Wing Commander

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We're already a month into the new year, so it's just about time for our annual fan project contest to wrap up. If you haven't voted yet, there's still time! Lots of fans are out there making a difference in the WC community, so we know it can be hard to just pick one. Here are the nominees again. Vote below!

• Adm_Maverick's Papercraft Adventures started off with humble beginnings. We initially got to see some cool cardboard hobby ships, but his work grew quite a bit in 2018 to include reproducible miniature models and a tabletop game using these small ships.
• Dark Sentinel's Art is well known as the best Nephilim showcase in the known universe. It's most prominent in the WCP/SO MUP, but that's not the only project his efforts have helped!
• DefianceIndustries' Art is also synonymous with the high quality ships in the WCP/SO MUP, but that's just the beginning. His gorgeous ships also grace the

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For those who haven't been closely following the development of Star Citizen lately, there have been a few interesting announcements on the project's financials and upcoming plans.

Cloud Imperium recently released an accounting document that details out how the company used its money form 2012 through 2017. They spent $193 million on development and other expenses during that time with more than $4 million per month going out in 2017. We know they hit $200 million in crowd funding in November, but they also have other resources such as $46 million in private investment raised in December.

The most visible development lately has been to bolster the game's persistent universe and core technology, but a roadmap to Squadron 42 has also been released. This is the single player campaign starring Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies, among others, which many Wing Commander fans have been waiting for. New

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...Wing Commander

Flat Universe

! The votes are in, and WCFU took the top spot in our annual fan project contest for the third time. The newest version of their top-down shooter features new fighters, new explosion & damage effects, new weapons and awesome new multiplayer modes. The

Maslas

Brothers

previously won in 2014 and 2016. They seem to have even numbered years on lock - will they be able to keep it up in 2019?

In second place close behind Flat Universe, we have an actual literal tie this year. The first runner up is the Prophecy & Secret Ops

Model Upgrade Pack

! 2017's winner also had a big year with new ship models, impressive new Open/GL graphical effects and a neat iridescence effect for the Nephilim ships thanks to the unholy machinations of the MUP team: DefianceIndustries, Dark Sentinel, Pedro, PopsiclePete, Whistler and gr1mre4per

The other runner up is a newcomer this year: the WC1

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This is a crazy story! Everyone's favorite officially licensed top-down Xbox 360 Wing Commander shooter was released back in July 2007. In the original

press release

announcing its launch, EA confirmed that Wing Commander

Arena

was coming out in all markets where Xbox Live Arcade existed - except Japan. Finally, it's now available for

¥ 1,188

or about $11.

In confirming this unusual turn of events, Music_Guru was able to find a

cached

copy of the page from several weeks ago that still shows just the theme packs for sale. Interestingly, the Confed and Kilrathi Xbox

dashboard themes

were released in Japan back in 2007, and websites even

reviewed them separately

at the time. Arena is also listed in various '

new

release

' listings with a January 24, 2019 debut called out. If you're in Japan and still have your 360 hooked up, we'd love to hear about your experience. Are there any localization tweaks made

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We have a new poll today that asks about the many flavors of the

F-38 Talon

fighter. Some people may not be aware there's actually five distinct paint schemes out there. As the story goes, the corrupt Gemini Sector

Governor Menesch

illicitly sold untold numbers of the craft to rogue groups such as the

Church of Man

. This explains how commonplace they are in Privateer as well as why they're equally flown by both the local militia, Retros and random pirates. The model is also reused as the Kilrathi

Gratha

in Super Wing Commander. Finally, it shows up in Privateer 2 as an easter egg ship you race the Papagod clan to investigate. Which is your favorite to blow up?

They're listed in the graph as follows: 1: Unknown Ship (Privateer 2), 2: Gratha (Super Wing Commander), 3: Church of Man Talon (Privateer), 4: Militia Talon (Privateer), 5: Pirate Talon (Privateer)

The old poll shows we still have a ways to

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AircPirateNinsei

has completed his enlarged flying

Hornet fighter

. This update has a larger wingspan to fit more effective control surfaces and a larger powerplant. He'll be getting it airborne soon, and we can't wait to see! There's a lot of talent and skill that's obviously going into this. Follow the development at the

Flite Test Forums

.

The Hornet with a wingspan of 1000 mm (39.37 in) is ready2fly! :)The AUW is 513 g (18.10 oz). The Dry Weight (without battery) is 370 g (13.05 oz).The battery is a Turnigy nano-tech 4s with 1300 mAh.

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Adm_Maverick

took a break from his

tabletop

game to complete his impressive Tallahassee cruiser

model

. He's designed it so each subcomponent fits together tightly and the overall structure balances well. As an extra bonus, you can see how his

miniature fighters

scale nicely, so he'll actually be able to use the 24" capship in his future gaming endeavors. Sounds like fun!

I've had another project I've been working on for a while: Scratchbuilding. I started with the Excalibur... realized I was in way over my head, took it back a step and worked on the Tallahassee Cruiser... lost the materials for that... and decided to go for broke and started over on the cruiser but built to be 24" long. I threw on the last parts of the Tallahassee Cruiser last night. I learned a lot from this build, mostly in the way of bracing and how to square parts of the model up.

That's one of the Hellcat tokens I built for

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DocteurJ

is back with another

OldiesGamesTV

episode in his long running French language series on Wing Commander. The focus for this segment is the epic introduction to Wing Commander 4 and associated early sequences. He uses the DVD edition to ensure quality is top notch. It's great to see Wingnuts keeping the fandom global!

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pahandav

has created a MEGA Overview of the Wing Commander series. He covers each of the main games, which is all of the PC games except the expansions, Secret Ops or Arena. Of course it would be nice if those were included too, but it's still pretty impressive how exhaustive the video is as it takes nearly a full hour to cover the landscape. Lots of streamers hit WC1 or WC3/4, so it's a nice change to hear someone detailing out Academy nav points, Armada shipyards and the nuances of Privateer 2 videos. I suppose we'll just have to wait for the GIGA Overview for more!

In this video, I provide an overview of the 9 main games of the Wing Commander series released between 1990 and 1997.

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George Oldziey

reports that the Wing Commander

Jazz Albums

have been shipped! If you haven't sent your address in - or you don't receive yours in a week or so, let George know what's up! The cover art by

SabreAce

just looks fantastic. Some of the initial plans for a future campaign to record even more Wing Commander music are in the very preliminary stages, so stay tuned in the coming months for that. It's been a long road to get all of this amazing music put together, but the results have been very impressive!

Greetings all! All the CDs for which I have received shipping instructions have been shipped. I sent off the last of them today, mostly overseas. So if you have not received them in a week or so let me know. Most of you should have already received them. I hope you are enjoying them!

I'll keep you all posted on when the next phase of Volume 2 orchestral recording begins.

Thank you for

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Check out this cool Italian budget release of Wing Commander III! I’ve seen Prophecy and several other Origin games in this same style. I love finding different Wing Commanders from around the world!

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Wing Commander has once again appeared live in concert! This time the WC1 music was performed by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra at the February 9

Joystick 11.0

convention (

translated

). Did anyone happen to make it there in person? We haven't found a first hand account yet, but it could have sounded like the video below from the graduation ceremonies of the

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

in Stockholm. Crazy enough, these two instances weren't the only

Swedish orchestra

to play Wing Commander in the last few years. Sweden's apparently the place to be if you want to hear live classical WC tunes!

Welcome to the eleventh edition of Joystick, Malmö Symphony Orchestra's annual music music concert!

Experience a magical evening filled with powerful, imaginative music from the world of computer and video games. Today, the genre is well-established and is found in many orchestras repertoires worldwide.

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SciFi at War

is an interesting mod for Star Wars: Empire at War that we recently stumbled upon. It mashes up different franchises, such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, into one mega game. The video below shows various Halo ships fighting craft from Wing Commander. It doesn't seem like the WC fleet is fully fleshed out, and I can't quite tell if the

mod

is still active, but it's a pretty cool concept! You can grab it at the

Steam Workshop

. If this just makes you want to play a WC RTS game, you can check out the

WC Invasion

mod, which is also for Empire at War.

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The Love Arrow continues to warm our hearts in this cold month. It seems physically smaller every year though.

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The Combat Information Center team is proud to announce that we will be launching the Wing Commander community's first-ever weekly streaming show. The first episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED will air on YouTube this coming Thursday, February 21st at 7 PM Eastern. All Wings Considered is a live, weekly and informal look at the Wing Commander universe and fandom which includes gameplay, behind the scenes stories, community news and an ever-growing collection of regular segments and features! We've been developing the show for several months now as an outlet for our love of the series and are excited to start sharing with the rest of the world.

The first episode of All Wings Considered will also include the first iteration of a Wing Commander book club! This week we will be discussing the first four chapters of Wing Commander: End Run and everyone is welcome to join the live conversation via the WCCIC

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Frequent visitors to the

CIC Forums

have already noticed that our message boards got a big upgrade this weekend. We first switched over to

Xenforo 1.0

back in 2011, and this brings us up to 2.1 (skipping right past 2.0)! There's a long list of basic quality-of-life tweaks that bring the forums in line with modern user interfaces. Graphical elements scale better to high res displays, a variety of post reactions are now available, more types of uploads can be added and the site displays much better on mobile devices. KrisV is still working on several additional features, including a more extended menu of emojis that will be available soon. We're also looking at a handful of neat optional upgrades that could be possible with the new setup - would people be interested in two-factor authentication? Check things out and

let us know

what you think!

Xenforo 2.0 highlightsGreatly-enhanced mobile-friendly

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There's an exciting update to the

Homeworld Remastered Mod

, Flag Commander, today.

L.I.F.

has finished the prologue campaign with an exciting pre-WC3 mission. It follows the Victory in the aftermath of the Battle of Earth as they chase down a rogue Kilrathi fleet. It's pretty cool to interact with these characters on this scale from an RTS perspective! Grab the game at ModDb

here

.

Here's a new update to the single-player experience of Flag Commander: the final mission of the prologue campaign. Over the development of this campaign, I learned a lot in coding the events and logic of SP missions, which helped making the missions smoother and more reactive, so this update also includes some modifications of the first three missions to add proper backgrounds as well as character icons when someone is speaking.

This campaign is self-contained and follows the Victory soon after the Battle of Earth, in a

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Pix

recently came across a pretty neat article in the UK magazine

PC Zone

. I really like it's graphical layout with the Dralthis overflying the slick text. The author is a big fan of the WC series and uses it as an example for awesome '90s games that were outside the realm of his usual fare. I do wonder about the Hobbes blurb a bit, and I think the suggestion in the gray box is just that GOG exists. It's a little odd to not come out and just say that, but this is still a great quote:

Just give me a lantern-jawed, blue-haired hero fighting some big cats in space, and I'm as happy as a porcine covered in excrement.

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Our kickoff episode of

ALL WINGS CONSIDERED

is nearly here! Be sure to tune in on Thursday, February 21st, at 7 PM Eastern (4 PM Pacific) to watch our live streaming Wing Commander show. This works out to Midnight GMT, which we know is late on a school night, so the archived recording will be available later. We'll update this post with the actual YouTube link once we go live, but you can also stop by the CIC

Discord Server

where the link and associated #Wingnut chatroom will be available. It should be lots of fun!

The first episode of All Wings Considered will also include the first iteration of a Wing Commander book club! This week we will be discussing the first four chapters of Wing Commander: End Run and everyone is welcome to join the live conversation via the WCCIC Discord server. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

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The first episode of ALL WINGS CONSIDERED is live now! All Wings Considered is the CIC's first ever streaming variety show which will feature news, conversation and gameplay relating to our favorite series. This week we're taking on ground missions in Wing Commander IV and talking about the first four chapters of the novel End Run with members of the community. If you're watching live, you can join the End Run book discussion through the voice chat channel of our Discord server here. Missed the stream? The replay will be available below once it has been processed by YouTube. You can subscribe to the AWC channel for future notifications here.