate Strategy Guide is lesser known and harder to find. It's certainly a very interesting artifact in its own way. Hopefully more fans can

check it out now

!

I recently realised I'd missed it out so if the other 3 guides weren't enough for you, there is now a scan of the Wing Commander 3 Ultimate Strategy Guide in the disorganised list that I call a downloads page.

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Darkmage DMJC has some great news for WC4 fans on Linux. After years of steady progress, he reports that the latest build of Wine successfully runs GOG's DVD version of the game. There's a particular checkbox in the winecfg file that you need to make sure is unmarked, but after that, it should be fairly smooth sailing. As with anything like this, there's always the potential for unique hardware/software configurations to produce new hiccups, so hit up the CIC Forums or Discord if you encounter issues!

Wing Commander IV DVD edition works on Linux! Set this in winecfg. If that box is ticked it fails. Also run regsvr32 Mpeg2DecFilter.ax and regsvr32 ac3filter.ax to make sure the codecs are installed.

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The WC4 Fan Remake team has a new update to share regarding shields. Wing Commander 4's game engine didn't visually depict shields for capships: it's one of those things your brain either glosses over or subconsciously imagines was there all along. We got some gorgeous effects during cutscenes, but you don't experience them in flight. After 26 years, that's finally being rectified with a fancy animated texture technique. The thumbnail below expands into an animated gif so you can see the sparkly results in action! You can also read about the whole process in a new article at WCRespace.com.

We’ve tried to create something similar, but not identical. The FMV has flat, circular ripples which can be carefully placed. We have no control over where the player fires and, if the player fired into a corner, it would clip into the geometry or extend past it (as seen in WCP). Instead we project an animated

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The war toils on for the crew making the WC4 Fan Remake. With a playable demo still in the works, the team has firmed up a potential set of minimum specs to get everything running smoothly. I haven't kept up with modern PC specs, but these seem quite reasonable for the level of graphical fidelity and performance we've seen from previews. With that being said, now is your chance to voice any concern if something else should be supported.

With the help of EmuMusicFan I believe we now have some minimum specs.He helped test with low GPU memory and movie playback optimizations to get 60fps 1080p h265 running at speed with only 2 cores.

Minimum specs: (No shadows, no post process)
2 Core CPU
2GB GPU (Probably 860M/750Ti)
8GB Memory

Recommended specs:
4 Core CPU
6GB GPU (Something like a 980Ti)
8GB Memory

Ideal specs:
4 Core CPU
8GB GPU (Something like a 1070Ti)
16GB Memory

If these specs seem too high for anyone give

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We posted an exciting trailer this past weekend that gave everyone a solid update on all of the progress being made for the WC4 Fan Remake. The team has also published a new article on classic assets and how they differ from the fancy new models. The original models and textures are used as an index to ensure the new content is spot on. There will even be an easy switch in the game that allows players to swap between the old and new graphics. Read up on what they're doing at WCRespace here.

One of our primary aims with this remaster is to create a version of the gameplay which matches the FMV as closely as possible. This means creating new models based on the FMV. That said it is fairly standard practice for these kinds of projects to offer a classic mode where you can play the game unaltered.

Likewise when the remaster is eventually released you will be able to switch between Defiance Industries'