News categories list

  • 25

    Dec

    originator_tool37t.jpgWe're a little late in calling for nominations, but there's still time before 2024 gets away from us! We're quickly approaching our annual Fan Project of the Year contest, and this year we're adding a twist. We always ask about the community highlights from the prior twelve months, but this time we're adding a Hall of Fame vote where you can separately select from some of your favorite projects from years past. So think back to some of your favorites and let us know what you think! Email nominations to news@wcnews.com and look for the full vote in the near future. Here's some of the past winners to get you thinking:

  • 03

    Dec

    PC Winter Event: Q has returned to begin this year’s Winter Event! Compete and participate in Winter Events to earn Winter Prize vouchers that can be used to redeem the all new Fek’ihri Fe’rang Dreadnought Carrier [T6]! This year’s festivities will be integrated into our recently released Event Interface, as part of your Mission Journal. Beginning this year, Daily Progress toward earning your new starship can be obtained by participating in any of the following activities: Fastest Game on Ice Klingon Ice Fishing Tides of Ice The Fast and the Flurrious Cones of Conduct The Kramp’Ihri Go to the Winter Vendor and check out this year’s new items! Black Nanopulse Weaponry. 3 brand new Cold-Themed Bridge Officer Training Manuals. 3 brand new Winter Sweater designs. Winter Wonderland Weaponry, including an all new hand-thrown impaling device and candy-licious

  • 27

    Jun

  • 24

    Jun

  • 17

    May

  • 06

    Mar

    Exciting news for one of our sister communities: Electronic Arts has released a mountain of Command and Conquer material for fans to explore including source code, modding access and never-before-seen footage of games while they were in development! You can read all of the details in their announcement.

    commandconquerlogot.jpg

    Source code has been posted to Github for the original game, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals Zero Hour! They've also enabled mod support for several games via Steam Workshop and put out this fascinating video:

    Once upon a time, Wing Commander and Command & Conquer, both beloved by fans, were effectively friendly rivals with Electronic Arts pitting Origin and Westwood against each other to develop a space MMO. That battle ended tragically for both studios! But it's nice to see a dedication to putting some of that history right… maybe we could see some archival Wing Commander material someday!

  • 28

    Jun

    This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Blade Runner and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here (in a word, New Detroit!). The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

    BladeRunnert.jpg

  • 03

    Jun

  • 04

    Nov

    The image of an unreleased Wing Commander CCG box set has intrigued us for more than two decades, but we've got a slightly better idea of what happened now. Thunder Castle Games was a company that bought CCG developer Mag Force 7 shortly after the WC game was produced, and this boxed set of the series was proposed but never produced. AD reached out to the original artist, Brad Kelly, and he added this background:

    I mocked up a number of gift set box designs for TCG including this one for Wing Commander. To my knowledge it never got published. TCG mostly imploded in 1996, hemorrhaging employees, including myself.

    I don't recall details of any plans, beyond the obvious expectation of releasing a two-player gift box. I knew at the time that relations soured between TCG and MF7, but didn't know details. TCG had/has a reputation for burning bridges, so it was not unexpected.

    I spoke to Margaret Weis

  • 04

    Oct

    This one isn't strictly WC-related, but longtime Wingnut and CIC visitor Vidmaster has released a free tabletop game that looks pretty neat. It's a work in progress that's ready for prospective players to print and play at home. He describes it as a "near future space exploration board game." The universe is built via a grid of tiles that you assemble, and there are plenty of detailed cards and interface pieces to get acquainted with. Everything you need to go get going is available here. Vidmaster is looking for feedback from Wing Commander fans who might be into this, so you can help follow up at the CIC Forums. It makes me wonder what possibilities are out there for fans who want to take something like this in a WC direction!

    vidmaster_game1t.jpgvidmaster_game2t.jpgvidmaster_game3t.jpgvidmaster_game4t.jpg

    I made a super-niche board game again. It is free. This time, it is a solo-experience, that is a board game played by one person only (something I considered ridicolus
  • 12

    Jun

  • 24

    May

    This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that inspired Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is Tora! Tora! Tora! which informed Chris Roberts' vision for the Wing Commander movie… and which was essentially the first draft of Action Stations! You can find details on that as well as how to watch along with us in the announcement post here. The movie will start about 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

    ToraToraToraPostert.jpg

  • 13

    Feb

  • 21

    Aug

    AllTinker has been hard at work making progress on his Confederation project to enhance the WC1 engine. He's put together this new status update with a handful of tantalizing new screenshots to share for the birthday. Enjoy!

    Hi all, I was hoping to have a playable test ready for the CIC birthday, but a few too many things have gotten in the way sadly... I've made a lot of progress on my format-reading library; I have a fairly short list of things I want to wrap up before I put it (and the viewer) up on github - it may be after the first Confederation test release, I'm not sure.

    Art-wise one silly thing I realised was that my old widescreen redraws hadn't taken into account the non-square pixels in WC1/2 (being 320x200), so I've also been redrawing those to be even wider, to match my original 21:9 widescreen goal - at the proper original aspect ratio this time. Here's a selection of those

  • 01

    Apr

    The procession of physical Wing Commander models continues! Today we've got a magnificent Border Worlds Avenger torpedo bomber made in Lego by John Nelson. While the ships featured over the last few days have been amazing, the creativity and talent on display here shines through in a unique way. It's quite a constraint to be forced to build within the limits of the physical Lego bricks at your disposal, which makes color-matching to a fighter's particular paint scheme like this super impressive. He's got the silhouette there - and if anything, this version is slightly sleeker than what we saw in Wing Commander 4. The turret is also an especially nice touch! We'd love to see him build more!

    lego_avenger1t.jpglego_avenger2t.jpglego_avenger3t.jpglego_avenger4t.jpglego_avenger5t.jpg

    Hello. I finally got around to a project I’ve wanted to tackle and that’s making Wing Commander fighters from Legos.

    My first go was the Border Worlds Avenger. The colors aren’t perfect and the proportions

  • 01

    Jul

  • 01

    May

    I'm always fascinated to find brief glimpses of Wing Commander that aired on TV and I thought of another vector for them: 3DO advertisements! So I spent some time digging through material archived by 3DO fans to find a few glimpses of Super Wing Commander and Wing Commander III that aired on national TV.

    3DOCommercials1t.jpg3DOCommercials2t.jpg3DOCommercials3t.jpg

    First is a 1994 advertisement called "Stop Playing with Toys" which includes a brief clip of Super Wing Commander! Watch carefully to see part of the Scimitar takeoff sequence. Fun fact: both of the 'toys' thrown away at the start, an SNES and a Genesis with Sega CD attached, also have excellent Wing Commander ports.

    Then we have a 1995 advertisement called "Welcome to the REAL World" which incudes a brief clip of gameplay from Wing Commander III. The available copy is pretty low resolution but it's clearly the player flying a Hellcat and destroying a Dralthi.

    Super Wing Commander also appears in this

  • 24

    Apr