05
Mar
Tonight’s little project: a spreadsheet of all the ship graphics that appear in Privateer 2’s booth and which palette they use! Find the full link here (second tab).
Wing Commander
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04
Mar
It's a good week to buy Wing Commander games thanks to GOG's Sci-Fi Sale! Each of the WC titles is marked down 75% to $1.49. Since the theme is science fiction, the discount doesn't extend to games like Strike Commander, but it does include Bioforge, Crusader, System Shock and others. The sale should last all week.
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02
Mar
Fresh off the boat from Australia! I love weird compilations so much.
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02
Mar
Here's a quick graphic showing the known service dates for Confed fighters from the games (2654 and after); as you can see, it's largely not a case of designs replacing each other between WC1-3!
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29
Feb
…Another week, another exciting update to the Originator extraction tool! A headline feature this time is support for Wing Commander Arena models. Look how sharp they are in this format! There's some huge untapped potential with these designs. AllTinker also improved on the Privateer 2 enhancements added earlier this month and also added support for viewing certain images and text out of Origin's game Bioforge. You can grab the new update here.
Here's version 0.3.05, which mainly adds a few more missing bits of Privateer 2 text, brings over some of my old work-in-progress Bioforge stuff, and adds support for Wing Commander Arena models. [For] Wing Commander Arena's models, which are binary Ogre3D models - I wrote a custom parser rather than use Ogre itself. Originator itself doesn't display the normalmaps currently, but it does export them; it'd be easy enough but I'll wait until I do a bit of a
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29
Feb
Shout out to the wonderful fan ship illustrations in Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe! They're credited to Elizabeth Creegan. You can access a full collection of Ms. Creegan's ship sketches here.
Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe is the master pilot's guide to all eight Wing Commander games. Every ship and weapon is discussed; every mission is explained; every winning strategy and tactic is detailed; every undocumented feature is laid bare. You get years of Wing Commander experience - without giving up your day job. It's the Bible of the Wing Commander Universe!
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28
Feb
Knight26-77 has switched over to Nephilim models, and his first two are beauties! He's managed to source a "burnt titanium" material that prints with an apparent irridescent quality in order to give them their natural bug sheen. In keeping with the aquatic Manta and Moray theme, Knight's posed the designs in and around the pool to give them a fluidic space vibe. These are definitely some of the best physical Nephilim models that I've seen!
Casey we got bugs!!! Printed this in Burnt Titanium. I like the look it gives. She just looked so good in the sun and wet.
Can't forget the build video:
Another Defiance Industries Wing Commander Prophecy Upgrade model.
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27
Feb
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The WC4 Remastered team is back with a big new update on the significant progress that the team has made over the last couple months. Although they haven't formally published any updates, they've been very busy at work on several fronts. Some key menu / interface tasks and video integration have been completed. The team has made some excellent asteroid fixes and fleshed out the first few introductory missions. There's even a beautiful new Clarkson class transport model. Head over to WCRespace for the full article on what's new!Over Christmas and the early part of this year progress has been excellent, not only have we added all the missing UI menus but two more missions are now fully playable. Unfortunately it’s now ODVS’ turn to be overwhelmed with work so we will hold off showing those menus until he can replace my programmer art with his usual high standard.
For this article we will take a look
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25
Feb
…Now let's take a look at some of the background vehicles that did make it into the game!
This is TRUCK, CART and CARGO which drive through Perry Naval Base. Truck and cart also appear on the mining base.
LOADER is a variant of truck that appears in the ship upgrade room. From the dev files (and the Oxford promo shot that started all this!) it looks like they intended for these guys to appear on the landing screens too.
This is the first of several CAR models. It drives through the New Constantinople concourse scene (in both directions.)
Perry's pad vista has this blink-and-you-miss him fellow: a tiny SHUTTLE that comes in from the left entrance. I can't believe they built so many tiny models (large at the time) for background animations that weren't more than a few pixels in the final game.
New Detroit's landing pad has two vehicles flying around: JACKO and AIRCAR.
New Detroit's street level has another CAR -
24
Feb
…You made it to the weekend! Time to repair, rearm and refuel. To help ease you out of the workweek, here's a brief primer on the Refueler. No, not the Condor Refueling Shuttle, but that's a good guess! We're going all the way back to the Privateer Refueler truck that was cut from the final version of the game. It appears in a variety of prerelease screenshots and even several images on the back of the box. LOAF did a bunch of research on it last year, and here's the scoop:
Privateer was originally intended to include an animated refueler and loader at nearly every hangar which would interact with your landed spacecraft. The animations were cut from the game and the refueler removed entirely. The 3D model for the Refueler has been discovered marked inactive in PAD.3DS in the WC3D archive.
It does appear in a screenshot used in print advertising and then three times on the box of the game itself.
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23
Feb
…We've got another exciting update to share regarding the Originator universal extraction tool. AllTinker has been hard at work this month building out features and better support to get the most out of Privateer 2 assets. This is a huge boost to people like LOAF who are spending lots of time researching The Darkening lately. Today's update allows modders and curious fans greater ability to pull both images, audio text out of the code. Grab the update here!
I'm chipping away at some longer-term features (and Confederation), but here's a new version (0.3.04) which is mostly focussed on Privateer 2.
I've added support for "BASE" images, which allowed me to complete the remaining palette hook-up logic. The major text formats used by the game are also now supported. I've added support for the IFF-nested sample sets, which gives access to the majority of the remaining (non-movie) audio. IFF shapes are
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23
Feb
LOAF recently ran across this nifty issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus. It's positioned as a preview of Privateer just prior to its imminent launch, but the "article" is provided by Origin itself. I wonder when it was written, because it's pretty aspirational for being published just a few weeks before the game shipped. It's interesting to spot the differences between this and the final game!
Did we ever figure out ethics in game journalism? Here's a case where the magazine just let one of Privateer's designers straight up write the preview... and it's totally reasonable and promises only what they end up delivering.
Here's a nice visual comparison of when CGSP also had covers of Privateer 2 and Privateer 3!
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21
Feb
ParadiseRegaind has posted an extremely cool and unique collectible. He worked with apesincaves to commission an awesome diorama cube of the key original Wing Commander art and Hornet cockpit. The artist also makes them for Tie Fighter, Doom and many other franchises. You can even pick one up for yourself for about $42!
Picked up these really cool diorama shadow boxes on eBay recently. The maker/seller is great and made the Wing Commander one at my request. I’m trying to get him to make a Descent one now!
He has a ton of these for various classic games and series. Well worth a shout out!
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21
Feb
Knight26-77 has a new 3D print to share. This time it's the Class A Space Superiority Fighter F-109 Vampire. It's a little hard to see without zooming into these pics, but the shape is pretty spot on, all the way down to the nose guns and blister fairings on the rotating engine pods. As Knight himself admits, the paint job could use a little work, but that time lapse video is extremely cool. Be sure to check it out!
Not the best painter I know, but from a distance... LOL
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20
Feb
…AllTinker has a couple of fantastic extra wide art pieces to share from his Confederation mod of WC1. I really really like that extended view of the Tiger's Claw with bridge and gun turrets visible.
Here's another couple of things for the heck of it; the extended 'Claw for the landing animation, and the victory animation (the first frame of it at least; the whole animation is good to go though).
Some scenes are going to be easier to draw than others. The victory sunset is a relatively simple background to flow out. On the other hand, coming up with the visuals for the back half of each fighter are proving to be more of a challenge!
In terms of stuff I haven't done for the widescreen mod, there's only one thing now: the side views of the ships in the hangar, and they're very difficult. I experimented with some cheat methods, e.g. a big clamp holding the ship, or other stuff in the foreground to hide
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19
Feb
Hey, you made it through the week - congratulations! Now it's time to relax. Celebrate your victory with this ten minute loop that Vinman made of the Prophecy victory music. Or if you're already suffering from the Sunday scaries, use this clip to help calm your nerves ahead of the coming workweek!
This morning I grabbed a shirt out of my closet, saw it said WING COMMANDER on it, and got a bug up my butt to do a Wing Commandery thing today.After a morning of screwing around in Audacity, here's almost ten minutes of the mission accomplished music from Prophecy, for when you want to reward yourself for doing a good job.
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17
Feb
…We recently spent some time dissecting and analyzing the Wing Commander preview for the Amiga. Now we've followed that up with the same treatment for the Wing Commander II rolling demo! The Wing Commander II demo was put together by Origin for Winter CES 1991 and was first shown on January 10 of that year. It was the first Wing Commander to include speech (featuring voices recorded by the developers) and remains the release with the most time between the demo and the final product (roughly eight months). It's most famous for some of the wonderful extra graphics it contains, including an alternate model for the Bloodfang, a closeup of a Kilrathi guardsman and an animated scene in which Prince Thkrahath enters the Emperor's throne room. We've collected videos, assets, history and even hehind the scenes stories from the development team!
There's even a new patch available for download for the community,
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17
Feb
…Last week, we talked about Privateer 2's palette feature which allows any ship to appear in the livery of any of twelve factions. We didn't mention that this was being noted in the service of helping AllTinker add the correct default style for every ship in a future release of the incredible Originator. There were actually two additional options we didn't show in the last post: the Heretic's actual color yellow and blue scheme and this final seemingly unused one (note how this one also changes the color of the cockpit glass from green to blue).
In this process of studying this, we did manage to find somewhere in Privateer 2 that the system is actually used: for generating the 'booth database' images of ships! If you look closely at the different registration entries (and a few other places) you'll see different ships appear in all sorts of different colors! The system isn't actually used internally but
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15
Feb
…WARNING: This update contains imagery which may not be safe for work. We've redacted any thumbnails to remove nudity but there will be text links to the original images.
Back in 2019, we published a Visual Guide to Pin-Ups in Wing Commander which remains, as you might imagine, a popular resource. Last weekend, we received a question from ParadiseRegaind about the two Strike Commander pin-ups: they looked to be photo-realistic... were they based on real pictures?
We agreed that at least the female pin-up seem to be a paintover... but of whom? Our collected knowledge of early 1990s cheesecake was extremely limited and so I put the call out on Twitter: did anyone know this woman? A user named TNEQL answered the call: it's Pamela Anderson! Ms. Anderson had been a Playboy model in the early 1990s who became a massive international star after leading Baywatch. TNEQL had found the exact photo in an August 1994
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14
Feb
…Knight26-77 is back with an impressive new set of 3D prints - plus the time lapse videos to go along with them! The first model is the fantastically large Midway class megacarrier compared to variety of other large capital ships. We also get to see his new Piranha side-by-side with a handful of light fighter favorites. It's very cool to see how everything comes together on the printing pad!
DefianceIndustries gave me permission to do some test prints of a couple of his WCP Model upgraded designs. We have started with the Piranha and the Midway. DI warned that they were but under-detailed, but I decided to give it a try anyway. We'll start with the Midway.
Flying alongside her Kilrathi War contemporaries, you can see just how much of an absolute unit the Midway is.
Next up the 1:72 F-106 Piranha alongside some of her Kilrathi War era precursor light fighters, most by the super talented Klavs and one
