Wing Commander

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St3lt3k spotted a really cool interview with the lead designer of Wing Commander Privateer, Joel Manners. This is a person we have not heard a lot from over the years, so it's really great that badastroza at Steemit managed to have a lengthy conversation with him about how the game came to be. They talked about how Joel got started at Origin and how the concept for Trade Commander evolved. There were big discussions about whether to include the Kilrathi, and a big push to ensure the game still felt like a Wing Commander title despite the unique setting. Check it out for yourself here!

Sometimes you’re working on a game that has that incredibly distinct feeling and sometimes you’re not and you have to search for it, but Privateer was one of those times where it just had it. It was very easy to do – I wish I could tell you about our creative debates and pathos and struggle to find our golden

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Here's a really cool video of WC4 Remastered running at an impressive ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratio. We've known for a few years that the game would at least support 21:9, but this is a nice confirmation that the even wider 5120x1440 resolution will work. The example clip below might not scale up in the embedded version, so I'd recommend popping it out to a full YouTube screen for the entire effect. Also be sure it's running at at least 1440p so you can enjoy the game's beautiful graphics. If you haven't gotten a chance to give the updated WC4 Fan Remake for a spin yet, grab the demo here (900 meg exe).

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is probably the greatest example of the medium, with Hollywood budgets, real sets and an outstanding cast including Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and Tom Wilson; and unlike many other FMV titles, each benefits from outstanding direction; which

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If you've been following LOAF's Wing Commander Privateer exploration lately, you've read about how the game's code refers to a Test Bed System that the Origin developers used while making the game. It's not linked from anywhere in the Gemini Sector, but it's still a "real" place that exists since it's pictured in the manual. To our knowledge, no players have managed to find it, until now! Rylex has accomplished an amazing feat by hex editing his way on over. There's not actually a whole lot to do - enemies spawn, but there are no asteroids or landing bases. But it's pretty incredible to be able to fly around in a previously undiscovered star system after nearly three decades. You can read up on the process and jump to the Test Best System yourself with these instructions!

So as you might know, it's possible in Righteous Fire to fly directly to Eden from the beginning of the game. Just go to Rikel

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Klavs has produced a new take on the venerable Wing Commander Movie universe map. About a year ago, he made an electrified version that really pops, and now he's got another novel recreation that looks like it was sketched on old paper. Both are based in the wonderful 275 megapixel corrected image photographed by LOAF and Thomas Hennessy and straightened by Jetlag. You can imagine this as some kind of Pilgrim artifact or even in-universe artistic interpretation. I also love that all the details like nebulas/galactic arms and Charybdis are there, although they look like they could be aged or degraded patches. Very cool!

Fidgeting with the star map today and I thought an ancient looking paper version might be cool!

Here's the older two versions I mentioned, so I don't miss a chance to repost them!

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John Nelson has another built another classy custom Lego fighter. Like his exquisite Longbow, this one also comes from Wing Commander 3. I like the bubble canopy and especially the lines of the aft fuselage. There's some forced scaling necessary for the gun pod, but that's a nice touch too.

While I gather parts to complete another project, here is the Arrow. This one is far from perfect. The canopy should be down further and the fuselage should end with a point and the back wings aren’t great but this is as close as it’s getting.

Plier (would) say, “The Arrow is a fine dog fighter that runs circles around anything in space but ConFed cheaped out on the missile racks. Give me the Banshee anyday.”

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Recently I extracted all of Privateer's gameflow screens (the planets and bases) and matched them to their correct palettes. 229 animations with over 5,000 frames! It's everything from flashing lights on the landing pad to the little cars that fly by on New Detroit. But behold my most exciting discovery: a never-before-seen ship! Thanks to the palette I knew it had to go, specifically, in the Perry Naval Base landing screen... but as far as I can tell it doesn't actually spawn there in the game. You can even see it says PNB (for "Perry Naval Base") on the side! This is about what it would've looked like, though it might've crossed the screen lower. Not such a bad day when you discover a new Wing Commander ship thirty years after it was made!

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Transmission Interrupted! I’m taking over your normal Wing Commander feed to wish a very happy birthday to CIC founder Chris Reid! Chris is the reason you’ve seen a new update in the space every single day for the past twenty years. Heck, most of the time you see my byline it’s because he’s taken the time to find something I was fooling with on Discord or Twitter. None of this site would be possible without Chris and he’s also one of the most thoughtful and competent people I’ve ever known. So in the greatest old IRC style, please put down your trouts and raise a virtual mug of Goddard Special to a real legend! Now, back to your regularly scheduled commlinks…

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Here's a recent discovery of mine regarding the unused hologram character Merlin in the Wing Commander movie. The film was shot to include all his scenes and his deletion had a knock-on effect for nearly all other elements of the film.

Merlin was Blair's PPC (Personal Portable Computer), a futuristic version of a Siri-ChatGTP crossbred with a holographic avatar. He would banter with Blair, make observations, and be a bit of comic relief. Here are a few early concepts of what he might have looked like:

Blair also would discuss things with Merlin while in the cockpit of his Rapier. When the decision was made to remove the character, they changed some of Merlin's in-flight dialogue to be from the Rapier Computer. We often speculated about what Blair's PPC unit (holo emitter base) looked like. Surely we must be able to see Merlin's base somewhere in the final movie. At the time, the obvious conclusion

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On this day in 2629, the Odysseus-class long range exploratory vessel CS Iason was lost with all hands after encountering the Kilrathi destroyer K’rath’kan. It was the first official contact between the Terran Confederation and the Empire of Kilrah.

Following the Iason incident, Confed interdicted all non-military exploratory, trade and colonization activity beyond the Vega sector frontier. At the same time they began a coordinated covert scouting operation to determine the extent of Kilrathi dominion. By the end of '38, Confed analysts had determined that the Kilrathi sphere of influence was at least equal to, and possibly greater than, that of humanity. Four separate envoys (under heavy escort) were sent into Kilrathi space in an attempt to at least open up lines of communication, but all such efforts were met by armed aggression. (All four missions were able to retreat under fire back to Confed

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Fun, minor change to Privateer: the build used for the manual screenshots says 'engage' versus 'launch' in the final game.

There are a few more of these in the manual! Since printed docs had to go to print well before a game went gold you can often find little changes like this. The price for the plasma gun was increased (inflation!) as has the location where the weapon gumps appear on the Tarsus:

The mission computer screenshots all show that this build had a '+' before the credits. Additionally, neither of the briefings for the missions on the greyscale shots are possible in the final game's mad libs random mission generator.

The Merchants' Guild mission example IS possible, though! Still has the old credit display:

The Orion cockpit has a Centurion VDU showing upgrades only possible on the Centurion... and one that isn't in the final game, a central tractor beam slot.

Big change in scanner prices!

The

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The Wing Commander Movie turns twenty-four today! As crazy as that sounds, it also means we're just a year away from it being a quarter century old. The film may be getting up there in age, but there's still plenty to learn about it. Check out the list below for some of our recent analyses and stories from just the last year!

• A Visual Guide to Uniforms
• Star Wars Actor Crossover
• Counting Ships of the Fleet
• On Declaration of War
• Vintage TV Spots
• The Diligent in Space Engineers
• Odd Connections
• Flight Suit for Sale
• Supertitle Megapost
• Tweeting in Real Time
  • Day Zero
  • Day One
  • Day Two
  • Day Three
  • Epilogue

For a nice visual pop, here's an upgraded trailer that AD put together as well as a gorgeous Rapier wallpaper by Klavs:

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My Privateer challenge was to get a screenshot of each ship in each base. So here's a quick post! Mining/pirate asteroids:

Agricultural/pleasure planets:

Refineries! A reminder that Privateer shipped on 6 3.5" diskettes: only the asteroid version has an animated spotlight.

New Constantinople...

New Detroit...

class="twittercard">Oxford!

Perry. Technically, this is a "hangar bay" instead of a "landing pad". The more you know!

And of course by far the biggest pain in the butt to collect... the derelict!

These are all bound for the WCPedia where I've been doing some pretty neat insane person stuff but also that I've been too brain exhausted to talk much about. You can check out the newly completed Hangar page here!

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We've got great news for Wingnuts today! DaveO's extensive archive of Wing Commander videos has returned to the internet. Dave started this vast archive some fifteen years ago with playthroughs of most main story games and their expansions, but over time some segments became unavailable.

There's all kinds of reasons why fans might want to have this at their fingertips. It's very helpful to be able to quickly check how something looked in a mission, consult a video for strategy or grab a certain screenshot. You get game flow, cinematic and gameplay here for a complete experience. A few samples are below, but you can find all of his various game-specific playlists here on YouTube.

The CIC also has its own large scale WC video archive, but it's a little more focused on things like trailers, promotional vids, behind-the-scenes content, fan projects and similar material. The two archives complement

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Here's a cool little clip of Normal_Andy firing up Wing Commander Privateer on the Miyoo Mini. We know it's powerful enough, because he previously got WC3 running. Controls might be a bit tough to manage on such a small device, but it's still very neat to see it in operation!

Wing Commander Privateer on the Miyoo, really gotta figure out control remapping though, dunno if it's possible with all the keys this game uses pic.twitter.com/dSd4ry9B5V

— Normal_Andy (@normal_andy) January 14, 2023

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Today we've got a pair of tiny reviews from vintage mid '90s magazines. They're arguably less exciting than the big spreads that the main story games would usually get, but my take is that these are still important in the context of Wing Commander history. Both are short, but that's why I dug up two to share. Print real estate was valuable back in the day, so sometimes the only information you'd have about certain games would be a few sentences like this here and there. This would happen sometimes to games like Super Wing Commander (3DO) and Armada, which got a small strip in the January 1994 edition of Electronic Gaming Monthly and the February 1995 issue of Next Generation magazine. At least there were some screenshots, which is more than some of these titles got! Special bonus: Bioforge advertisement!

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Here's a Wing Commander/Origin ad I don't think I've seen before. Unfortunately, it's... not great. From the May 1995 issue of Wired:

And here's an Apple ad from 1996 with Wing Commander IV! All that empty space is because the Macintosh only had these ten games in 1996.

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Folks, I've uncovered some shocking cut content hidden in Privateer's files. The game has... TWO UNUSED NOSES.

For comparison, here's a few actual faces from Privateer:

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John Nelson has made a number of impressive Lego Wing Commander fighters, and his new Longbow might be the best yet. His latest creation incorporates many of the iconic bomber's famous elements from bubble cockpit to side hatch. Both the rear turret and forward gun emplacements look great. The angle of the 'wings' also looks spot on and the colors are accurate to Wing Commander 3. It's a very impressive build!

I tweaked the wings a little from those first photos and got the right color bricks into place for the front by the cockpit but the Longbow is done! Technic pieces were needed for the angled wings and while there are some gaps in the middle fuselage just behind the outcroppings I am pleased with the result.

Pliers (would) say, “The Longbow is Confed's finest bomber and has the firepower to turn any convoy to scrap iron in its wake, if a bunch of light fighters don’t gang up on it first.”

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I decided to try and take apart Wing Commander Armada to learn about how it generates maps. The 'Campaign' mode has 11 pre-set sectors that are always the same but the 'Armada' mode creates random ones. Where do the names come from and how many are there?

Long story short, I found the table of all 704 system names with a hex editor and cross referenced them with the published campaign maps. 704 systems is 11 blocks of 64 each. The first systems in the start of each block all appear in their respective campaign sector while the Armada mode can pull from anywhere in the table for a random map. So here's a spreadsheet of them all... the immediate takeaway is that I've discovered 118 new star systems previously uncataloged in Wing Commander lore! Also the list is super fun, lots and lots of 1994 gags and obvious Origin in-jokes.

Next I wanted to learn more about the planet graphics. I've found they're

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It was just last week when we featured a post by PC Gamer UK remembering the February 1995 (#15) issue of their magazine... which surprised us all because it featured a long forgotten portrait of Prince Thrakhath! Thanks to X-Wing Game Series we have an excellent quality scan of the magazine and we've pulled out all the Wing Commander material for you.

The most exciting discovery was the story behind the painting... along with an unobstructed, high resolution scan of the full piece! It turns out it was painted by Paul Kidby, an English artist notable for his work in Terry Prachett's worlds, and the original was given away in an Electronic Arts contest run through the magazine. How did history forget this?!

The review itself is comprehensive and accurate... Wing Commander III is an immaculate game!

The issue also included a short article on actors appearing in CD-ROMs that features a photograph of Mark