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AD reminded me that Blair's callsign is DODGER in Kevin Droney's first draft script for the Wing Commander movie. I... don't hate it? The scene where they all explain their callsigns is fun, too:

Kevin Droney's First Draft (133 pages, 33 mb), which was written way back in 1995 (10/27/95)! It's very different from the later versions: it features many different proper nouns (Angelica "Angel" Devereaux), a strange callsign for Blair ("Dodger") and a very unusual twist on the traitor subplot. The Second Draft (9/21/97) and the Third/Shooting Draft (1/8/98) are also available. Along with the original Phoenix Pictures Memo, you now have all the tools to decide what went right and what went wrong with the Wing Commander movie's story!

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Goge stopped by to share a very cool space sim tech demo that he's been working on lately. It's called Squadron: Mercenaries and he's got some very lofty goals in mind! The core portion starts as a traditional Wing Commander style sim, but there are larger secondary element planned as well. One really cool thing that jumped out at me is that it just runs in a browser window. You can visit the website here and be playing in a few seconds without installation. More info is on the page to get oriented. We hope to see some of his ambitious plans come together!

Squadron: Mercenaries

Squadron Mercenaries is a thrilling spacefaring epic that blends the adrenaline-pumping space flight combat simulation of Wing Commander with the intricate personnel and material management aspects of 'Mechwarrior Mercenaries.' In this immersive game, players will not only engage in intense dogfights and grand-scale space

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Oh, did your version of Wing Commander III not have a mission where you escort two minelayers?

Lord Thrakhath sacrificed an entire Bhantkara carrier group in a feint at Torgo as part of his strategy to trap the Behemoth. Here: Thunderbolt 300 escorts a pair of dedicated minesweepers as part of the effort to cover the weapon’s approaches.

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We've got a couple of exciting updates on the Confederation engine makeover for Wing Commander 1. AllTinker shared his latest Raptor side art. He's also created a very cool 3D bubble of the Hornet cockpit to explore potential new features that can take advantage of this. Click into the thumbnail for a larger animated GIF video of the head movement in action!

I'm still working on the extended side views for the hangar sequence, but I've at least made a start on all five WC1 ships. The closest to being finished is the Raptor:

After pondering my wrap-around cockpits I've decided the best way to properly support ultrawide without the awkward (lack of) perspective is to bite the bullet and go 3D. This will just be another option. The wraparound 2D cockpits don't look so bad at 16:9, but really start to break down quickly beyond that. 3D cockpits also allow things like padlock view (something I've always

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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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It's time once again for... SNACKS OF THE TERRAN CONFEDERATION!

The famed TCS Victory's rec room always has popcorn on the tables...

The Grey Ghost, TCS Lexington, has little bowls of peanuts all around the lounge.

... and finally the megacarrier Midway has a megasnack: big cheeze doodlepuff type things.

The Victory's bar has some other options, too: bowls of peanuts, cherries, orange slices (only around when Flint is drinking!) and what I think are Tootsie Pops?!

Does anyone ever actually eat the bar snacks? There's a scene in WC4 where Blair palms a peanut and then puts it back while he's talking to Maniac... but I think Captain Paulsen is the only one who ever eats anything!

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Cybot078 has returned with several new environments for Privateer fans. He's recreated Perry, New Constantinople and Oxford. Each one has been filled out with more scenery and photographed from a wider point of view. They're pretty imaginative pieces of art and help you appreciate the original scenes even more. I never really noticed the cloud-like bulges in the Perry ceiling or thought about how large the Constantinople space might be. The first image in each set is the original. Take a look below!

Perry Naval Base:

New Constantinople:

Oxford:

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Here are a couple of fun treats from poking through an archive of Computer and Video Games magazines.

This review of Wing Commander SNES has a neat ship identification chart (where they've colored in the ships)!

Here's a June 1994 announcement for a Genesis port of Wing Commander II. It never made it out!

A Wing Commander III preview with some set photography and storyboards. Interesting what they imagined for Angel before Yolanda Jilot was cast!

Some new set photos from Privateer 2 back when it was just 'The Darkening'!

And finally some Wing Commander IV set photos being used to fill out an article about how Windows 95... exists?

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Adm_Maverick has a very cool new model project to share! He's souped up a printable model of the Vampire and is making some very cool modifications to it. It's much larger than the original source and the engine pods rotate. As you can see from the pictures below, he's also adding lights so that the engines even glow! The sections that are complete so far look great. You can see more of the subcomponents come together with step-by-step captions at the CIC Forums here.

There comes a point in any project where you look at your in-progress work and you see the work coming together that you’re like “okay… this is looking friggen awesome!” Here is that moment with the Vampire model:

I decided to something crazy and I took the Vampire figure from Thingverse, and upscaled it to produce a roughly 14" long model. Now because of the size of my resin printer, I had to break the model down into segments. But

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Happy Easter!

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It's April 1! Since before we even opened at wcnews.com more than 25 years ago, the CIC Staff has had some strict rules about April Fool's Day: Never announce a new Wing Commander game. Don't do anything that would get people excited just to let them down. Mostly err on just being silly. We've had a few good jokes, and joked about a few things that came true. But with so much of the current discourse dominated by propaganda and conspiracy theories, we're not really in the mood to celebrate a holiday dedicated to fake news.

So anyhow, the regular news continus. There's two more days to get your discounted Wing Commander. Each game is 65-75% off. Hope you have a great day.

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The recent Heritage Auction of material from Planet Hollywood included several Wing Commander costumes! Which means there are some great high resolution photos to share. Here's Mark Hamill's flight suit from Wing Commander IV:

And here is Malcolm McDowell's Black Lance uniform from the same game! (Note that the rank insignia on the cuff is there incorrectly.)

Here are some photos of the event where these costumes were donated to the restaurant in 1996 just a few days before the game was released. They got some good press out of it!

On the other hand, I didn't even know Mark Hamill's Wing Commander Prophecy flight suit had been in Planet Hollywood's collection. Guess the same trick doesn't work twice! (Or three times, Planet Hollywood got a movie Rapier at one point too...)

There was also a great photo by of some loose rank insignias up close. Can you identify them?

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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The Titan known as Oya appears to have deployed a large fleet of Orthrus vessels into star systems farther from their own territory breaking expected behaviour.
Analysts noted that the locations in which Orthrus vessels have been tracked didn't appear to have any particular importance, instead suggesting that this may be a new tactic or possibly a simple panic response to the mounting pressure on its fleet.
Titan Oya has been steadily losing territory to large numbers of AX-equipped human forces. These forces, spearheaded by coalitions known as 'AXI' and 'XSF' have been reclaiming ground from the Titans successfully for some time and were pivotal in the recent successful campaigns against the now-destroyed Titans, Taranis and Leigong.
The Pilots' Federation have issued an alert to all independent pilots for each of the star systems where Orthrus vessels have been detected:
"If Oya can be

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Material gathered from the Titan Taranis wreckage has reportedly allowed Achilles Aerospace to complete the research on their prototype Frame Shift Drive.
The recent initiative sponsored by Achilles Aerospace saw over 5000 independent pilots enter the hazardous wreckage of Titan Taranis, retrieving enough Titan Drive Components to allow Achilles to allegedly design a new type of Frame Shift Drive based on Titan technology.
A spokesperson for Achilles Aerospace gave the following update:
The Achilles Corporation would like to commend every brave pilot that responded to our request. The data we are gathering from the collected materials is staggering, and our work has progressed at an astonishing rate. Our teams are hard at work getting the prototype ready for production as I speak, and we are eager to show you all the fruits of our labour very soon.
Sirius Corporation, the current sole

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We've got an exciting preview to share today! One of the most exhilarating projects of the last decade was George Oldziey's spectacular mission to record his Wing Commander hits with a live orchestra. The endeavor was a resounding success, and fans around the world treasure the results to this day. Over the years, Mr. Oldziey has launched a couple of spinoffs that have delivered some new digital music and set the groundwork for a possible sequel. George has been carefully planning what he might do in a follow-up effort for a number of years, and now that time is upon us! Advances in technology and in the music market have made some new things possible... with your help! Stay tuned and check back at the end of this week for more details!

Vinman: Hell yes, I'd been hoping for years that we'd get another chunk o' music!

Here's a recap video of the original live orchestra project to help set the

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It's a good week for Wing Commander music! If all the recent posts have got you in the mood for more, Pekka Leppaluoto has just recorded a new extract of George Oldziey's iconic Wing Commander 3 tracks. He used AllTinker's Originator tool to pull the source .hmp files out of the game and then play them back on an authentic Roland SCC-1. This would have been one of the most incredible ways to listen to the game back in 1994. Give the soundtrack a listen below, and check back later this weekend for more info on what's coming next! You can already sign in on Kickstarter and get a notification as soon as the project goes live.

Setup used: a real Intel 486 DX2 PC with Roland SCC-1 card's line-outs connected to RME Fireface 802 channel inputs. Recorded at 96/24. A rinse of Waves' L3 UltraMaximizer in post.

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I've updated my Wing Commander playlists on Spotify, just for you! First up: the movie score plus the licensed, diegetic tracks.

Second, the Wing Commander Prophecy OST recreated from pieces. It's getting closer with each update... we're just lacking, you know, the Cobalt 60 tracks.

And here's the big hot dog, everything Wing Commander-related in one place. They added the recent Wing Commander I go buy it anyway.

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Origin composer George Oldziey is now counting down the hours to the launch of his second album of live Wing Commander music! What makes now the right time for a sequel? Check out the update below for some of the motivation behind the project.

So, this is a big year for me for round numbers. I turned 70, and 30 years ago I scored my very first video game, Wing Commander 3. And 10 years ago I had the privilege of running a successful Kickstarter campaign, funded by the greatest video game fans in the world, that resulted in the first orchestral recording of 40 minutes of my original music from the three Wing Commander games that I scored for Electronic Arts/Origin (see the link to a video about those sessions 10 years ago).

This Sunday I'm going to launch another KS campaign to record another 40 minutes of music from those games with a large orchestra!

I've been blessed to have had MANY musical

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Today's the day! Origin composer George Oldziey's campaign to create a second album of live Wing Commander music has launched! Fans have been abuzz for the last few days as info has been released, but now there are a number of exciting additional details that can finally be shared.

For starters, Mr. Oldziey has revealed that this is a combination effort! He's not only working with a new live orchestra to perform 40-45 additional minutes of his classic Wing Commander work, but it will also be available digitally, on CD and on vinyl. Both a new live recording and a collectible vinyl print have been high on the list of fan requests these last few years, but the road to get here has been pretty challenging. Costs have been up and down as the world has been in turmoil, but George has been working on new bids that look very promising in order to make this happen. Here's a video that explains how this

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We were originally planning to mix up the news a bit to start the week off, but George Oldziey’s campaign is off to such a roaring start that it’s become newsworthy again! In barely over a day since going live, the campaign to create a new live album of Wing Commander music has hit the 50% funding mark! This means more than $8000 of the $16,000 target has been achieved. When combined with Matt Hiltner’s previously mentioned large donation, we are very much well on the way to making this a reality! Things are going so well that George is already starting to firm up plans for some of the hypothetical stretch goals that have been on his mind. No one expected to be talking about that so soon, but it’s a wonderful situation to be in. All of this is made possible by the ongoing support from so many dedicated Wing Commander fans. This is just the beginning; so we’re very anxious to see where