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Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

*Pilots' Federation ALERT*
The Empire has carried out reprisals against the rogue faction Darkwater Inc in the Summerland system.
The private military firm had trained NMLA terrorists and held Emperor Arissa Lavigny-Duval captive, on the orders of a cabal of senators named the Lords of Restoration.
Darkwater mustered an impressive armada, but these were no match for a combination of superpower forces and independent pilots. Colonel Ronan Brock, the mercenaries' leader, was killed during the fighting when he fled from the Onyx Storm megaship and was shot down by Imperial auxiliaries.
Emperor Arissa praised all those who helped destroy Darkwater, and declared: "Let the Battle of Summerland mark the victorious end of our bitter war against both the NMLA and the traitors who sought to destabilise the Empire."
ACT clarified that "Although there may always be Neo-Marlinist extremists, the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

ODVS is back with some new enhanced video samples. This is another test with an exotic combo of AI neural net techniques to drastically fix up the video. In this case, he's attacked the especially old school WC3 footage and improved the frame rate, color depth/texture quality and facial/environmental resolution. There are some definite pros and cons to working with each set of tools, so this is just an experiment to see what's possible, but it produces some fascinating results. It's amazing what he's been able to do with such low quality source material! Owen explains some of the process below, but you can read more on the topic of these magic AI-boosted apps here.

I've been quiet for a while, but I have been tinkering away and experimenting.

Specifically, I've experimented with using alternative AI methods. I know I've mentioned using DAIN (Depth-Aware frame INterpolation) AI models to increase

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we have a jazzed up version of the Armada intro from Retrobear Diskette Quest. There's a little bit of DOSBox scaling happening that supposedly makes it look better at higher resolutions, but the visuals aren't the draw here. It also has some "Roland MT-32 emulation" turned on, and I do hear the extra notes associated with that! Armada is a wonderful game that doesn't get as much time in the spotlight as it deserves, so take this as a plug to fire the game up this weekend!

How do you think the video above compares to the version that FekLeyrTarg rebuilt from scratch with Origin model assets? They both have their particular charms!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Playstation: "Let's do a weird print campaign for our port of Wing Commander III."

3DO: "Hold my beer."

The unusual "French Fancies" ad was only part of a strange early EA/3DO marketing campaign. An unused Wing Commander cockpit shot is pictured bottom middle in the

Dead Fish

spread. Not to be outdone, it was also accompanied by the "EA Lard" concept.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Dennis Mull has some fun new Wing Commander additions. Both of these are Privateer bundles, but it's interesting to see how they're from opposite ends of the Privateer multipack spectrum. The first set is highlighted by the QEMM memory manager, which would hypothetically help you get the necessary memory freed up in order to run the game. It came with the floppy disk version of Priv as well as the Origin title ShadowCaster. The second box is a higher end collection with the CD versions of both P1 and Strike Commander - complete with full speech and expansions. I love how visually distinct both are from each other with the purple/rainbow star combo on one side versus the clean white lines on the other. They're two very different ways to add Privateer to your collection!

Today I received a box with some nice items: One of them is the Qemm & 2 hot games bundle including #WingCommander Privateer and

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

The independent inquiry into Aegis has delivered its final conclusions and recommended that the organisation be closed down.
Dr Paul Baumann, who chaired the board of inquiry, summarised the detailed report:
"Aegis was established on solid foundations in 3303 with strong leadership. Over the years, poor mid-level management and general negligence reduced its effectiveness. A silo mentality developed, with each department focusing on itself rather than strategic goals."
"Reduced funding undoubtedly contributed to low morale among staff and a lack of any further breakthroughs in AX technology. But a reliance on independent pilots to combat the Thargoids became normalised, with some staff considering them 'disposable mercenaries'."
"More specifically, the loss of the megaship Alexandria and the illegal attack against Hind Mine are both catastrophes that could have been anticipated and prevented.

Quote from Mass Effect News-Bot

The Nintendo Switch has continued to find success thanks in no small part to its high-quality first-party content. Nintendo has also had a part in backing exclusive games for their platform, with one of the biggest examples in recent years being the Bayonetta series. After funding Bayonetta 2 for the Wii U, Nintendo has specifically backed Bayonetta 3 to serve as a Switch-exclusive experience. While much of the same talent has been set to return, rumors and signs pointed towards the original voice of Bayonetta not returning. Now, it has been confirmed that there is a new Bayonetta voice in town that gamers might be familiar with.

Game Informer recently shared a new cover story for their magazine which focuses on the release of Bayonetta 3. The piece focuses on many aspects of the new Bayonetta game, but one particular detail (via Nintendo Everything) has been revealed by the story regarding the game’s

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

Welcome to your final year at Starfleet Academy, Cadets. With the looming Klingon war, and so much to discover out in the universe, it’s set to be a busy one. We here at the Starfleet Academy Yearbook Association know that you've got a lot of responsibilities, but we want to let you know that we’re still producing your senior yearbook, and we want to know how you’re doing no matter where or when your journey into the Final Frontier takes you! From October 9th, 2018 to midnight on November 6th, 2018, we’re holding a screenshot contest! Take a screenshot with an Age of Discovery character, and send it along to us at community@crypticstudios.com, with the subject line “Yearbook Screenshot Contest”. Every Tuesday, we’ll produce a brand new Yearbook page from the Starfleet Academy Yearbook, starring your characters! If your screenshot is picked to be a part of it, you’ll earn one of five brand

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

DefianceIndustries

has debuted his Bearcat, and it's a beauty! Wingnuts overall have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the heavy fighter, but I've always been a fan. I love the aggressive stance from the head on perspective as well as the substantial engine cluster. It's hard to have a conversation about the ship without dragging in discussion about its wide-spaced guns, but they sure look cool. We really don't get to play with the ships nearly enough, and if we ever got a game where the Bearcat got more play time, it'd probably have a different gun loadout with better beam convergence anyhow.

Oh speaking of Bearcats...

This is oddly one of my favorite Confed designs, it's clearly an evolution of the Hellcat but there's some definite Excalibur influence as well. Also on paper, it's actually quite a nice fighter; she's fast, nimble, and has better shields and armor than her big sister. About

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

CountvonSchnaps has a new sketch: a wonderful Tallahassee class cruiser like the TCS Coventry in WC3. I really like what he's done with colors, paneling and detail across the hull. It adds some rich character! He originally drew a Southampton destroyer, which we highlighted last year. I missed the cruiser addition until Dragon1 pointed it out this week, but I'm happy to be able to share both now!

A redesign (slightly) of a cruiser featured in Wing Commander 3 and 4: the Tallahassee Class cruiser. Sporting 11 turrets (2x dual barrel heavy antimatter turrets, 1 x dual barrel tachyon gun turret and 8 laser cannons) it also has a front mounted axial gauss cannon and a torpedo/missile launcher. Similar to the Southampton it has a hangar bay located at the back which can house a full wing of fighter; typically, 4 Arrow light fighters and a shuttle.

It is fun to make ships like these, in a sketchy and

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The new Flag Commander update with realistic starscape backgrounds is live! As we mentioned last month,

L.I.F.

got some neat skybox software and has been carefully adding cool scenes to the

Homeworld Remastered

mod. Grab the update with the pretty backgrounds

here

. Here's some gorgeous examples and creative flavor text!

The Concordia wasn't exactly the first ship I'd have thought about when it came to pull a gut punch like this one, but I was a pilot, not a brass, so there I was, flying escort in my trusty Sabre. Sure, we were going to be cut off from reinforcements or easy retreat, but the Cats wouldn't see us coming, if Intel didn't mess up too much on that one.

It was a long shot that ultimately paid off big, since I'm able to write about it now. A science officer briefed us about some strange astrogation phenomenon that involved a couple of jump points in interstellar space that somehow got

Quote from Star Trek Online News-Bot

As part of our upcoming content release, from June 30th to July 30th, PC Captains playing Star Trek Online will have access to a special event. We want to give you the details now to prepare – but the name of this event might be a bit of a spoiler, so we'll have to hold that back.This new event will provide participating Captains with an epic reward: The Red Angel Suit. Read on to find out more about the event and its rewards. Event Progress Participating in this event grants daily progress towards the Grand Prize: The Red Angel Suit. Obtaining the Red Angel suit requires 40 daily progress, and Captains can earn two daily progress per day by playing any of the following content: Two Brand New Episodes (2 Points Each) New Task Force Operation: Best Served Cold (2 Points) Three New Patrols (1 Point Each) Clash Above Ceron Strike at Seedea Trouble over Terrh Once the player

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Shot97 has snapped a fun preview from a 1990 edition of Dragon Magazine. At this point in time, the game was still sporting its Wingleader title after Squadron was nixed due to potential copyright concerns. Ultimately Wing Commander was selected over all. I love how the Kilrathi are called "vicious militarists" and the Friend or Foe missile is held up as a "deadly" weapon. And thirty years later, we're still trying to make ray tracing a thing!

Also coming from Origin is Wingleader. Mankind is locked in a deadly war with the Kilrathi in the 27th century. Battling these vicious militarists are the daring pilots of the Terran Confederation. With his faithful wingman flying at his side, the fearless Wingleader battles with Kilrathi aces in heated deep-space dogfights. The game features Panaview, 3-D technology that employs highly detailed, ray-traced, bit-mapped images modeled in 256 VGA colors.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today dczanik shared a very slick interpretation of young Angel. The design started as a 3D model, but he finally turned it into a more artsy graphic. Let him know what you think at the CIC Forums!

Hey guys! I did a paint over a 3D model I sculpted years ago. It's of a young Angel. Originally I was going to make a 3D model of her WC1 character, but liked the look of a younger Angel. I thought you would enjoy it. Hope you like it! Here's the original model:

It was used for Howard Day's Wing Leader characters. But I really wanted to finish it in the way I wanted it to look so I finally got around to finishing it. And I made a 16 bit look for those that prefer the old pixel graphics:

Here's a few original shots to compare: WC1, Claw Marks, Super Famicon Claw Marks and WC2.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Phil's Computer Lab is a great YouTube channel focused on reviewing older tech. A while back he made a handful of tweak guides for Wing Commanders 1-3 and Privateer. In the clips below, he's also set up a series of reference videos to demonstrate how the original Wing Commander would be expected to run on actual 386 hardware: SX25, DX25, DX33 and DX40 machines. He lays out the other major components and BIOS settings and then lets them go!

These would have been common mid to higher end systems when the game was new, so prospective players can get a sense of what the developers' intended performance levels were. Unlike most of the series, the original WC did not come with a frame rate limiter that normalized play as computers got faster. A great many slowdown utilities and emulators have been implemented since, but they don't all work perfectly. It can sometimes be tricky to calibrate the right

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The Vega Sector fleet continues to grow.

DefianceIndustries

has turned his attention to the Tiger's Claw, and he's taking an interesting perspective on it. The goal is to merge some of the differences between the in-game sprite and the line art from Claw Marks. There are lots of different versions of the Tiger's Claw that show up here and there, and each has its own interesting aspects, so this is pretty cool to see!

The WC1 parade continues. Line-art accurate Bengal for all. You'll notice several differences between the line art and the final Sprite model. The three biggest ones I found are the tapering at the bow is more pronounced, There are only 5 engines instead of 6, and overall the vessel isn't very tall, it's more squat than the final version. But, I kinda dig the '80s ball style turrets and the more detailed stern. I'll texture it when time permits.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The

WC1 sprite refresh

that Unnamed Character, Goliath and Howard Day are working on was a big hit last month, so here's a closer look at one of the stars. These are the full 1024x1024 frame shots used for the upgraded Bengal. They're higher res than the upgraded assets in engine so you can really get a good look. It's been more than a

decade

since Howard first debuted this model, and it still holds up amazingly well. This iteration also has some updated light effects that really make it pop. These are just six of the 62 frames that make up a WC1 ship - you can find the rest at the

CIC Forums

.

Re-renders with some material tweaks for goodness

Quote from No Man

Hello Everyone,

We know that there is a lot of hunger out there for news and updates on No Man’s Sky. We’re very excited to be able to share more information from behind the scenes.

Our next chapter No Man’s Sky: Beyond, is coming on August 14th!

Beyond will contain three major updates rolled into one larger free release. These changes are a mix of features we’ve been dreaming of for a while, and a reaction to how we have seen folks playing since the release of NEXT.

An expanded Online experience will bring a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together.

Meanwhile VR support will bring the entire game experience to life in virtual reality. Grab the joystick and thruster to fly your starship over an unexplored alien planet as you peer out of the cockpit at the view below. Reach into your backpack to grab your multitool, touch it to switch to

Quote from No Man

Hello Everyone!

It’s hard to believe that No Man’s Sky Beyond launched only a week ago. It has been a super intense and exciting time for us, but seeing the community begin to explore the new features, watching people gathering together in the Space Anomaly, building intricate contraptions, and obviously milking alien creatures has meant a lot to us. Adding big ambitious things, to something already big and ambitious is never easy, but witnessing more than two million people play in the first seven days was so humbling and overwhelming.

As always, we are listening intently, and focusing on the fixes and improvements that are most important to the community. The team have been working hard to safely resolve any critical issues, and we have now reached a point where we can begin to include improvements to functionality, gameplay and performance (as well as continuing to resolve more rare critical issues).

A complete

Quote from No Man

Hello Everyone!

It’s only been a couple of weeks since our last development update, but we wanted to reach out to say that the team is well and hard at work, and now quite settled into this strange “new normal” of working remotely.

Sometimes it’s good to take a moment and look back on the most recent steps in the No Man’s Sky journey. Beginning with Synthesis, we planned to release more regularly, and it’s encouraging to look back on how this has unfolded so far. Over the past five months, we’ve released four substantial content updates – Synthesis, ByteBeat, the Living Ship and the Exo Mech – and we’re so happy with what each of those has added to the vision of the game.

In addition to these content updates, we are working up some more ambitious additions to the universe, and have so much more planned for 2020 for us to feel excited about.

Community Research

The Quicksilver Synthesis Companion has been focusing their