Wing Commander

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L.I.F. has completed his campaign run Freelancer port with Wing Commander ships, which marks a big milestone for the project! As he went through one set piece to the next, he's been steadily stamping out miscellaneous bugs and glitches so that Wingnuts can play through the whole story now with a huge dose of WC immersion. The next stage of the project is massively ambitious and potentially changes the entire dynamic of the core game. Similar to Privateer, he's going to start working in a greater ability for ships to customize their weapons, engine power, cargo space and more. This should allow most all ships to stay relevant and be competitive as players move throughout the various factions' home regions. One of the biggest gripes about the original Freelancer was that it had an unrealistic progression of each fleet's relative strengths as the main character made progress. Rather than

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Today we have a new poll that asks which game engines you're most excited about on the modding scene. Fan Projects have been reaching back further than ever lately and doing some

truly

amazing

things with classic Wing Commander game engines. There's a lot of ways you can group these, so we went with the general way that projects have been getting managed lately. Yes, technically Privateer is a spinoff of the original WC1/2 engine, and technically Armada is a prototype of the RealSpace engine popularized by Wing Commanders 3 and 4, but we usually see projects sorted out by the options as we have them depicted here. And while I would absolutely love to see SWC or Arena on this list, due to platform limitations, there's very little action going on with these at this time. Hopefully talented Wingnuts can change this in the future though!

Our annual birthday poll showed similar, yet still impressive,

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LOAF recently found a nifty marketing prerelease snap of the Wing Commander 4 box. As the story

goes

, the stark geometric pattern of the main box eventually gave way to a slipcase sleeve with a more action-oriented center. You can see in the shot below that this bears a fairly strong resemblance to the final design. The core art and even font are in place, but the lettering was repositioned a bunch before production. Note that it just says "Wing IV" on the side though!

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Centaurianmudpig

has released some new samples from his WC-inspired space combat game,

Project Aries

. The first of the two animated gifs below show off the classic interior cockpit options that you can select during flight. Then there is a demonstration of WC1/2 style flak cannons in action. Finally, there's a clip of a Salthi and Dralthi lookalike escorting a transport. It's nice to see there's still progress being made!

It's been (almost) two years, while development has been on and off (mostly off), work continues.

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Mike Winterbauer

's Wing Commander Art Portfolio

Kickstarter

has officially launched! Mr. Winterbauer was the artist that painted the famous variant of the WC1 art that was used for the Super Nintendo box cover and various promotional materials. I spent a ton of time playing the SNES edition of WC1 during the early '90s, so this is very exciting to me! The campaign seeks to publish a book that catalogues the process that led to the creation of these items. For various supporter levels, there are some super cool rewards including art cards, magnets, canvas prints and even a metal portrait. Check out the details

here

.

This Kickstarter is all about celebrating Wing Commander and it's cool fans! In 1992, I said, "I can't believe I get to paint Wing Commander"

I have put together this campaign to get Wing Commander fans a super cool collectible signed art book and awesome signed print rewards. This is

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DefianceIndustries

took a momentary break from his many other projects to share a bit about the Wing Commander 4 modeling that he's been up to. He's got a high quality WC4 Depot about wrapped up, and he's spent a considerable amount of time differentiating all the different flight decks. A major focus has been to draw up some of the differences between the Yorktown class TCS Victory and Concordia class TCS Lexington - these are getting touched on both the inside and outside to make them slightly more visually distinct in line with their depiction in WC3/4.

...I've been busy. Firstly doing work for Pedro's WC4 remaster project. I've sent over some fighters but for the first mission we also needed Bluepoint/Orlando. It still needs some details but it's coming along nicely.

The next item is something of a pet project. The Yorktown vs. The Lexington type carriers. In WC4 the Concordia-class fleet

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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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AD has been on a twenty-three year mission to learn more about all things relating to the Wing Commander Movie, and his latest research is about the "open matte" broadcast of the film. At least Australia was airing this version in 2008, and there may have been other times and places that got it as well. As you can see by the example below, by adjusting where the edge of the frame is, viewers can see detail like the universe map's border and Paladin's journal in the intro. It'd be pretty amazing to see what other visual data might exist out there! If you have a copy or any more detail, please let AD know!

The DVD and Bluray are in 2.35:1 as intended. This screenshot is the only proof that it aired that way I've seen. Anyone else out there happen to catch the film on TV in this format?

The extra map borders - not normally visible in the movie - in that shot match the high quality digitizing of

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BastichB 64K is kicking off a new series, called DOS Days, and he's chosen Wing Commander to inaugurate the first episode. This review is nice because it seeks to set the stage for what 1990 was like from both a pop culture and PC gaming perspective. The author played Space Rogue, but was blown away by Origin's next space game, Wing Commander. He credits the missions, music and interpersonal interaction for making it all so enthralling. There's also a shout out to all the great ports, such as the Sega CD version we mentioned in the news yesterday. They start to allude to the rest of the games in the series as well, but discussion on those will be mostly reserved for future episodes.

In this 1st episode of DOS days I jump back to 1990 and check out the original "Wing Commander" game.

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Here's a magazine ad for the version of QEMM that came bundled with Privateer and Shadowcaster... and look, there was an Ultima Underworld version, too! Neat.

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E3 2018 is unfolding over the next week, and Electronic Arts held its

press event

today to highlight its new games coming in the year ahead.

Battlefield V

and

Anthem

have stirred some of the most interest and look fairly neat. No new Wing Commander games seem to be on the horizon for 2018, but EA did announce another mobile Command & Conquer game,

Rivals

, in the "Clash Royale" style. It's streamlined significantly compared to classic RTS games, but the fast-paced style will probably prove to be pretty popular. It looks fairly sharp graphically, and there seems to be a bit of depth in the form of different commanders and a complementary suite of tactics necessary to win. We shared the news about

Red Alert Online

earlier this spring and spent a lot of time talking about how this franchise seems to keep bouncing back. It doesn't surprise me anymore, C&C has more lives than a Kilrathi!

Display

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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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The final missing ebook from the Baen Wing Commander catalog continues to march towards release. As previously mentioned, the Milk Run story is available as a sample chapter to help get fans excited. Since we last reported, the novel has been added for preorder on Kobo, and we've added links to Google Play as well. End Run fully releases on July 3, 2018. Also check out our new the new and improved Book Grid that Kris and LOAF made. All the digital options you could want in your WC novel life are now at your fingertips! (except Freedom Flight on Google Play, apparently)

- Baen Ebook
- Amazon Kindle
- Apple iBooks
- B&N Nook
- Kobo
- Google Play

- Baen Ebook
- Amazon Kindle
- Apple iBooks
- B&N Nook
- Kobo
- Google Play

- Baen Ebook
- Amazon Kindle
- Apple iBooks
- B&N Nook
- Kobo
- Google Play

- Baen Ebook
- Amazon Kindle
- Apple iBooks
- B&N Nook
- Kobo
- Google Play

- Baen Ebook
- Amazon

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Sorry for the sudden notice, but we need to announce a delay in tomorrow's Wing Commander CIC Birthday Party. Due to an emergent medical issue, the event will be moved out at least a week. We'll be sure to confirm details when we can firm up the new date. Thanks to everyone for being so flexible on this! On the bright side, we've reached out to a few of the Wingnuts who have been diligently prepping material for the event, and it sounds like the extra time will help them put some extra polish on a few things.

With that being said, tomorrow is still the actual 30th birthday of the Wing Commander series! Since we're always celebrating the franchise in #Wingnut on Discord every single day, you're more than welcome to drop in and commemorate the date with us! We just won't have a formal agenda or fancy front page slate tomorrow.

It's also great to see other places are starting to get in the mood as

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The WC Toolbox is branching out to even further reaches of the Wing Commander universe. UnnamedCharacter's latest update adds the first features to help crack open console ports. WC3 is first up: on the 3DO, prospective hackers can extract .bun(dles) and .str(eam) data files. For WC3 on the Playstion, it's now possible to extract .lib(rary) and .tai (voice) files. Regular PC WC3 also gets .pak and .iff support as well. I wouldn't know the first thing to do with these exports, but the WC modding community is very excited to be able to get their hands on even more in-game assets from The Heart of the Tiger! You can grab the latest tool kit here or learn about how the new functionality work at the CIC Forums.

I was not planning on making a release just yet, but I have noticed some interest in the container formats for console versions of WC games. Since I have working code to handle some of these

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The retro game site

Commodore4ever

has found another iteration of the Wing Commander 1 sell sheet advertisement. This one features a black banner with the words, "The award winning Space Combat Simulation. Available soon for the Amiga!" This poster-style image is a famous advert that actually predates WC - the earliest versions promote the game as

Wingleader

with the famous words, "What you SEE is what you PLAY!" Other iterations exist, including variants in different languages. Although this minor wording tweak may not seem super exciting, from a collector's point of view, it's fascinating to see just how many versions exist!

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DefianceIndustries

has moved over to Kilrathi ships as he fills out his WC1 fleet, and the first two fliers are the Dralthi and Salthi. We've seen a hundred Dralthi variants over the years, and they just never get old. This one is as gorgeous as we've ever seen, so it's just a treat. The Salthi is also a lot of fun, and I especially love the light shining on its side. This greenish hue gives it a soft throwback to the Jalthi from SNES Secret Missions, which was essentially a

green Salthi

. Very cool!

You fly like the apes that you are...

Or my all time favorite: "Hmm, that ape squealed when it popped!"

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Here's a couple of striking Wing Commander Movie concept images from around LOAF's previous Cloud Imperium office. They feature the Broadsword and one of its primary foes, the Fralthi. Look closely and there's some interesting notes about how the reinforced bow could be used for ramming. We don't often see this tactic employed by Wing Commander capships - short of a rare last ditch self destructing maneuver - but it would be an interesting dynamic to add in to capship battles. Star Trek Discovery had a pretty impressive

combat ram

last year, and it'd be neat to see more of that.

Good old Broadswords; not fast, but they got you home safe.

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Here's an oddity from the August 1994 issue of Gamesworld magazine. Wing Commander Armada is previewed alongside System Shock, and while the text has little new info, that logo sure is unusual! It's certainly a very similar typeface to the real Armada logo, but has a 3D quality we don't normally see, and we've seen a lot of Armada logos. Either they got this cool design from a press distribution or had a very keen eye for making up their own. As for the prediction that "Wing Commander Armada is bigger and badder than it's (sic) predecessor and jam-packed with improvements and enhancements," sure.

LOAF: Get ready for a weird logo. BRACE BRACE BRACE

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Author Andrea Contato has a crowd funding project you may be interesting! He's written an in-depth history of Richard Garriott and the Ultima series and is raising the money to translate and produce a physical print run! Here's the introduction:

Greetings, traveller!

If you have played a computer role-playing game (CRPG), chances are Ultima played a part in its inspiration. Created by visionary Richard Garriott, and produced by his company Origin Systems, Inc., Ultima is one of the most important and influential CRPG series in the world. Through the Moongate illuminates the path of the Ultima games' history and the creative people behind this landmark series. It also covers some of Origin's other games, especially Wing Commander, and touches on several contemporary titles. Many of these tales have never before been told.

Are you ready to step... Through the Moongate?

The entire book sounds wonderful...