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Today's we've got a meaty new article with some exciting content updates for the WC4 Fan Remake. The team is currently working on recreating the WC4 demo, which is notable for including a Stormfire cannon pickup floating in space. Unlike in the full game, this gives the Hellcat a unique special weapon for the mission. They've also spent considerable time working out how the spaceflight physics will work. It will incorporate some interesting inertial cues from WC1, WC2 and Prophecy. You can read all about it at WCRespace.com here.

As we work towards the demo release there are three main areas to focus on:

• Applying all the now-known stats values to the game objects
• Running the mission scripts for all of the objects
• Improving the AI

The first of these is largely done and has driven a lot of new work; one piece of which is implementing the stormfire gun.

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Here's a potentially promising teaser of what might be possible for the WC4 Fan Remake. Pedro's recently done some experimentation with AI-assisted video enhancement, and the results are surprisingly positive. He reports that the ability to upscale still images is fantastic, so this will help sharpen up the game flow sets at least. There's a lot of work yet to be done to refine the video elements, but this promising technology will likely improve by the time the remake is ready to go. What's already possible seems to border on something from Star Trek, so we can't wait to see how it develops!

For stills it's excellent, we can definitely use this tech to up res the room images. For motion a lot of artifacts creep in.Still by the time WCIV is good to go I bet this technology will be good enough.If they can fix eyes in motion it would be useable; currently it's recognising shapes rather than features.

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Development on the WC4 Fan Remake has been generally slow of late, but Pedro has a few neat updates to report. He's done some testing with ODVS' fantastic enhanced video with great results. It'll be a perfectly complement to the gameplay updates that have been at the forefront so far. There has also been some discussion on new features like modern gamepad controller support as well as improving some of the development tools as well. There's still quite a bit of work to go, but it's good to hear the team is still on it!

To be honest development paused for a while, but I came back to it last night, did a few fixes; tested it with ODVS' AI upscale. It looks good, don't worry we'll be incorporating the best possible video when the time comes. I did make some progress on a particle editor, but Rear Admiral Tarsus is offering to help out with tools (which I am super grateful for). We have a potential

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Pedro reports that work steadily continues on the WC4 Fan Remake project. Although he claims that all of the various technical hurdles they're facing aren't news, I would argue that this provides important context to just how complex managing a modern fan project can be. A great many projects hit a wall and fail to progress beyond this point when the excitement of a flashy launch fades and the technical foundation work grinds on, so it's wonderful to see that the team is facing these challenges head on. What they've already accomplished is pretty neat too! Check out the trailer below for a sample.

Wing IV is fighting a lot of unexciting battles on multiple fronts - loading gameplay scripts to in order to load FMVs you've already seen, which requires loading subtitles, and branching options - which you've already seen but need to be implemented anyway. And then there are tasks like updating the

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We're at that time of the year when most Wingnuts get busy with holiday business and fan project activity briefly slows. Nevertheless, Pedro managed to share this new screenshot of the WC4 Fan Remake going ultrawide. It looks pretty darn sharp, and all of that gorgeous screen real estate will come in extra handy during a dogfight!

Been out of action with flu, work craziness and most significantly moving, I haven't even had chance to set up the server again yet so I'm afraid I've made very little progress... but with the extra desk space I got a new monitor so I can start testing Ultra Wide resolutions and HDR.

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This is a big one, folks! After years of hard work, the WC4 Fan Remake team is super excited to finally unveil the first playable demo for Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom Remastered. Today's release is a fancy update to the original WC4 Demo released on October 19, 1995. As we've seen through their many technical articles released over the years, it takes a lot of foundation building (design, art, sound, coding, user interface and much more) to reach a milestone like this. Detailed instructions have been published to help people get things going. There's even a snazzy demo trailer below! You can grab the installer package here (900 meg exe). Keep in mind that this is still a beta level artifact and the team very much appreciates your feedback. Give it a try and have fun!

We are supremely proud to announce that the first playable demo of Wing Commander IV - The Price of Freedom:

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We're happy to kick off the new week with another exciting update from the WC4 Remastered team! They've posted a new article where they dig into the development of the game's third mission. It's the first time players get to experience a new fighter, so this includes deploying a second cockpit and implementing alternate HUD locations for certain items. There's also new information about the ability to play bespoke music at certain contextually relevant points during a mission. There's even a video about this in more depth! Check out the full article here.

Getting the new cockpit in wasn’t smooth sailing, though. The Hellcat cockpit was held together by a number of hacks from our first trailer. Now, everything is data-driven and reusable, with no hardcoding in sight, making future cockpits much easier to implement.

Each ship can now have its own custom HUD layout, necessitated by the different

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We've got a delicious update today on WC4 Remastered. Pedro reports that the team is digging deep into the ground missions of the game. As is usual on a project like this, once they started peeling back the layers of the original, things got complicated. This has necessitated some clever solutions, which have been detailed in a new WCRespace article. A few options include taking some artistic license and deviating from the original experience slightly, but this should produce a more engaging product overall.

The first issue was to add support for loading the terrain and we had to ensure that the models which we had full transforms for lined up exactly as they did in the original game.Classic buildings and terrain.

We have accomplished this and added support for terrain collisions. The ~1 million vertex original terrain can be rendered on modern hardware in a single draw call – but still that’s

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The WC4 Remastered team is back with a big new update on the significant progress that the team has made over the last couple months. Although they haven't formally published any updates, they've been very busy at work on several fronts. Some key menu / interface tasks and video integration have been completed. The team has made some excellent asteroid fixes and fleshed out the first few introductory missions. There's even a beautiful new Clarkson class transport model. Head over to WCRespace for the full article on what's new!

Over Christmas and the early part of this year progress has been excellent, not only have we added all the missing UI menus but two more missions are now fully playable. Unfortunately it’s now ODVS’ turn to be overwhelmed with work so we will hold off showing those menus until he can replace my programmer art with his usual high standard.

For this article we will take a look

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ODVS has a nice treat for German Wing Commander fans (of which there are many!). With the help of Bernd Vollbrecht and Dr. Gerd Naumann, he's redone the audio for the WC4 Remastered trailer. It's a wonderful video, and now more people can listen to it in their native language! You can download the playable demo for the WC4 Fan Remake yourself here (900 meg exe).

Here's a little something for German-speaking Wingnuts, courtesy of MrCoffeeee:

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The WCRespace team is back with a new update on the WC4 Fan Remake. There's a whole new article by Pedro that goes into great detail about the game's user interface. He says it's not the most glamorous subject, and it might be tedious to design and program, but I love these liminal console screens. They're critical glue that helps sell the total experience. An especially big deal this time around is the adjustment to accommodate 16:9 widescreen settings. It takes some finesse to make them look authentic compared to the original 4:3 shape. The fourth and fifth images below are especially stark - they compare the original loading screen with today's update!

Now brute forcing in new UI wouldn’t be impossible but that removes some of the nostalgia. No problem, we’ll just upscale them like we do the rooms… except we optionally support 16:9 by zooming in on the gameflow rooms, and there is no way

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Oh man I never noticed how obvious it was that the Axius corridors were the Lexington set relit.

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This week the WC4 Fan Remake team has an update on sound effects. They revealed last month that a new composer had signed on, but a specific audio effects specialist, MrCoffeeee, is now also on the team to punch up what you hear even further. This is one of those things that your nostalgia brain might think was just fine back in 1996, but when bringing those dated chirps forward 25 years, the quality don't match the stellar visuals and music that fans are creating for the remake. Check out the sample below to hear what the updated version sounds like! Don't forget to visit the full article over at WCRespace.com for more background on today's update.

Recreating sounds for Wing Commander 4 turns out to be a task on its own. When playing the old lady again in 2021, it turned out that the game holds some very cool sounds for its time but unfortunately in low audio quality. In order to save space in the

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KilrathiKiller stopped in to share the latest in a series of Wing Commander wallpapers. This one commemorates Wing Commander 4! They feature nice high resolution 4K logos that look crisp against a space backdrop. If you don't recall his previous iterations, that might be because they date back to 2008 and 2009. We're always happy to see someone come back around and keep plugging away on a project. Hopefully he completes his Prophecy artwork before 2030 - but in case he doesn't, we'll be here when he's ready!

So was sitting here with some time on my hands and decided to make a little 4K wallpaper for fans of Wing Commander 4. Possibly my favorite of the series. Hope you like. I have both just the logo and one with a background. If anyone remembers I always had a version with the characters in background but finding pics for 4K that don't look terrible is really tough from something that old. I

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The WC4 Remastered team has a new article on their journey to improve in-flight comms. The videos that come across your VDU in flight are far smaller and more compressed than the game's regular FMV, so getting these tiny clips to look good is an extra challenge. So, ODVS has incorporated several technologies to try to bring them up to modern standards. Check out the new video below to see how they look!

A future release of the project's demo will share these in action. In the mean time, if anyone is an expert at extracting Playstation videos and would like to contribute to research in this area, let them know!

Aside from the miniscule resolution of the source material, another major problem is compression. In order to fit all those thousands of frames onto the game’s CD-ROMs, they were quite heavily compressed using mid-90s techniques. The unfortunate side-effect for us is that they’re blocky

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Stinger has released his long awaited and highly anticipated update to wcdx! It now fully supports Wing Commander 2 and both Special Operations packs. This means a handful of annoying bugs and incompatibilities have been fixed, thus enabling the Kilrathi Saga version of the game to compete with DOSBox/GOG as the ideal way to play the originals in 2020. This release also includes bonus tools to explore the game's data files and listen to the soundtrack. Grab it below!

wcdx version 2.2 is here! After years of empty promises and unmet expectations, I can finally present to you the next official release of wcdx!

What's that, you say? Version 2.2? But what ever happened to 2.0 and 2.1? Last anybody knew, there was just an alpha that kinda-sorta worked for WC2! What gives?

wcdx gives, that's what gives! Specifically, it gives you Wing Commander 2, and Special Operations 1, and Special Operations 2!

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Stinger

has released a long-awaited update to his

WCDX

patch for Kilrathi Saga. The program makes a number of critical updates to the game's DirectX implementation in order to improve compatibility on modern computers. WC1 has been the primary focus, but the last couple updates provide initial support for Wing Commander 2. This update refines that and improves stability and smoothness of your WC2 game in Windows. Grab the files

here

and give it a try!

General changes:

• Patcher internals have been completely overhauled. Ideally, you won't notice any difference, but you should now get better error messages when things go wrong.
• Due to implementation divergence in the underlying platform, wcdx now handles scaling of the game's graphics internally instead of relying on the operating system.
• Restored mouse cursor positioning for all games.
• Much better multi-monitor support.

WC2:

• Fixed a couple of

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Stinger

has released a long-awaited update to his

WCDX

patch for Kilrathi Saga. The program makes a number of critical updates to the game's DirectX implementation in order to improve compatibility on modern computers. WC1 has been the primary focus, but the last couple updates provide initial support for Wing Commander 2. This update refines that and improves stability and smoothness of your WC2 game in Windows. Grab the files

here

and give it a try!

General changes:

• Patcher internals have been completely overhauled. Ideally, you won't notice any difference, but you should now get better error messages when things go wrong.
• Due to implementation divergence in the underlying platform, wcdx now handles scaling of the game's graphics internally instead of relying on the operating system.
• Restored mouse cursor positioning for all games.
• Much better multi-monitor support.

WC2:

• Fixed a couple of

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It's probably only really interesting to me, but here's two minutes of the Dorkir VDU footage from the various insert shots done for the Wing Commander movie. I rotated, cropped, and did some minor stabilization on this clip to make it slightly more viewable. The best looking section is about a minute in, but the low quality and partially cut-off shots are due to how it was shot or the source tapes it came from. You can see that it's a bit more WC1 Dorkir-looking than we thought before, because you can't really get a good or clear shot of it from the Blu-ray edition.

LOAF added this image for context:

For comparison, here's the Wing Commander I Dorkir design. The movie version looks like they just elongated the 'cab'. But it's pretty neat to watch a movie so many times and still be able to see a new spaceship.

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DefianceIndustries

has completed the first large scale base for the Secret Ops

Model Upgrade Pack

. This is a cool design, and the tiny little flight deck is a nice touch. In addition to making it much more detailed and gorgeous to look at, he's also significantly amped up the destroyability. There's potential to take out individual components for a future project, which is pretty neat. Enjoy the pictures!

Further updates! Got the first of the major stations imported: the Confed Relay. It plays a larger role than the other stations, especially in WCP where Blair lands on one only to get subsequently captured because Blair and Decker's marines apparently missed the 8-foot tall bug hanging out in the landing bay sipping a Mai Tai - or the obviously alien fighter which launches from the station from one of the two landing bays which are currently full of Tigershark and/or Hercules LC...oh well, it's