Wing Commander

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Following up on his recent release of the

jazz and bar music

digital recordings, veteran video game composer

George Oldziey

has sent out three more updates to his backers. George has exported the sheet music for several tracks from volume 2 of the orchestral project to video format. You can follow the score as the music notation is played back through the Sibelious sound fonts. The second update shows a preview of the artwork for the physical copy of the jazz album. It was made by community member

SabreAce

, who you may remember from his work on those awesome

squadron patches

a few years ago. And finally there was a response to a frequently asked question regarding the recommended listening order. If you backed this project, be sure to keep an eye on your e-mail or the

Kickstarter page

for the latest updates. Kickstarter e-mail updates always end up in my spam folder for some reason. The Victory bar music

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Mail call! Here’s a wonderful press booklet from the Wing Commander movie’s French distributor, United International Pictures. 32 pages and about the size of Claw Marks!

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Today we'd like to officially announce our annual Birthday Party for the CIC's 20th Anniversary! This year we'll be observing the event on Saturday, August 18, 2018 at 7:00 pm EDT (4:00 pm PDT and 11:00 pm GMT). We'll be celebrating two decades of Wing Commander community at wcnews.com, and we hope you join us! As usual, the day will be chock full of site updates, news stories, trivia and fun times! There'll also be one significant change this year. For the first time, we'll be transitioning the online party from IRC to Discord. A large group of Wingnuts has been testing out the program for over a year, and we'd like to invite you to join us there. Although the shift away from our trusty IRC server is bittersweet, there are some very cool advantages with Discord. The program makes it very easy to join on both PCs and via mobile devices, there's enhanced support for attachments and even

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Here's a peek at an interesting prototype of the Wing Commander Universe Map included with Wing Commander Prophecy. We first caught a glimpse of this during our 2012

trip

to the University of Texas archive. While the

final map

detailed many sectors where most of the main events happened in the series, this appears to be a little snippet that just traces through the events of WCP. Due to the number of differences, it appears to predate even the

preview map

that was released online during development, which is pretty cool! Extra bonus: Pix, ace and LOAF posing Texas-style with George Oldziey's CD!

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DefianceIndustries

has announced the release date for the next big update to the Secret Ops

Model Upgrade Pack

. The new version will make its debut at the CIC 20th Birthday Party on Saturday, August 18! This should include the grand revamp of the TCS Midway, which we're all anxious to see. Looking out further into the future, there's been good progress on cockpit graphics. A sneak peek at the Piranha and Panther are included below. There's lots of great things coming!

Greetings MUP fans! So we have a date for the next release for the MUP. August 18. If that date sounds familiar it's because it coincides with the birthday party. So we'll be giving everyone a birthday present. In the meantime I'm finishing the Midway but I wanted to post some updates on a "nice to have" we've been tinkering with. A while back we looked at the possibility of adding real cockpits to WCP and SO, now that the open GL

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DefianceIndustries

has announced the release date for the next big update to the Secret Ops

Model Upgrade Pack

. The new version will make its debut at the CIC 20th Birthday Party on Saturday, August 18! This should include the grand revamp of the TCS Midway, which we're all anxious to see. Looking out further into the future, there's been good progress on cockpit graphics. A sneak peek at the Piranha and Panther are included below. There's lots of great things coming!

Greetings MUP fans! So we have a date for the next release for the MUP. August 18. If that date sounds familiar it's because it coincides with the birthday party. So we'll be giving everyone a birthday present. In the meantime I'm finishing the Midway but I wanted to post some updates on a "nice to have" we've been tinkering with. A while back we looked at the possibility of adding real cockpits to WCP and SO, now that the open GL

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Here's a peek at an interesting prototype of the Wing Commander Universe Map included with Wing Commander Prophecy. We first caught a glimpse of this during our 2012

trip

to the University of Texas archive. While the

final map

detailed many sectors where most of the main events happened in the series, this appears to be a little snippet that just traces through the events of WCP. Due to the number of differences, it appears to predate even the

preview map

that was released online during development, which is pretty cool! Extra bonus: Pix, ace and LOAF posing Texas-style with George Oldziey's CD!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Today we'd like to officially announce our annual Birthday Party for the CIC's 20th Anniversary! This year we'll be observing the event on Saturday, August 18, 2018 at 7:00 pm EDT (4:00 pm PDT and 11:00 pm GMT). We'll be celebrating two decades of Wing Commander community at wcnews.com, and we hope you join us! As usual, the day will be chock full of site updates, news stories, trivia and fun times! There'll also be one significant change this year. For the first time, we'll be transitioning the online party from IRC to Discord. A large group of Wingnuts has been testing out the program for over a year, and we'd like to invite you to join us there. Although the shift away from our trusty IRC server is bittersweet, there are some very cool advantages with Discord. The program makes it very easy to join on both PCs and via mobile devices, there's enhanced support for attachments and even

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Mail call! Here’s a wonderful press booklet from the Wing Commander movie’s French distributor, United International Pictures. 32 pages and about the size of Claw Marks!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Following up on his recent release of the

jazz and bar music

digital recordings, veteran video game composer

George Oldziey

has sent out three more updates to his backers. George has exported the sheet music for several tracks from volume 2 of the orchestral project to video format. You can follow the score as the music notation is played back through the Sibelious sound fonts. The second update shows a preview of the artwork for the physical copy of the jazz album. It was made by community member

SabreAce

, who you may remember from his work on those awesome

squadron patches

a few years ago. And finally there was a response to a frequently asked question regarding the recommended listening order. If you backed this project, be sure to keep an eye on your e-mail or the

Kickstarter page

for the latest updates. Kickstarter e-mail updates always end up in my spam folder for some reason. The Victory bar music

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Former Origin veteran

Raph Koster

recently published a new book titled

Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One

. Available first in digital formats, you can now also get the hefty, 702 page paperback edition. Mr. Koster was lead designer for Ultima Online and went on to develop the ill-fated

Privateer Online

before moving on to Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest and many others. The postmortems book contains critical analyses and after-action reports on many of the games that he worked on throughout his long career. We've

previously highlighted

a few snippets on the proposed commerce system in Privateer Online meant to tease the various sections of the book. It promises to provide some fascinating insight behind the scenes of game development. The

B&N Nook

digital download is priced considerably cheaper than the Kindle version, while

Amazon

seems to have better pricing on the paperback version.

Few game

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Back in 2016, the

Decipher SciFi

podcast devoted an entire

episode

to the Wing Commander movie. The show starts off with an overview of the Wing Commander computer game series with a focus on

Wing Commander 3

as a revolutionary interactive movie and the ever increasing production values and development budget up to Wing Commander 4. The show runners are all familiar with the franchise, having played the originals back in the 1990s on DOS PC or Amiga, and they even went to see the film when it was playing in theaters. The movie segment of the show touches on a wide range of topics, including unlikely fraternization, the traitor subplot getting axed, production challenges as a first time director with a limited budget, and Pilgrim pick-up lines. Check out the episode

here

.

As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time.

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While flipping through the October 1994 issue of British gaming magazine PC Zone, noted retro gamer

Pix

spotted a vintage

Armada review

. The reviewer praises the graphics (a low resolution preview of the still upcoming Wing Commander 3) and was especially impressed with the hybrid turn-based/split-screen multiplayer feature, in which two players can go head-to-head on a single computer. The user friendliness of the menu system for setting up modem or netBIOS sessions also received a nod of approval. The five page spread contains ample screenshots of

Armada

's different game modes, although some space is reserved for a large inset preview of Wing Commander 3. Shortly after the game's release, the free

Proving Grounds

expansion would add support for IPX networking and six player sessions. A decade later, a

fan patch

by

HCl

enabled internet play. Scans below courtesy of

Pix's Origin Adventures

!

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Noted DOS aficionado

Christian Klein

has

posted

some interesting comparison shots of the Japanese editions of

Wing Commander III

. We've covered these a couple of times in the past, but it's worth pointing out again that the game received a full audio dub (check out the intro

here

), and that Japan is the only market where a Windows 95 port of WC3 was released as a

standalone product

! The front box art for DOS/V machines (a version of IBM DOS with better support for the Japanese language) was pretty much identical to the Western release with some Japanese text thrown in, while the Windows 95 edition featured a more unique design (though certainly not as "out there" as

some

other

Japanese box art). The same design is featured on the cover of the Japanese

guide to WC3

for PlayStation. Christian also provides us with a look at the reverse side box art and the CD-ROM disc labels, which are more bland than the

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Forums member

pahandav

noticed a minor glitch with the

DVD port

of Wing Commander IV. The game provides transition scenes of Blair navigating the ship's passageways en route to hotspots like the lounge or flight control. Seasoned players usually skip these scenes to save time, so you may not have noticed that, on the DVD version, a few of these clips are lacking audio:

I was getting ready to do a stream of Wing Commander 4 and noticed that the walking videos on the Lexington had no sound. So, I extracted the audio from those videos from the CD version, and reencoded them to AC3.

To use these, you'll need to load SC_5150A.VOB through SC_5150G.VOB in AviDemux, go to Select Track under the audio menu, click on the box that says Track 0 from audio, and then click add audio track. Select the .ac3 file for the VOB file. Then make sure that the output format on the main window is set to MPEG-PS Muxer, and

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When the

Kilrathi Saga

bundle was released, it was met with a mixed reception. While it provided an accessible method for playing the classic trilogy on faster Windows 95 computers, it also contained a few technical glitches and oddities. One notable change is that the

Wing Commander III

port had its MIDI soundtrack swapped out for WAV audio recordings of the same, and not particularly high quality ones at that. Today, playing the originals through DOSBox provides a much better overall gameplay experience on modern hardware. But just as the Kilrathi Saga remains a must-buy item for collectors, we do want to preserve the KS WC3 music for posterity. Forums member

Darkmage

kindly exported the raw WAV music from the game's data files, and

Whistler

converted them to MP3 format for your convenience. You can listen to a sample track below and download the entire package

here

(9.1MB). It's a far cry from the MIDI

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Adm_Maverick

has posted a status update for his scratch-built

papercraft

Tallahassee model. He showed off a few images to demonstrate what he's done lately, and this includes a nice resizing up to a significantly larger scale model. The blueprints for his new design are displayed right next to his previous generation cruiser. We can't wait to see the larger results! He's also previously used different color materials to show contrast during the construction phase, which are clearly very different than any scheme we'd ever seen in game, but I kind of like the funky colors. There's some potential for some very creative artistic license there!

So what am I doing? Well, I'm sort of starting over... kind of. As I mentioned previously I lost the file that had all the notes for scaling so I couldn't finish the last version of the model I was working on. Well, I decided to take the first steps and go big

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Great news for Wing Commander music fans!

George Oldziey

has finished processing the Wing Commander jazz and bar music

recorded

earlier this year by his awesome Latin jazz band, and the digital version is now available. If you backed his

Kickstarter

last year, you should have received a message with download links and a password, so log in and check it out! If you didn't back the project but still want to hear an awesome sample, the Victory's famous tune has been released as a teaser here. It's my favorite - I just love it! More goodies are still in the works, which George details below.

Your browser cannot play this file. Click here to download the track.

Greetings all. I'm terribly sorry for the LONG delay, but I just sent links to the digital media versions of the Wing Commander Bar Music recording to those that contributed at $20 and more to phase 1 of volume 2, so check your inboxes. The

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Today a larger than normal percentage of Wing Commander fans are outside lighting off explosives and various rocketry. If you're among them, please stay safe! Might want to keep a Super Soaker handy... or leave the pyrotechnics to the professionals. It's also Origin founder Richard Garriott's 57th birthday - Happy Birthday!

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Stinger

has released a long-awaited update to his

WCDX

patch for Kilrathi Saga. The program makes a number of critical updates to the game's DirectX implementation in order to improve compatibility on modern computers. WC1 has been the primary focus, but the last couple updates provide initial support for Wing Commander 2. This update refines that and improves stability and smoothness of your WC2 game in Windows. Grab the files

here

and give it a try!

General changes:

• Patcher internals have been completely overhauled. Ideally, you won't notice any difference, but you should now get better error messages when things go wrong.
• Due to implementation divergence in the underlying platform, wcdx now handles scaling of the game's graphics internally instead of relying on the operating system.
• Restored mouse cursor positioning for all games.
• Much better multi-monitor support.

WC2:

• Fixed a couple of