Wing Commander

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There have been some new developments with the Peacock service this month, and this could affect your access to stream Wing Commander Academy. As you know, Peacock added WCA to its slate of shows back in 2020. Although the series is readily available on DVD for cheap, there are a handful of improvements that make the streaming edition arguably superior, including better music/voice sound balance. A few items fixed on disc were not incorporated, however, and you can read all about these differences here. In 2021 a countdown appeared that implied the show would be moving to a higher paid tier, but this was soon dialed back. The ticker has now reappeared, which suggests it may only remain in its current form until the end of the month. Presumably, the show would remain in either the Premium or possibly Premium Plus category.

On a very much related note, there have also been some big changes in who

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Today we've got a couple of cool 3D takes by Tore Gettoni. He's taken the 2D sprites from a pair of famous WC2 ships and visualized them in rotating three dimensions as a type of pixel art. The result is a neat hybrid of modern and classic visuals styles. We'd love to see more material like this with a similar aesthetic!

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Wing Commander II - TC Fighter F-44 Rapier II

Flying high with my brother @boldyfrenk and his beat straight from the shadiest systems in the Enigma sector

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Wing Commander II - Kilrathi Empire Fighter Drakhri

Second joint with my brother @boldyfrenk and his beat recovered from a covert operation behind Kilrah's lines in the Enigma sector

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Today we've got a very thorough retrospective by Space Cadet Rewind. He set out to create an elaborate analysis of all the ins and outs of the original Wing Commander, and the resulting video came out to almost two hours! He covers a wide variety of topics including the history of the genre, mechanics of the game, mission rundowns, wingmen profiles, tips for each ship, info on the expansions/ports and more. I'm still going through it myself! If you've got a couple hours to wrap yourself in a thick WC1 blanket, give the clip below a watch!

A longform review/analysis of Wing Commander, the original space sim.

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AD has done a little digging and found some interesting new aspects to a wild Wing Commander 3 promotion. We've previously reported about the contest to win a flight aboard a "Russian fighter jet" that was part of the WC3 marketing campaign. It was apparently an even larger event than we knew with French adverts to fly a MiG rather than the Su-27 called out in English fine print (despite them using the same fighter jet image). They do seem to refer to separate trip rewards, however, based on slight differences in what the prize packages entail (different date ranges, mention of spending money, supplemental US trip details, etc). The images below also show how there was a red box sleeve band around certain copies of the game to advertise everything, which is pretty neat. These copies are still listed on eBay for collectors out there! English & French

And here's more detail from our previous posts!

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Did you ever wonder why Privateer's missions go from series 5 to 7 in the game's internal numerical sequencing? Series 6 was cut pretty late in the process... but now we've found an earlier version of the game's script that includes them! After finding the derelict, you take the gun to the ship dealer on New Detroit...

There a man named WILMER tells you that he can't install the gun because you need to talk to Roman Lynch again. Roman Lynch is the mob boss you last saw earlier in the game after he sent his henchman Miggs to murder you and steal your artifact.

Incidentally, this finally explains why there is a never used closeup background stored in the game for a conversation with the ship dealer!

Lynch runs this town and you can only get the gun installed if you fly a series of missions for him. The missions are especially immoral, attacking business rivals and civilians...

... and one of them is an

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AllTinker has a variety of updates to the Confederation project that we shared last month. First up, there are more shockingly good graphical test assets to share. His extended take on the flight deck looks incredibly natural - it's surprising to check out the animated version that compares his take to the original. There's also a great interpretation of what a young Ralgha looked like. He was a pretty buff guy in his youth! This version was partially inspired by EmuMusicFan's sketches. There's also a handful of technical enhancements that have been made that you can read about in more detail at the CIC Forums. This includes some in-depth discussion about how visuals like the landing sequence below were made!

A quick update on the project: I've recently started work on splitting out the code for reading the original data formats into a separate C++ base library which will be open sourced as soon

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AD found a neat beer being served at The Quakerhouse in Darlington, UK. Apparently they have an in-house microbrewery dubbed Mad Scientist, operated by Brian (The Scientist) Dourish and Rob (Egor) Brunton. Wing Commander is one of their creations. It's listed as a "spiced/herbed beer" and the little table card pictured below says it's a 4% ABV made with ginger. If anyone's nearby and able to check this out, definitely let us know how it is!

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Sprite sheets for explosions in Origin FX’s Armageddon mode (Left) versus Privateer (Right). I had not realized FX shipped nine months before Priv! You can see a few frames were cut in that time:

Armageddon is an Origin FX movie which displays a variety of explosions and damage effects on the desktop. There are six types of explosions, two of which are taken from Wing Commander Privateer. Three sound effects can play. The movie is named after the armageddon spell from the Ultima series.

"Be careful — if you stop typing for long, there could be trouble brewing. It’s a terrorist attack of the software kind . . . explosions everywhere, blowing away your application and clearing the screen with the violent beauty of detonation after detonation. Whether they leave pitch black craters, smoke or no trace at all is your own decision to make from the safety of your console."

Here are the other four explosions in

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It's well established that some of the earliest Wing Commander games had music that was built around specialty sound cards. People with the right Roland hardware could listen to the background tracks exactly as the composers imagined them. George Sanger recently capitalized on this by releasing a special MT-32 Archival Edition of his WC1 soundtrack, and even the SC-55 tracks for Privateer have gotten some renewed interest of late. But there is another! Wing Commander Armada was also composed using an SC-55, and it has absolutely glorious music locked behind this card as well. Nerdly Pleasures recently took the time to record it, and here it is for your audio enjoyment! I just listened to the whole thing straight through. Thanks to Anatoly Shashkin for the tip.

Wing Commander: Armada is a spinoff of the Wing Commander series with music composed by "Midian" (Marc Schaefgen, Dana Glover). Recorded

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We’ve come down to the last day of the crowdfunding campaign to create a Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score. The tally at this point is around $6000, which is a fair bit under the stated goal, but we’re still very hopeful that everything will continue to progress and we’ll see the finished album. The current estimated completion is March 2024, and we’ll continue to follow the project closely and share any updates along the way. If you’d like to stake your claim on one of these records, you can still do so here through tonight!

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AtolmAzel is an artist over on DeviantArt who specializes in sci-fi art. Among their many galleries is a special section with sketches inspired by Wing Commander. Check out some of their slick pieces below! The sampling below shows off the Dralthi, K'ha'haf, Rapier, Longbow and a handful of capships. They incorporate some very distinct familiar themes with some smooth artistic license. You can find all of their sketches here!

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Like most people, I can't walk down the street without someone stopping me and demanding to know: is System Shock set in the Wing Commander universe? Buddy, I tell them, no it isn't. But there's a lot of fun backstory getting there...

(System) Shocking but true: the game DID begin development as a game set in the Wing Commander universe! Here's a pitch by Warren Spector for 'Alien Commander' that might seem pretty familiar (and in other ways... pretty... alien).

That's right, System Shock could've taken place in the wreckage of the Tiger's Claw! This was a popular idea at Origin at the time. When the Baen package was first announced the third book was also scheduled to be about the end of the 'Claw! With an outline by Jerry Pournelle.

It was even the focus of the Wing Commander II team's shirt... which artist Paul Steed famously decided was so ugly that he volunteered to design the following shirts

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AllTinker has a brand new exciting fan project to share with fellow fans. For quite a while now, he's been working on reverse engineering some of the original Wing Commander games in a new engine he's dubbed 'Confederation'. There's a lot of ambitious stuff he's got planned, and you can visit the CIC Forums to read up on all the details. One of the most eye-catching is the potential for enabling a proper widescreen mode. He's mocked up some terrific concept art of how that would look aboard the Tiger's Claw. It might only be a handful of pixels on the sides, but I really like what he's done here! Click on each of the thumbnails for an animation that compares the original to his new design:

Confederation is essentially a custom cross-platform engine which reads original data files from the Wing Commander (and Privateer) series - based on some of my own ("clean room") reverse engineering, but also

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Here's a neat translation of the Privateer 2 cheats that LOAF found in a Chinese game guide. Did you know that Privateer 2 even had cheats? Here's what each of them do. To enter the codes, open the navigation screen by pressing Alt-N. Then press F and type one of the following. Press enter to initiate:

• NO TALENT (Invincibility)
• REP ME UP (Repairs armor and shields)
• NAPALM (Unlimited nukes)
• PETY PETY (Full afterburners)
• CHILL OUT (Lasers produce less heat)

Privateer 2 cheats from a Chinese game book!

You can find more codes for Wing Commander games here!

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Here's a little detail you might miss in Wing Commander IV: Colonel Blair and Seether have the same three ribbons on their uniform but they wear them in reverse order!

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The month of May is blazing by, and that means the campaign to create a Deluxe vinyl pressing of the WING COMMANDER score has just a week left to go! Pledges have dropped off a little bit in the later half of this month, but Supercade Van is using the "flexible goal" model where all proceeds are collected no matter what the final number is so that the funds can be put towards still making the project a reality. You can still put in for a $35 contribution which nets you a dedication in the liner notes and the standard edition of the vinyl album. More deluxe editions are available at $50 and $75, and there are some bonus categories above that for extra swag. You can learn more about the campaign here!

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Drooling over these photos of Wing Commander III's costume shop. I wish we had high resolution images of all those Kilrathi sketches!

Massive kudos to Dundradal for figuring out that one of their references is the PLANET OF THE APES SOUNDTRACK!

Thought I found one in the prop book but it turns out it's Melek who is not in the photos!

Here's one! From the digital assets used for the Kilrathi Saga calendar. Sadly not in color.

Low resolution versions of two extracted from the Wing Commander III Behind the Screens CD. Someone who isn't as dumb as I am should science the color from the little one into the monochrome big version.

Here's one of the sketches! It was reused as the drawing of Sivar on the wall of the temple seen in the Prophecy intro... and was included with the Electronic Press Kit!

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Today we've got a new test render to show off what Mac is doing with Klavs' Concordia model. Everything about this scene is impressively intense: the model geometry, the textures, the lighting. Look closely and you'll even catch a couple bonus Sabres taking off!

The Concordia is a pretty slick model still, well worth learning how to texture 3d models for lmao. I've actually been slowly going back to texturing her lately, since I made a lot of mistakes with how I went about things the first time out. Especially in terms of how well it was optimized.

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The aptly named Tiger Claw TV YouTube channel has done a review of an interesting bootleg "100 in 1" SNES cartridge from AliExpress. It contains the ROMS of a hundred Super Nintendo games, including Wing Commander: The Secret Missions. It looks like this dates back to 2021 and just includes the standalone expansion sequel. We don't necessarily encourage piracy, but we do like finding Wing Commander in crazy places! You can jump to 4:35 for the SM part.

SNES Multicart from AliExpress

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It's time for us to swap out front page polls, and the new one is a logical choice. We're asking what your favorite Kilrathi design recreated for the Academy television show was. The were five (or six) fighter/bombers and two capships that made the jump, and they all look pretty sweet, so take a moment to consider which looks best to you. The Strakha is a bit of a questionable once since it's more of a "stealth Sartha" in this case. We did exclude the Carrier/Destroyer/Blockade Runner/Transport, since it's a unique design that simply borrows some design elements from familiar WC3 ships.

The old poll asked about the Confed ships that appeared in WCA. For some reason, the Hellcat was massively popular with double the votes of the second place winner. It's kind of funny because the ship only appears in the simulated combat from the pilot episode. Oh well, people like what they like!