Wing Commander

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ODVS has another awesome sample of the great work he's doing to enhance Wing Commander 4's video footage and make complimentary tweaks for the WC4 Fan Remake. In this case, he's found a snippet of audio that was present on the original CD but missing from the official DVD release carried by places like GOG.com. He's managed to splice the two together so the missing verbiage will be heard in future releases in HD or 4K. The team is still on the lookout for other similar improvements to be made in the future. There's also a new tool to improve the frame rate, which is on display in the sample below as well. Check it out!

A couple of new things to mention is this one. Firstly, as part of our efforts to improve on the base game in Wing Commander IV Remastered, I'll be fixing up any audio errors I come across - including missing dialogue. For reasons unknown, Catscratch's line "Oh my God, you're him!"

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The annual CIC Fan Project of the Year voting is now in full swing! There's a wonderful lineup of nominees this year, so we know it can be hard to just pick one to vote for. The contest phase will end in a week or two, so now's your chance to help select the winner for 2020. Good luck to all the nominees!

• The AI/Neural Net Enhanced Wing Commander Video Packs made a big splash this year by surprising fans with the quality of its upscaled movies. The new footage can even be easily dropped into WC4 and Prophecy.
• The Animated Academy-style Video Project is a relatively new endeavor by prolific modeler DefianceIndustries. He's managed to create some gorgeous cartoon style models that look wonderful in action.
• Flight Commander 2 was another newcomer this year. There's already a playable demo to interact with, and it even runs in a web browser!
• The Gemini Sector RPG has had an especially busy year. The

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Fabien Sanglard has posted a great podcast interview with former Origin programmer Frank Savage. The main purpose of the conversation was to learn more about Strike Commander, but there's also wonderful information about Origin as a company, the technology of Wing Commander 3 and Mr. Savage's later work on Xbox. The whole recording close in at more than 70 minutes, but there's also a transcript you can skim to get the gist of it. Check it out here!

Frank Savage: So at that time I was a hobbyist game developer. I taught myself C and C++. My education was in Electrical Engineering. So I knew the mathematics behind 3D stuff, but I had never applied it. I never tried to do anything with it except for a couple of courses in college. I was a huge fan of the Wing Commander series. I had Wing Commander license plates on my car in Illinois where I was living in Chicago at the time. I would go to GenCon every

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Today we have a fabulous digital painting to share. This depiction of a Ferret taking on a Drakhri was created by artist Mike Riendeau. He's currently making a series of video game-inspired art, which you can find on Twitter here. The scene was suggested by More_Boom_Boom, and it's a really great one. I love the stylization that takes the relatively sterile gray Ferret cockpit and gives it the green-and-blue glow of a Sabre. Very cool!

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Never let it be forgotten:

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Here's an excerpt from the end of Privateer 2 where we see the player (and others) escape Kronos' doomed flagship. Unfortunately only the published 320x200 version survives so it can be hard to see some of the neat details. Let's try and identify the ships!

Since the player can choose from 18 different ships there was no way to know which they'd actually fly the last mission in. To hedge bets, the escaping fleet includes four of the most likely options. First out is a Drakkar!

Then we've got a Danrik in an all-grey livery. (And that's a good choice because you were probably flying a Danrik here!)

Then there's a Shaman...

And out in front but not identifiable until you get to the second shot is the game's signature Heretic!

Cinematics not knowing what ship to use wasn't a problem exclusive to Privateer 2, either. Wing Commander Prophecy gives the final hero flyby shot to the Devastator instead of the

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LYP Studios got a lot of attention last month for their amazing Morningstar model, but that wasn't actually the first ship in their collection. Their archives also include a slick Centurion design that can be 3D printed and assembled at home. The applicable files are available here. If you put one together, be sure to send us pics!

I missed this originally, but LYP's Morningstar even glows in the dark! Check out the photoluminescent decals! Super cool!

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Here's a treat! People tend to think of Wing Commander Secret Ops as a game without FMV and a story told via text, but there were actually wonderful flashes of "video" throughout. Every chapter had some nifty in-engine cutscenes, and there were also a couple of really cool teaser trailers posted to the web. The first teaser revs up Prophecy's ICIS interface. It includes a terrifying distress signal that indicates the bugs are back! The second trailer builds on this but adds communication from the TCS Mistral Sea, which the Prophecy documentation mentioned would be the second Midway class megacarrier off the line. The third clip is a gameplay trailer that shows off the first mission and new dust cannon in action!

Both of the ICIS trailers were originally presented as Shockwave Flash files. While these have been in our archive for more than two decades, with the recent deprecation of Flash on the

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Here's a slightly ridiculous video to help break up the doom scrolling. We found it on the cutting room floor after EmuMusicFan's first round of Dame Da Ne memes. It's oddly hypnotic, and I'm slightly embarrassed by how many times I've watched it. Although this might not be the most revelatory update, we are working on a very cool news post that I'm looking forward to sharing later this weekend!

Anyway... I think, well, machine learning can certainly do some amazing things, but then again, it can also be used for "silly" and interesting experiments, like this one.

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Bazar du Grenier's YouTube channel has posted a gushing retrospective on Wing Commander 3. Rmax2 helps put this in perspective: The streamer has almost 2 million followers and this video has been seen more than 150,000 times in just a few hours. It's a popular channel for young French gamers, so this clip serves to inform a new generation about how fantastic the WC games are.

If you weren't aware, YouTube provides automatic language translation captions, so it's accessible to anyone. Click the CC logo at the bottom of the clip and the gear icon to select a language. Although the translation isn't perfect, you can tell how excited the author is to share his memories of the series. He also goes on to explain how great examples of mid '90s FMV games like this helped lead us to to rich stories in modern games today. Check it out for yourself below!

Hello everyone! A little video on a series that I'll

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By now you've probably seen ODVS' amazing enhanced video footage, but you haven't seen it quite like this! Due to previous limitations in what the AI/neural net tools could do, the best quality material he was able to generate in 2020 worked out to 1080p resolution. Aside from a few limited upscaling tests early on, he hasn't gone for Ultra HD until now. This is still a first cut at the new resolution, but even this preliminary 4K experiment is very impressive! Check it out here:

With recent improvements to Topaz Video Enhance AI's models, I thought it was finally time to attempt an upscale directly to 2160p 4K - and I have to say I'm pleased with the results.

While my previous videos have been available as 4K streams on YouTube, I rendered the actual fooage at 1080p Full HD, then used traditional bilinear scaling to double up to 4K - because YouTube uses a higher quality codec for 1440p and 2160p

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It seems like we've said it a lot this past year, but these are trying times. I know quite a few Wingnuts live in the DC area, including multiple members of the CIC Staff. We hope you're all staying safe out there tonight. It's never our intent to trivialize serious or stressful events, but hopefully you can find some much-needed distraction and comfort in our posts. Of course, there's always a Wing Commander angle to real life events, and the Terran Confederation is no stranger to assaults on Washington DC. The district is still the seat of power for humanity in the 27th Century, centered on the Hall of the Great Assembly adjacent to the old US Capitol building. You can learn more about civics in the WC universe in LOAF's wonderful article here.

The Legislative Branch

The Terran Confederation’s legislative branch is a unicameral body known as the Confederation Senate, the Congress, the General

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Here is some bad news that I totally missed at the time: the great prop maker Bill Pearson passed away back in March. Here's a quick summary of material covering his work on Wing Commander by ways of a tribute. First of all, a lot of this history is possible because Mr. Pearson maintained a wonderful online archive of his work. You can find hundreds and hundreds of pictures plus a two hour lecture covering the entirety of his career at his website here.

The Spaceshipper: Model maker Bill Pearson: Alien, Moon, Space Precinct, Wing Commander, Flash Gordon, Outland, Red Dwarf...

Production Designer Peter Lamont hired Bill Pearson to develop model spacecraft and a number of hero props based on his team's concept art for Wing Commander in 1998. Bill did the work in his UK studio and shipped it over to Luxembourg for the shoot. Let's look at some items!

He built this magnificent (and enormous) physical model

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We've got a really cool crossover to share today. Tomorrow, Bonkus_Maximus' Twitch stream will be broadcasting a retro playthrough of Wing Commander Privateer. But it's not just any Priv livestream! He'll be playing the game as an in-universe tie-in to the events that have recently occurred in the Gemini Sector RPG. That's some awesome collaboration and sounds like a lot of fun! You can watch the action starting at 5pm US Pacific / 8 PM Eastern time on Tuesday evening, January 5, over on Twitch. You can also read up on some of the recent RPG logs that set the stage for tomorrow's event.

Hey all! The ever entertaining Bonkus Maximus will be hosting the greatest crossover in the history of mankind. Mark your calendars, January 5th, assuming we survive this year, will feature Bonkus in Palan, avenging the losses that the team of the TCS Majestic took 10 years earlier in the Gemini Sector RPG. Let's

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Another annual tradition that we're happy to kick off is our Fan Project of the Year vote. This gives us a small opportunity to recognize a few of the projects that had a positive impact on the community in the past year. The nominees below stood out either by magnitude of their release, significance of their innovation or sustained duration of their project's output across a good chunk of the year. You're probably familiar with most all of them, but here's a quick rundown. Scroll a bit further to cast your vote!

• The AI/Neural Net Enhanced Wing Commander Video Packs made a big splash this year by surprising fans with the quality of its upscaled movies. The new footage can even be easily dropped into WC4 and Prophecy.
• The Animated Academy-style Video Project is a relatively new endeavor by prolific modeler DefianceIndustries. He's managed to create some gorgeous cartoon style models that look

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It's that time of the year again! Having see what all we managed to accomplish in 2020, what do you think 2021 will look like? Although more people will hopefully be able to spend more time outside this summer, we are blessed with a large group of folks who are pretty content to just be indoors. In either case, it's hard to not imagine this year will be better than 2020 in almost every way! What do you expect?

The old poll asked which non-PC platform was your preferred system for a new Wing Commander game. Xbox Series X edged out ahead of the Playstation 5, but by a lesser margin than the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. The results were flipped compared to the original Xbox One and PS4 match up back in 2013. With all of this new generation's cross compatibility, you can't go wrong with either one!

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We made it! Most of us, at least. I know some of you lost loved ones in 2020, and you have our deepest sympathies. A lot has been written about a year that words don't really do justice. Usually we take this time to look back and come away inspired by the vast efforts of the Wing Commander community to reach new heights celebrating our favorite fandom. It still feels weird to celebrate this time though, because although 2020 may be over, the worst may be yet to come in the next few weeks and months. But there is still hope that help is on the way, and we will turn a corner in a matter of months. Until then, please continue to be vigilant and stay safe. We will do the same. And we'll be here every day to provide the latest Wing Commander news. If nothing else, it's a fun distraction in a difficult time. So our annual recap may be somewhat low key this year, but here we go!

The year started

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EmuMusicFan has gotten a little bit fancier with his graphical novel project. Although you can't see the animation in these screenshots, they depict some of the latest motion that accompanies his various set pieces. For example, the moon in the background of the first shot is a dynamic object that will cycle to give a sense of time. Likewise, the dark shadow over the character in the third image isn't just a blacked out version of the final shot: it's a silhouette effect that's been applied. All of this combines to create more elaborate presentation in his stories to come!

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centaurianmudpig's Wing Commander style shooter Absolute Territory is now 25% off on Steam. That makes it a bit over $11 and a budget-friendly way to expand your space sim diet. The game has been getting steady updated since its release earlier this year, and the game now has enhanced ship and weapon selection. There's also a flashy new trailer that shows the game off nicely. Achievements and other interface improvements were incorporated last month as the game continues to get more polished. It's been a good year for fans going on to published their own professional space games, and Absolute Territory gives Wingnuts another solid option to choose from!

Update 1.3.0 brings ship and weapon choices throughout the Absolute Territory campaign. Ships and weapons are restricted at first, and as you go through the campaign more will be made available to you. Choose wisely. Players can make use of this

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It's been more than fifteen months since we last reported on the progress of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, so as 2020 winds down I thought it'd be nice to check in and see how they're doing. It was just last week that Roberts Space Industries posted a new roadmap on the future of the games' development. We previously reported that the team was projecting the storyline campaign to enter beta late this year, but that will not come to pass. Chris Roberts has just announced that it's "too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42." The new roadmap shows elements like art and level design will continue as far as the projection goes into 2021. Chris has drawn parallels between Star Citizen and Cyberpunk 2077, which was in development for about 9 years before being released to a mixed reception, so there is clearly no rush to the finish line imminent. And with that being said, it'd been a