Wing Commander

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I FOUND A TRUCK! In the Wing Commander Academy finale when Maniac is flying through the Agon'Ra'Sivar he hits a Kilrathi fuel truck. You can barely see it under the explosion! It's a similar shape to the Kilrathi tanks in WC3!

I also made a quick graphic of the layout of the Agon'Ra'Sivar's flight deck as Maniac strafes it! You can see he hits a Sartha on the catapult followed by several loaded strike planes and then the truck to set off the secondary explosions that cripple the ship.

This was all in the service of another fun project: I went through the show and divided into missions like the games… and then I used that to do a kill board for the show! Here’s the episode-by-episode breakdown. I hope there’s somebody that counts HISS tanks like this.

You can read more about vehicles in Wing Commander below!

• Tanks
• Tractors
• Movie Refuel/Repair Truck
• Privateer Background Vehicles
• Privateer Refueler Truck

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Last month LOAF put together an exhaustive writeup about the many Kilrathi emblems and symbols depicted over the years. In the spirit of completeness, here's a couple more than have surfaced since then! If you see any more we missed, let us know!

@kingmakeress had me looking through the 3DO version of Victory Streak where I found this forgotten oddity included alongside the Kiranka claw symbol!

These Kilrathi medals from the TCTG are worth considering as well!

Find the original post here if you want to learn all about Kilrathi iconography!

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There's a new update for the Wing Commander album campaign! If you didn't know, live orchestras can be difficult to book. Top talent often requires deposits and schedule commitment months in advance. Thanks to your early and generous support, composer George Oldziey was already able to secure a date in August, so the effort remains right on track. You can get in on the project yourself here!

Greetings all. As a result of your amazing generosity in pledging to this campaign we have more than passed the initial goal of recording with the full orchestra. Just to update you, I've booked August 19th of this year to travel to Budapest to record all the music! Because of this I will easily be able to meet my original projection of getting the final products to you by October. There will of course be editing and mixing involved, followed soon thereafter by creating the physical rewards.

The Budapest

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CountvonSchnaps has a brand new Wing Commander sketch, and this one is a bomber! He's created a Longbow named "Sledge Hammer" for the war effort. It's a chunky beast with lots of gorgeous details to look over. There's also an extra turret up top to fend off the Kilrathi. It was just published to DeviantArt yesterday and already has 80 Favorites, which seems like a lot. It's really nice to see the Wing Commander love out there! You can find his previous destroyer and cruiser takes here.

As per the results of the previous poll a Wing Commander design was in order. As such I picked the Longbow torpedo bomber. I played Wing Commander a lot and I did like the designs of the fighter and other ships in there. Kilrathi ships felt really alien and the story in which you could interact also appealed to me.

I did make a few alteration as to its design. It now has a turret and 3, instead of a 2 man crew. A

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AllTinker has a new bit of Wing Commander joy to share today. He's remastered the iconic Wing Commander opening track. It's a beautiful tune to listen to on its own, but this also supports his Confederation enhancement of WC1. Give it a listen below!

Hi folks, I've been battling against real life a little but work continues on the code & art. I have something slightly different to preview today - another side-project to the side-project; can't help myself - I've mentioned before that I'm interested in having General MIDI versions of the earlier game soundtracks, which would allow rendering with soundfonts or GM modules like the Sound Canvas (ala Privateer, WC3 etc.). In working towards that, rather than going directly from MT-32 to GM, I've been pulling apart the music and reorchestrating it in a more traditional sense first. Here's the first track I feel is ready enough to demonstrate:

I've made a

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Let's compare the Wing Commander 3 ship selection screen across ports! Here's the PC/Mac, 3DO (two screens instead of one) and PlayStation versions of the Arrow...

Three Hellcats V, primed, prepped, etc.

Thunderbolt!

The Longbow is largely cut from the 3DO version; it only appears as an option very rarely! (I found it in Delius 3, will have to chart it all out someday soon.)

And the mighty Excalibur:

There's an Easter egg in the PC version: if you hit ALT-S at this screen then it'll display specifications over the ships. None of the lore mentioned here matches anything else!

One discovery from the 3DO version is that the Hellcat, Thunderbolt and the Excalibur get six mines per hardpoint! But the mostly absent Longbow doesn't. The Thunderbolt mine loadout is the default for the Torgo 2 minelaying mission even though you don't actually use them.

The PC version assigns you a custom Longbow loadout for Torgo 2

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We're rounding out the third week of Origin composer George Oldziey's campaign to create a new album of Wing Commander music. The current tally is very nearly at $17,000. That's enough to ensure the project moves forward, which is great! As we previously reported, George has already scheduled time with the orchestra in Europe to record in August. However, it would be amazing if the live choral addition were added in as well. For that, we would need about $5,000 additional over what's been contributed so far. I still think it's very doable with all of your help! You can learn more about the project and pledge for a copy of the music when it's released here.

Here's a sample of reorchestrated WC4 track that George has already recreated on paper. The sound you hear is a digital recreation below, so the final result with live musicians will be even better!

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Destro has a new update on what to expect in the future for the Wing Loader program. He added preliminary support for WC4, Prophecy and Secret Ops towards the end of last year, but there's still plenty to do for the earlier games in the series. Now that in-game speech is working in WC1, I might be most excited about what is happening with WC3. He's made some major breakthroughs regarding the ability to add ODVS' enhanced video footage. There's even the potential to add back in scenes like news clips and the Hobbes explanation that are only included in the console ports. It's all exciting stuff! You can download the latest version here.

I've got a few things planned for a new release. Currently I'm working on some memory fixes, better camera code to fix some jumpy issues I've seen online:

• A few changes to the scripting to make reading it easier.
• Added in Imgui support and making preferences so users

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There's a piece of IMDb trivia that claims the poster in Blair's quarters is Freddie Prinze Jr.'s future wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar. I hate to ruin a non-Star Wars-related Wing Commander factoid but...

... it's not true. It's one of several propaganda posters made for the Tiger Claw sets (note the Confed flag behind her) and like the ones in other quarters and the lounge the lady is a stock photo model from a collection licensed by the production.

I don't know who she is but as you can see I've found the source photo for the first time! Plus another one from the same shoot. Today she shows up frequently as the graphic for scammy social media accounts in search of wealthy American husbands.

I also found her on a Czech translation of a romance novel by... Jude DEVERAUX! Which is pretty on-the-nose, IYKYK.

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GOG has kicked off a brand new Sci-Fi Sale to help you complete your Wing Commander collection. Each of the games is marked down 75%. There's actually almost 600 games that fall under the sci-fi definition over at GOG, so I did a check to see where Wing Commander places in the all-time best seller rankings. It looks like WC1&2, WC3, WC4 and Privateer are all in the top ten behind System Shock 2 and Masters of Orion 1&2. Prophecy, Privateer 2 and Crusader are close behind in the top 15. Armada and Academy make the top 25, with Star Trek 25th Anniversary between them. Those are excellent numbers!

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Here's a fresh batch of whimsical Privateer scenes and objects by Cybot. He's got a couple of inspired bases, a sharp-looking Centurion, the Mercenaries' Guild office and some cars! Many of the items depicted are available as 3D models to download. Grab them at the CIC Forums here!

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Scout recently found this spicy post on the Game Collecting Reddit. A user named charitysmyth1 had just acquired a copy of Wing Commander 2. Much to their surprise, it contained a collection of vintage early '90s adult media. These look like rather tame items all-in-all, but they might have been considered pretty racy before the internet age. Although not pictured, it sounds like the box did include the WC2 disks at least!

Scored some big box PC games over the weekend. What I found in Wing Commander II completely caught me off guard.

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The campaign to make a new Wing Commander album had a very good week! It added more than $1500 in pledges from a couple dozen new fans. With that being said, its current $18,500 tally does make it a challenge to hit the $22,000 mark to add in a live choir. As great as it would be to hit the $22K stretch target, composer George Oldziey says that if we end up falling a little bit short, he may be able to generate a little bit more live orchestral material with the funds. Either way, the money will be used to enhance the final product! The final few days of any crowdfunding effort can be unpredictable, so we'll keep our fingers crossed! You can secure your copy and help the project here!

Note that George's comment below is from a few days ago. The Kickstarter officially closes this coming Saturday. Now's the time to jump in if you haven't yet!

Greetings all! As a result of your amazing support

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Today we've got a little snippet unearthed by Sash's RetroBytes. It's a segment from the British TV show Bad Influence! that peeks behind the scenes of Wing Commander 3. Most of the footage looks like material we'd have seen on other longer WC3 BTS features, but it's always nice to see times when Wing Commander was showcased on television!

The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III. #Retrogaming #dosgaming #wingcommander #technology #90s#GameTVNibbles pic.twitter.com/kU9j4qkdol

— Sasha's RetroBytes (@SharkaBytes) October 9, 2023

The Heart of the Tiger! Hollywood comes to video games in a big way - as we see in this clip of Bad Influence series 3 episode 4 where they went behind the scenes of the production of Wing Commander III.