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The San Francisco Giants are entering the Final Frontier, and Star Trek Online is coming along for the ride! On August 26th, members of the STO development team will be at Oracle Park for Star Trek Night with the Giants, and you could be there, too! We’re giving away four tickets to the event, and two Discovery Era Constitution Class Cruisers as well! All you have to do to enter is fill out the form below. In addition, anyone who purchases a ticket (or receives one from this contest) will receive a Star Trek messenger bag, and the chance to meet the developers of Star Trek Online and score Star Trek: Discovery holographic bridge officers. VIP ticket holders will also receive a Picard bobblehead, and the opportunity to take a photo in STO’s lifesize Captain’s Chair. For more information, please check out the Giants’ website. Take us out to the ball game, Captains, and we’ll see you

Quote from Star Trek Online News

To celebrate First Contact Day, we’re partnering with NETGEAR to give you the chance at some major prizes: a Lifetime Subscription to Star Trek Online on PC, and a Nighthawk Pro Gaming Router! All you have to do is follow the instructions below to enter. The contest will from from April 5th at 10am PT to April 8th at 11:59 pm PT. Get one of the most powerful routers in the world, specifically designed for gamers like you, and access to tons of rewards in Star Trek Online! There are many ways to enter and increase your chances of winning – check out the instructions below. Star Trek Online // Nighthawk Pro Gaming Giveaway OFFICIAL RULES: 1. No purchase necessary. 2. Only open to residents of the United States. 3. Rules subject to change. 4. Prizes cannot be transferred or redeemed for cash. 5. Void where prohibited by law. 6. Odds of winning depend on # of eligible entries received. 7.

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Greetings Captains! Thank you for supporting the Alliance. Star Trek Online partnered with Arozzi for a special Star Trek licensed chair giveaway. Take part in this raffle for a very special Star Trek branded gaming chair and table, courtesy of our friends at Arozzi! Star Trek Online | Arozzi Star Trek Gaming Chair & Table .share-footer a { margin: 20px 10px 10px 0; background: url(d7afaaa14e96d0d973f76157ae31ec5b1466398539.png) no-repeat 0 0; opacity: .5; display: inline-block; height: 60px; width: 60px; padding: 0; border: 1px solid transparent; -webkit-transition: opacity .3s; transition: opacity .3s; } .share-footer .TI { background-position: 0 20%; } .share-footer .YT { background-position: 0 40%; } .share-footer .YT { background-position: 0 40%; } .share-footer .TW { background-position: 0 60%; } .share-footer .FO { background-position: 0

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

Star Trek Online is teaming up with our good friends at SteelSeries as a part of their Space Sale! SteelSeries, the creators of some incredible gaming peripherals, are celebrating everything space with a massive sale, and a huge contest with Star Trek Online prizes! Every single person who enters will be able to claim an R&D Pack and a Large XP Boost, and one lucky grand prize winner will get their hands on the dynamic sounds of the Arctis Pro Wireless Headset PLUS their own customizable, 3D printed, hand-painted collectible of a starship of their choice from Gameprint! The contest runs from 3pm PT on 5/22 to 10pm PT on 6/10. Don’t miss your chance, you can enter using the button below! .share-footer a { margin: 20px 10px 10px 0; background: url(d7afaaa14e96d0d973f76157ae31ec5b1466398539.png) no-repeat 0 0; opacity: .5; display: inline-block; height: 60px; width:

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

We are getting closer and closer to Destination Star Trek Birmingham, and the Star Trek Online Away Team is performing our final preparations for the convention! The shuttle is getting loaded with all that is needed to see you in Birmingham from October 24th to October 27th. Our Away Team is bringing plenty of swag for those of you that come say hi, including holographic Landry and Lorca Bridge Officers. And this is your chance to win a 3-day-ticket for Destination Star Trek and to meet the team from Star Trek Online! We can’t wait to meet you at Destination Star Trek Birmingham, Captains. We’ll see you there! Star Trek Online [EN] | Destination Star Trek Giveaway .share-footer a { margin: 20px 10px 10px 0; background: url(d7afaaa14e96d0d973f76157ae31ec5b1466398539.png) no-repeat 0 0; opacity: .5; display: inline-block; height: 60px; width: 60px; padding:

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

We are getting closer and closer to Destination Star Trek Birmingham, and the Star Trek Online Away Team is performing our final preparations for the convention! The shuttle is getting loaded with all that is needed to see you in Birmingham from October 24th to October 27th. Our Away Team is bringing plenty of swag for those of you that come say hi, including holographic Landry and Lorca Bridge Officers. And this is your chance to win a 3-day-ticket for Destination Star Trek and to meet the team from Star Trek Online! We can’t wait to meet you at Destination Star Trek Birmingham, Captains. We’ll see you there! Star Trek Online [EN] | Destination Star Trek Giveaway .share-footer a { margin: 20px 10px 10px 0; background: url(d7afaaa14e96d0d973f76157ae31ec5b1466398539.png) no-repeat 0 0; opacity: .5; display: inline-block; height: 60px; width: 60px; padding:

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

Star Trek Las Vegas, the biggest gathering of Trek Fans and Celebrities, is coming to the Rio from July 31st – August 4th, and we want to see you there. That's why we're teaming with Creation Entertainment to give you the opportunity to win two tickets to the show! Come and meet your favorite Trek actors like William Shatner, Anson Mount, Denise Crosby, Michael Dorn and much, much more over the course of almost an entire week of celebrating Trek! But that's not all – every year at STLV we have an exclusive bridge officer pack that you can't get anywhere else. Last year's was some of the cast of Deep Space Nine, and we'll be beaming those officers on to the bridge of one of this year's lucky winners. You can enter the contest in the field below. ONE GRAND PRIZE WINNER WILL RECEIVE 2x Copper Passes to Star Trek Las Vegas 1x Command Dreadnought Cruiser Bundle (PC) 1x STLV Exclusive 2018 Bridge

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Howard Day has new some artwork to share, and it coincides nicely with our new CIC Poll. He's beautifully recreated a WC1-style briefing room - complete with red light, weathering and podium/lectern. It's not supposed to directly be from the Tiger's Claw, but it's a pretty sweet recreation from a ship of that era! There are also some nice updates to Maniac and Chef, two of his key pilots.

Here's the latest on the TCS Orszaga's briefing room - Supposed to be of a similar build/era to the TCS Tigers Claw, just smaller and a bit more battle-worn. Oh, and the latest on Chef and Maniac!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Billboard is a trade magazine for the entertainment industry which reports on the production and marketing side of films, television shows, music and others. In 1996, that included the burgeoning CD-ROM industry. We've found an interesting story in the February 3rd, 1996 issue about the marketing plans for Wing Commander IV... which include some things we'd never heard of, like print ads in American Airlines' in-flight magazine! It's a fascinating look at how Origin was preparing to sell a game that, frankly, didn't need to be marketed to us at all!

"Wing Commander IV' Set To Take Flight

Movie Game To Get Theatrical -Film Promotion

BY DOUGLAS REECE

LOS ANGELES -

ORIGIN Systems is hoping to shrink the gap between film and game with its upcoming release, "Wing Commander IV: The Price Of Freedom." The interactive movie game, which will be shipped worldwide the first week of February, will be promoted

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Wing Blender

has gotten its first update in more than a year. The program is a

Blender

importer/exporter for ship models that allows for easier manipulation of the items in Wing Commander Prophecy or Secret Ops. It's been a useful app for fan project modders, and the new version 2.2.1 can easily cut import time in half! You can grab the program

here

and get tips on its use at the

CIC Forums

.

Anyway, if you've tried to use the importer, you'll know that it is sluggish as hell. I've been trying to work on that. I made a few optimizations to the importer recently, which mostly involve using flat typed arrays instead of lists of lists, and it turned out to be MUCH faster than what I had. With my most recent optimizations, I was able to cut the import time in half! Well, at least for the more detailed meshes. AST_S_01.IFF hasn't shown much improvement in terms of import time, but that's because the other

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

BritizenCon

is an annual event for fans of Star Citizen in the UK. In conjunction with

JR Design & Fabrication

, the main panelists at the event were able to sit behind a really cool desk inspired by a setting in the game. On top of that, the WC fans there also built a really cool arcade style kiosk with built-in Wing Commander games! They designed a cabinet around a 27" monitor and loaded up Wing Commander 2, Armada and more on the systems. Everything was topped off by a keyboard and joystick built into the frame so that fans could simply walk up and jump into the games. You can read up further on how everything came together

here

.

Second on the list was to recreate some of the trading consoles and re-purpose them as Wing Commander arcade machines. As soon as we had this idea it had to be done!!

Painted and in place at the event they certainly went down well with the crowd and the people we spoke

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Brian demodulated has posted a wonderful throwback to 1991. He found his old vintage copy of Wing Commander 2 recently, and as awesome as that is alone, it also still had the faded original store receipt. Sometimes unique little bits like that can tell their own nostalgic story - and Brian has one to go along with this buying experience below! If you have an old '90s tale to share about finding WC in stores, drop it in the comments and share. You can find more of Brian's classic gaming stuff at demodulated.com.

I found my old copy of Wing Commander II at my parents' house this weekend. A truly beloved artifact. I can't begin to tell you how immersive this game was for little me. The box includes my very faded original receipt from Steals Direct in Toronto in November, 1991!

Looking at this box again reminds me of the experience. My dad took me to this enormous PC and software superstore, I picked

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Reaperman4711 has posted a video of him playing Wing Commander 3 on "period hardware." To me, that sounds positively ancient and even older than "vintage hardware." With that being said, there's a certain nostalgic joy to watching the game running on a nearly thirty year old beige box. On one hand, it's mind blowing how easy it is in 2021 to do a one-click GOG Galaxy install on your M1 Mac and launch the game with no effort. That frictionless experience is critical for bringing new blood into the Wing Commander community today. But there's a sense of accomplishment that goes along with getting your sound card IRQ settings set and firing up the game from a DOS prompt. And watching someone else who's done that work is the next best thing - enjoy!

Here is Wing Commander 3 gameplay, from an old MSDOS computer. There are some "immersive" ship-wandering cutscene conversations, followed by two early

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we've got a retro review that AD found in the August 1995 issue of the appropriately named Man!ac magazine. It's a German publication, so we've provided a rudimentary translation. It's easy to get a sense of what they have to say: lots of excitement around the video cutscenes and some commentary about the cool spaceflight. The final score is 86%. I really like the 3DO screenshots here. You see a lot of the same PC images pop up in most reviews, so the more colorful comm VDU clips really stand out!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Sidequest has posted a thorough retrospective of Wing Commander 3. It comes from an interesting perspective. The author has a lot of experience reviewing games, but was born after WC3's 1994 release. As such, one of the first things he calls out was the game's low resolution and high compression in cutscenes. While there's no doubt that this is an issue, if you lived through it at the time you would recall how the high end graphics (both in flight and for video) brought hardware of the time to its knees as it was. He also struggles a bit through the lack of tutorial help in-game, which was also typical of the era. But it's wonderful to see how people power through these difficulties and nevertheless have a blast with the game!

Thanks to Spacedock for spotting this one!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Prolific game streamer and dedicated Wingnut Bonkus_Maximus is about to kick off a big series with The Heart of the Tiger. He's played plenty of classic Wing Commander on his Twitch channel before, but he's decidedly out of practice in WC3. This provides a prime opportunity to jump into the game anew for a fresh experience. You can join in live here on Twitch starting Tuesday at 8 pm Eastern time. There's also still an opportunity to vote at the CIC Forums on the difficulty level you think he should attack.

Fellow Wingnuts,

I'm going to start my full, expanded playthrough of WCIII (Including winning and losing track missions) on Twitch starting on Tuesday, February 9, at 8pm (20:00) Eastern time (GMT -5). I went through the Orsini missions just to be sure the game runs smoothly on stream, and I haven't otherwise played it for a long time. I wanted to start a poll for the difficulty level, which I

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

This is also the time of year when we refresh our

Background

and

Development Archive

sections. These pages try to encapsulate all the useful or remarkable artifacts and bits of knowledge that we report on in our daily news updates, but can be difficult to keep track of over time. We hope these sections can be a good starting-off point for anyone just now wanting to learn about a classic Wing Commander game they found on GOG, or a more seasoned player wanting to research a certain topic in-depth. With the Wing Commander 3 anniversary coming up, this year's efforts focus on that title. Below you can find a birds eye overview of the new additions.

• Background: Essential (fan-created) tools and patches, noteworthy articles, manuals, Saturn and Jaguar port information.
• Game Design: Storyboards, the production book, the ESRB tape.
• Artwork: Various props you'll recognize, many sketches, mysterious ships

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I did this quick for a Discord discussion and thought it was pretty interesting: the difference in resolution between a Wing Commander III cutscene (320x160!) and a 4K movie. (AKA why they couldn't just reuse the game costumes, props, fx, etc for the movie...)

You can find a complete index of downloadable source videos (again, in the original 320x160 format!) here. On the opposite end of the spectrum, ODVS has used his advanced AI editing techniques to enhance and upscale the footage to HD quality here.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

When ODVS first set out to remaster the video from Wing Commander games, the DVD source footage for WC4 and Prophecy was an obvious choice. It wasn't clear whether the very low quality WC3 material could be significantly upgraded. But not only was Owen able to pull together a complete cut back in July, but now he's taken it up another level and made version 2.0 available! Everything is here in 1080p at 30 frames per second, and the overall contrast has been fixed throughout. Check out the trailer and grab it below! Note that there is not yet a way to integrate the clips into the game, but this pack solves a big chicken-and-egg problem. If enhanced videos didn't exist, fans wouldn't have a reason to figure out how to include them. Now they do!

• Wing Commander 3: version 2.0 (3.7 gig zip)

To celebrate Wing Commander CIC's birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the Wing Commander franchise, I'm

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

I'm comparing the UI in different Wing Commander III ports! Here's the callsign selection screen on the PC, 3DO, PlayStation and Macintosh. "Maverick" is my entry except on the PSX version which plugs in BLAIR automagically!

Here's the Victory's main menu on the PC, 3DO and PSX. The Macintosh port doesn't do any of this diegetically, it's handled all in the operating system's UI (boo).

Duty logs, aka save/load!

And here are the (gameflow) options screens.

Here's a really fun one: if you access the menu during the last two missions of the game (where you're flying from covert asteroid depots instead of the Victory) the menu changes to reflect the new location! And in the 3DO version only each depot gets its own name.

Vera: Are there differences in the Victory Streak too?

There are! They redid the layout so it would fit in the thin 3DO boxes and added all sorts of additional art. Even a System Shock