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It's been five days since we shared the amazing alpha version of Wing Commander Privateer. Even though it was a cut from just six weeks before the game was complete, Wingnuts have already found some stark differences. Many of the physical locations have subtle changes in texture or color, and the faces are often unrecognizable. There's quite a few interesting dialogue tweaks and stat/price differences as well as a number of bugs. For example, the Comm VDU doesn't always show correctly, but Zyxophoj discovered that it still works even when invisible. Not everyone has time to play through these types of items, so he's put together a fun video for you to kick back and watch.

I know I play old games, but maybe they could be a little bit older? An alpha build of Privateer, from about 6 weeks before the initial release, has been discovered. A big shout out to Ben Lesnick is warranted here for spending

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When you're signing something as important as the Treaty of Torgo, you need all hands on deck! LOAF pulled together some step-by-step images that show how the crew was replicated to fill the TCS Victory's bay. You can really see - outside of the group closer to the table - how it's the same four people replicated thirty-two times!

FAKE CROWD! ADMIRAL TOLWYN SHOULD DROP OUT!

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From the moment that the Privateer Alpha became available, fans have been furiously poring over the game to uncover its exciting secrets. One thing that was clear from the start was that there was at least one extra cutscene towards the end of the game. There are challenges with getting all the way to the end naturally, however, so DMJC and AllTinker worked diligently to extract the clip. They’ve combined speech and an appropriate music sample to come up with the attached 13 second cut. It would naturally play when you get to the Steltek Derelict carrier in Delta Prime, which is so cool! ”Hold your calls, I think we have a winner!” is such a perfect line of dialogue for this find!

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Destro has come a long way with Wing Loader, but what comes next? Although the program is most famously known for adding speech to WC1, it also fixes bugs and adds features to a number of WC games. Now Destro is taking a break on those types of updates and planning a path forward for more original content. He's made a video to highlight what's been done so far and hint at what's next. Check it out below, or grab the newest version here.

Hey everyone! It's been a minute! I figured I'd give a brief update on what's new and what I've been up too.

Now that Wing Loader is out there and WC3 HD videos are patched into the game, I want to take a step back from Wing Loader for a bit as I realize I've been working on this one app for about 4 years now! Don't worry, I'll still support it, add features and be active in the community but I want to get back to what Wing Loader actually was built to be... a

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Only just noticed how much the Super Wing Commander spacesuits owe The Last Starfighter…

Of course, that wasn’t the first thing Wing Commander… borrowed… from The Last Starfighter. (The Porcupine mine dropper standing in for the Death Blossom is not a coincidence!)

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GOG.com is helping ease the back-to-school blues with a hefty discount on the Wing Commander series. Most of the entries in the franchise are marked down 50% to $2.99, but Academy and Armada are slightly cheaper at 66% off. Privateer 2 tops the sale with a full 75% off, which is a little odd, but not the first time that P2 got singled out for special recognition!

Third new ship for ED in 2024 was previewed ...

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Civil, commercial and political groups within the Alliance and Federation are pledging loyalty to two increasingly high-profile individuals.
Sofia Trevino published a summary for The Federal Times:
"President Zachary Hudson has long been the figurehead for a wide range of Federal communities and corporations. But as he prepares to depart the White House, many of these are transferring their allegiance to the new head of the Republican Party, Vice President Jerome Archer."
"When Felicia Winters becomes president, Archer will take on the role of shadow president and lead the Republican opposition to the governing Liberal Party. He will effectively inherit Hudson's political power base, which spreads across the Federation and through many independent systems. Many millions of people, including members of the Pilots' Federation, will perform tasks and exploit local resources in order to expand

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I would do unspeakable things to see the ancient Pilgrim map props or Paladin's diary up close. Horrible, unimaginable things.

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Howard Day has upsized from his recent string of Kilrathi fighters and put together an absolutely gorgeous Kilrathi Dorkir tanker/transport. It's beautifully rendered here in his retro pixel style while also departing a bit from his sprite-oriented design as a full 3D model. He's posted videos below that show the ship in its full lifelike glory as well as with rotation-locked movement that causes the ship to display more like it did in the original Wing Commander. Extra bonus: the spherical head of the ship is inspired by the Dorkir from Super Wing Commander!

Added some Fresnel falloff to the windows on the Wing Leader Dorkir, and some flashing nav lights. I really like them. I also added some specular highlights, since it just doesn't feel like WC1 without them. First pass on some turrets, too! pic.twitter.com/NJbAfeH1NV

— Howie Day (@howieeday) August 29, 2024

  

Added some Fresnel falloff to the

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Noel Shourai stopped in to show off the fun John Rhys-Davies autograph that he picked up last weekend at Fan Expo Canada. LOAF originally recommended he print and use one of the sharp black and white set photos, and the results turned out great:

It's also not the first time someone has gotten a Paladin autograph like this. Here's one that LeHah picked up earlier too!

What a great photo gallery.

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The little chin turret that appears on a Scimitar in ONE episode of Academy is my R2-D2-firing-his-thrusters and you just have to embrace those moments.

We only see it in that one scene on the ground… but it makes short work of another (parked) Scimitar.

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Starfleet Design recently posted this wonderful Star Trek logo on Twitter. He's done a fantastic job marrying the text with little Starfleet deltas as a tribute to the classic Wing Commander logo. It also makes me think of the way that Wing Commander Arena repurposes the afterburning craft again with its own Rapier fighters.

Many but not all recognised this as a homage to the Wing Commander (1990) logo. It's not a game I know much about, but I do appreciate the classic sci-fi typeface STOP, designed by Aldo Novarese in 1971.

If you're looking for more Wing Commander logos, check out the gorgeous collection that elend made a few year ago. They cover a huge swath of the franchise and are vectorized to scale up as big as you need!

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Former Origin composer George Oldziey is back home after his work in Europe last month to record the new Wing Commander album. There's still a lot more work yet to do, including the choral recording next month, but he's put together two samples of WC3 and Prophecy tracks to give fans an idea what to look forward to. It's just an early preview, but the music is already sounding great! If you pledged for the album during the initial Kickstarter campaign, log in for download links to the samples.

Greetings all! I just recently received the session files from the recording in Budapest and thought I'd "tinker around" with a couple of them. I've done a lot of mixing over the years but this time around I might have someone who actually does that for a living do that for the project. Actually, I'm having discussions with the recording and mixing engineer for a very iconic film score composer (will

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Recent moves by Sirius Corporation have resulted in an uncharacteristic wobble in stock prices, according to Money Matters.
In an exclusive story, economist Roberta Unwin has revealed increasingly aggressive attempts by Li Yong-Rui to initiate a corporate takeover of Achilles Aerospace. Thus far, these attempts have proven unsuccessful.
Unwin went on to say:
"The current darling of the technology world, Achilles is riding a wave of momentum following the release of the SCO Frame Shift Drive. This breakthrough risks dislodging Sirius's monopoly on FSD technology for the first time in over a decade. According to my sources, Li is increasingly unhappy with the challenge to his dominance of the aerospace industry."
"I've heard phenomenal numbers when detailing Sirius's multiple offers to purchase Achilles Aerospace and its proprietary SCO designs. Maxine Patro remains unswayed and has kept

Is discount period for Elite Dangerous base game and its DLC Odyssey.

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Iceblade flew in to announce that a brand new campaign in the Wing Commander Gemini Sector RPG is in the process of kicking off. If you've been in the mood for an interactive WC role playing experience, now's a perfect time to get involved. Most of the action takes place in real time on their Discord server. They've also got some nifty animated cutscenes to help set the stage. If this sounds like your jam, reach out now - events are scheduled for this weekend!

Wing Commander Gemini Sector is still kicking. If fact, we are at the start of a new campaign. WC GS is a Discord Server Multi User Simulation with a custom built combat engine for engaging in text-based combat. Similar to a Tabletop game designed for Wing Commander. —Iceblade

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Mac has a very exciting new fighter history video to share! The Sabre is up on deck this time. As hinted about last month, the clip is full of exciting action shots and fancy animation. Give it a watch below!

Blender 4.2s EEVEE Next renderer is some powerful stuff, and this will be the first video to take advantage of it. The Downside? It's a much bigger performance hog then before.

With that being said, the next video: Wing Commander - F-57 Sabre, is now up.

Not your father's F-86 Sabre from the Korean War. This Sabre is much more of a beast.

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Today we've got another exciting update to AllTinker's Originator tool! It includes a number of welcome additions from around the franchise. The program will now be able to peer into the code of the magazine-distributed version of Wing Commander Arena, adds new abilities for reading files from Wing Commander 4 on PC/Playstation, plus gets enhanced image support for Secret Ops - to name a few items. Grab it at the CIC Forums here!

First release in quite a while; version 0.3.06 is mainly a bugfix release, but does add a couple of new things:

• Support for the "demo" version of Wing Commander Arena, which can be extracted from the Official Xbox Magazine Game Disc 76 (the content seems identical; the demo differences are all in how the executable is set up to run on the 360 without a full game license present).
• Support for Playstation's VAG audio format, used by Wing Commander 4 PSX.
• Fixed terrain heightmap

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Today in #Wingnut we were admiring the box designs of the blue stripe era.

LETS. OPEN. THE. FLAPS!!!!!!!

Impress your loved one with this Fun Fact Flap(tm): the Prophecy Gold box incorrectly identifies the alien cruiser as MARLIN-class. There was a renaming pass on most of the Nephilim ships late in development and Marlin became HYDRA in the final game.

The artwork for this callout is repurposed (and mirrored) from this Wing Commander Prophecy print ad!

The renaming; the original names are still used internally-

Skate cluster - Tri-Ray
Lamprey shield killer - Siren
Barracuda corvette - Skate
Triton transport - Leatherback
Hydra cruiser - Marlin
Leviathan carrier - Osprey
Kraken ship killer - Narwhal
Tiamat dreadnought - Tsunami

When I did Star*Soldier for Wing Commander Arena I snuck in a little joke about this on the World War I-style spotters guide poster. See how there are two cruisers but one is upside down!