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Here's another fun oddity by FekLeyrTarg. He's composed George Oldziey's WC3 Behemoth track in the MIDIS2Jam2 program. The instrument effect is kind of cool, and it sounds great!
George Oldziey's Behemoth theme from "Wing Commander III - Heart of the Tiger", performed by a virtual orchestra in MIDIS2Jam2 using Patch 93's SC-55 soundfont.
Jan
Nightball06 has a new set of Hellcat renders to share, and they've certainly come a very long way since his original 2D sketches. He tried commissioning another artist to take his designs to the next dimension, but now he's learned techniques to work with the model himself. There are a few liberties taken with specific elements, but the overarching space frame is pretty sharp. The textures are slick too. Now that this exist in virtual form, Nightball has plans to try his hand at animation next.
Thanks to the help from Mac, who gave me step-by-step instructions, I was finally able to render my "legacy"-images.Looks pretty nice I think...So thanks again to all who helped me
... Next stop: Animation
Apr
We're doing some back end testing today and needed a simple news post with four images. What four iconic images make for a perfect Wing Commander theme? The WC1 blueprints! These are 3K resolution samples, but if you need nice 5K copies for your ultra high res monitor, grab the blueprint pack (42 meg zip)!
Sep
Eryx Channel has posted a video about the "Evolution of Wing Commander Games." It's a simple clip with edits of the games as they appeared in the franchise, but a few things caught my eye. Games like Academy, Armada, Righteous Fire, Super Wing Commander, Kilrathi Saga and Arena are included, which is always really great to see. It's kind of odd they added in WC Saga at the end, because the rundown should really just go through 2007. Fan projects like WC Saga are wonderful, but there are a bunch of awesome ones that could warrant their own complete video. Also, that's a Star Citizen/Squadron 42 screenshot in the thumbnail, which is extra weird because it's not even in the clip!
Oh, the other thing that caught my eye is this stellar comment:
I liked this series because my dad would always be on top of the newest release in the series.Those were the good 'ol days!That's where we are now, folks.
Jul
…Many of the actors from the Wing Commander series have retired from acting or are otherwise engaged in different types of projects these days, but one person who's continued to see a fair bit of movie success is Josh Lucas. He's had a varied mix of action, drama, romance and now thriller type roles over the past 10-15 years, so he's enjoyed a pretty typecast-free career. He's also the main star of The Forever Purge, the fifth movie in the Purge series, which was just released in theaters this month. It looks like the new movie came in third place with about $12 million last weekend, but that's not so bad considering fairly stiff competition posed by F9 and the new Boss Baby sequel - not to mention the shadow that the pandemic still casts over the industry. As part of the press tour, there are a handful of interviews catching up with Mr. Lucas, such as the GMA piece below. Wow, he's fifty now!
Apr
…Shot97 has completed his absolutely massive hourlong review of Wing Commander 2. As you might imagine, it's a rather exhaustive look at many different aspects of the game, its expansions, gameplay, story, development and more. Fortunately, if you pop out the clip in a proper YouTube window, the video description has a full index that lets you jump around if there are certain elements that strike your fancy more than others. This allows you to cut straight to different magazine perspectives, character analysis or a peek at the SNES edition. So if you want to learn all the ins and outs there are to know about WC2 and you've got an hour to spare, fire up the full vid below. Alternately there's a written version with tons of great screenshots here. You can also find Shot's comparable video review of WC1 on the Amiga here.
Despite coming out just a year after the original in 1991 and featuring the
Nov
From now until 12/3/19 at 9 AM PT, you'll be able to unlock bonus currency on the Arc platform for Perfect World titles! The bonus you can expect is listed in the chart below: This Charge Bonus is ONLY available for the following payment processors: Direct Credit Card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover) Paypal Skrill (Formerly Moneybookers) BoaCompra Xsolla Paysafecard Steam (Steam Purchases receive the bonus but do not receive extra ZEN for buying in bulk)
May
…Want to challenge one of Kilrah's finest? Here's a guide to where you can find the various Kilrathi aces in the first three Wing Commander games. Wing Commander I and the 3DO port of III both have a system where aces will reappear if you miss them... up to seven times in some cases! Wing Commander II and III, on the other hand, only give you one shot at each. One neat situation is that if you let all the aces survive in the original Wing Commander they can all appear in the same final mission in Hell's Kitchen!
Wing Commander
Bhurak "Starkiller" nar Caxki (Salthi)
- McAuliffe 3
- Gateway 3
- Hell's Kitchen 2
- Hell's Kitchen 4
Dakhath "Deathstroke" nar Sihkag (Dralthi)
- Gimle 3
- Cheng-Du 2
- Rostov 1
- Hubble's Star 1
- Venice 3
- Hell's Kitchen 3
- Hell's Kitchen 4
Khajja "Machine" nar Ja'targk, aka "The Fang" (Krant)
- Brimstone 3
- Rostov 3
- Venice 1
- Hell's Kitchen 1
- Hell's Kitchen 4
Baktosh "Redclaw" nar Kiranka (Jalthi)
Mar
The campaign to update Brewer Corporation's Trailblazer fleet has concluded in the Minerva system.
Thanks to the efforts of independent pilots ferrying shipments to Minerva, a total of 5 additional Trailblazer megaships will be placed in strategic locations on the fringes of the core systems, providing a hub of tradable materials and services for early colonies.
Brewer COO Mark Rennik remarked on the campaign's success:
"Once again, we have received widespread support and confirmation of our efforts, which is both humbling and inspiring. It is obvious that there is great appetite for breaching the latest frontier to establish new colonies, further expanding humanity's sphere of influence in our section of the galaxy."
The Trailblazer megaships are expected to be deployed in the coming weeks.
Participants can now collect their rewards from the initiative.
Dec
…
The Wing Commander movie club gave our collective heart to a Starship Troopers! With all due deference to the one guy that was still mad that the movie didn't have the power suits from the novel, it's a heck of a movie! Now we're going to end the year by running silent and also deep with a movie you've absolutely heard of spoken in the same sentence as Wing Commander: Das Boot. You can join us this Friday via Discord to watch along.
Das Boot is a 1981 film which follows the crew of a German U-boat fighting in the Atlantic in 1941. It is known for its realistic depiction of submarine life and for telling a story that isn't about heroes winning glory but ordinary men living through a terrible time. The film's success introduced director Wolfgang Petersen to the world; he would later go on to direct films like Outbreak and Air Force One.
Das Boot was one of Chris Roberts' key influences when making the
Nov
…Caliban System, 2669; second mission. Captain Eisen has ordered you to clear every single nav point to prevent the Kilrathi from reporting the Victory's jump point. You battle through two nav points of fierce fighters and then find… four capital ships, unescorted? There's a light destroyed, two corvettes and a…
… it's a transport? No, it's a… "scout"? The existence of the scout has long been recognized but to the best of my knowledge no one had really looked into /why/ it was there. So I did… and learned some interesting things in the process, including a pretty significant change to something we had previously thought about the making of the game!
Wing Commander III famously shipped on time… but to make this happen the developers had to cut some broken features rather than spend time to get them working. A number of these changes were related to an item attachment bug which caused issues in some
Nov
Here, enjoy some Amiga WC1! This is far from the first time that we've posted an Amiga playthrough, but it's always fun to watch. Plenty of people got their first look at the game on PC or Super Nintendo, so for those folks, it's fun to see something like this to pick out the many small differences. Check out LOAF's comparison of the TrainSim and Barracks as an example!
The original Amiga version of Wing Commander had just 16 colors. It was released right before the Amiga 1200, which introduced the 256-color AGA version. Wing Commander is a computer game series from Origin Systems, the series creator is the American game developer Chris Roberts. The series is about humanity's fight for survival in the 27th century against aggressive alien races, particularly the cat-like Kilrathi.
Feb
…We've got another exciting update to share regarding the Originator universal extraction tool. AllTinker has been hard at work this month building out features and better support to get the most out of Privateer 2 assets. This is a huge boost to people like LOAF who are spending lots of time researching The Darkening lately. Today's update allows modders and curious fans greater ability to pull both images, audio text out of the code. Grab the update here!
I'm chipping away at some longer-term features (and Confederation), but here's a new version (0.3.04) which is mostly focussed on Privateer 2.I've added support for "BASE" images, which allowed me to complete the remaining palette hook-up logic. The major text formats used by the game are also now supported. I've added support for the IFF-nested sample sets, which gives access to the majority of the remaining (non-movie) audio. IFF shapes are
Oct
Mac's highly anticipated lore video on the TCS Concordia has been released! The clip has been teased in a variety of forms over the past month, and now you can enjoy the entire episode. It details the extensive history of the vessel from its commissioning in the wake of The Secret Missions 2 through the exploits of WC2 and the Special Operations and finally with her heroic efforts from the WC novels. The thorough narration is complemented by more than twenty minutes of gorgeous fleet footage. It's very informative and visually striking. Don't miss it!
The Rockstar of Confed's Carrier Fleet.
Apr
We're going to start this week off with a new Kilrathi Lego creation by John Nelson. You can see from the sweep of the wings that this is clearly the Dralthi IV variant, which puts it right in line with the Darket and Strakha he put together earlier. He's started to incorporate a larger mix of brown panels in an attempt to better mimic the WC3 color scheme. It makes me want a Lego Excalibur to start tearing them up!
This was a fun one to build years ago in a simpler state, but with the new colors and brick types this guy is far more accurate - albeit with my little tweaks and touches. This is the second model that I needed technic parts to complete.Pliers (would) say, "Dralthis are pretty pathetic, but don’t turn your back on them. Their particle cannons can fire continuously and will bring down anything from a carrier to an interceptor."
Apr
…Today we've got more physical models in the news. Not everyone is up to building a giant intricate model by hand, but 3D printing is a much more accessible way to go about creating something of your very own. L.I.F. has started down this path and his first creations are the Excalibur and Rapier. They look pretty solid for an initial effort with an impressive level of detail retained in a small package. He's done some non-WC tests next, and with those learnings in hand, he'll be moving on to a bigger Excalibur next!
We got our first 3D printer at our family workshop, and after calibrating it with a provided file, my first move was to test it with a more... complex shape, AKA Klavs' very own Excalibur. 6 centimetres long for a first run to see how well it'd work and what additional actions I'd have to take, but it's looking pretty nice already even if I´ll have to ensure the layering leaves no holes
Mar
It's finally spring for the majority of Wingnuts, and GOG is welcoming the season with a big discount on Wing Commander games. The series is marked down a customary 75%, so that means all DOS/Windows games are available for less than $12. It's a steal for easy digital access - even if you already have physical copies! Also, we know there's quite a bit of overlap between Star Trek and WC fans, and GOG has recently added a slate of Trek games to their catalog. Those additions are all 20% off too.
Feb
…The news of Russian's invasion of Ukraine has been a big distraction today, so our previously scheduled Wing Commander news is momentarily on hold. We recognize how lucky we are that it's only a distraction for us and not a life-or-death struggle as it is for people on the ground on Eastern Europe. We have friends and know Wingnuts in both countries, and we hope all remain safe. If you're looking for fellow WC fans to discuss the situation with, feel free to visit the #Wingnut Discord. With that being said, consider that it may be less stressful to focus on topics other than the war!
I am at least encouraged to see that Russian citizens have already started to speak out against the violence - even at their own personal peril. The more we realize our shared interests and how much we have in common, the sooner peace and stability can be restored. As such, here's a set of Russian videos about the WC
Nov
…Comchia recently shared some eye-popping screenshots of the EGA version of Wing Commander 2. WC2 is well known as a gorgeous game with lush colors and beautiful art, but not everyone in 1991 was able to appreciate its high end VGA graphics. Everyone with a high powered system quickly switched over to the 256 color option, but some fans were limited to just 16 simultaneous colors. It's pretty shocking how limited this was, however it's equal parts impressive that the artists were able to squeeze so much graphical fidelity out with such limitations. There's very little EGA Wing Commander content online these days. I've added an EGA WC1 video below so you can get a sense of what everything looked like in motion. It really makes you appreciate how far we've come!
Some screens of the EGA version of Wing Commander II. I'm used to seeing this game in the far more colourful VGA version, but I'm still
May
…
Here's one from deep in the archives. AD found an interview with the Fat Man and Team Fat in an early 1995 article of the New York Times, before they even started posting stories online in 1996. This one's been turned into a digital story for completeness so future generations can learn a little about the state of early game audio. It goes a little bit deeper than your typical magazine blurb. The conversation begins very similarly to many other interviews George Sanger has given over the years, but it also delves into some of the side-projects and other attempts that he was trying to use to expand his business. These are portrayed as controversial, but it sounds more like they were trying to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck - which a lot of folks were doing in this new media space at the time! You can read up on the whole article here.
Starting with "Loom," one of the first computer
