27
Jun
Wing Commander
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03
Jun
…DefianceIndustries has some more gorgeous artwork to share today. In honor of Wing Commander Academy coming to the Peacock streaming service, he's created new versions of the WCA television ships. They even go one step further and have nifty cartoon style textures, despite being traditional three dimensional models underneath. It all comes together in a very cool new wallpaper image that's available in ultrawidescreen. A standard widescreen is also available at the CIC Forums - where you can also let him know what you think!
Ok so I spent some time devising a proper 90's style toon shader with some pencil lines. I'm oddly pleased with the results. I added an ultrawide render as well for those of you with more monitor than sense.
I finished "Tooning" up my scimitars...get it? yuk! yuk!...Revel in the pure 90's cheese of it...I think the WCA Scim is probably the best version of it out there. The
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28
Jun
…DefianceIndustries has yet another hot new capships based on a design from Wing Commander Academy. This one is the Achilles, which is an interesting design that seems to serve several roles in the Confed navy. He's addressed the larger variants by making a nifty modular hull that potentially detaches from the main body. I'm surprised we don't see this concept more often, since it seems so useful. Speaking of Achilles, that underside is sure light on turrets...
Another WCA ship for your amusement. The Achilles destroyer/transport/fighter carrier (CVE maybe?). It looks like a Durango and a Wake had a naughty, naughty evening; the kind where they both had a bit too much Vak'qu and in the morning the Wake quietly slipped out the back without leaving so much as a piece of dry toast for the poor Durango - and this happened a few months later. Since the carrier is kind of a different bird (but the artists
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13
Jul
…Milquetoast Gaming has been steadily progressing through the WC series in a livestreaming adventure dubbed 'Wing Commander-thon'. There's lots of people out there broadcasting playthroughs of WC1, WC3 or even Privateer, but Milquetoast has been hitting them all. This includes games like Academy and Armada. These titles are often overlooked - people today may consider them too simplistic to take up - but they were both quite revolutionary in their own way at the time they were released. They're chronically underappreciated, so we love to see people having fun with them! It's wonderful to see people poke through all the unusual menus and options that each game provides. Academy and Armada are super unique in the franchise, and they hold a special place in our hearts!
The next stop on our trek down Wing Commandathon we jump into one of the game that lets you manage your own ship, mining planets and
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20
Jan
Prolific YouTuber Zaranyzerek has posted an in-depth “Closer Look” video at the Wing Commander Academy series on DVD. He shares with viewers a nice overview of what the show was about, the voice actors and how it fits into the Wing Commander universe. This actually isn’t the first time Zarany’s done a video on WCA. You can find the first in our archives back in 2014. As he’s mentioned before, not enough people know about Academy, so we love to see it get the extra visibility! Here we also get a nice and detailed tear down of the box and its contents from slip cover to disc art. Check the video out below and be sure to grab a copy of the season on DVD for just $8. You can also stream it on Peacock.
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12
Feb
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PC Gamer is now rerunning celebrated articles from a decade ago, so I guess that means we can rereport on them! Up on deck today is Richard Cobbett's big retrospective on the Wing Commander Academy animated series. It was part of his original Crapshoot column and delves into the history of the franchise with a focus on the show. He walks through the pilot and gives a number of examples that illustrate what made the cartoon stand out in the crowd. I don't recall his scorn for certain products like WC Prophecy, but that's beside the point. The one inaccuracy that does need to be pointed out is that the show is available on DVD now. This piece was written in April 2011, and in September 2011 we found out the series was to be released on disc. Amazingly, it's still in print, and Amazon carries it for just $8. I guess they'll keep making it if we keep buying it. If you don't have a copy in your -
15
Jul
…
The NBC streaming platform Peacock launches tomorrow, July 15, and with it comes Wing Commander Academy streaming for the first time. All thirteen episodes of our favorite television show will be available sandwiched between Will & Grace and World of Dance. It's normally $5 a month, but if you preorder it tonight it comes to just $30 for the first year, which is quite a markdown. An ad-free version is $80 for the year. Additionally, Comcast Xfinity customers get free access to Peacock via Flex or X1, so it's worth getting the right setup. We have no kind of advertising or affiliate sponsorship with anyone - we're just trying to find fellow Wingnuts the cheapest ways to experience Wing Commander! The series is still available on DVD for $8, but I'm excited to rewatch the show in a new way. Just seeing the thumbnail on a modern interface like that is cool! And there are likely to be slight -
21
Aug
…FekLeyrTarg has a beautiful remaster to share with fellow Wingnuts today. He's gone through the Wing Commander Academy game soundtrack and overhauled it with an SC-55 sound font. This is described as giving the game the "Kilrathi Saga treatment" based on the digital audio enhancements that those games received. He's matched up the new tracks with the appropriate in-game clips in a wonderful YouTube vid below. You can also separately download the new album in MP3 (18 meg zip) or WAV (131 meg zip).
Happy 25th Birthday Wing Commander CIC!
What if the PC game "Wing Commander Academy" (not to be confused with the animated TV-series) received a Windows port like the "Kilrathi Saga" version of "Wing Commander I" and "Wing Commander II - Vengeance of the Kilrathi" and George Oldziey re-orchestrated the music again? Find out in this video.
To render each music track with Patch93's Roland SC-55 soundfont in
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17
Jul
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Peacock is live and that means the highly anticipated streaming debut of Wing Commander Academy is here! The good news is that the sound appears to be much better than in other iterations of the show, so it seems like this is probably the definitive edition to watch. On the other hand, the brief segment missing from "On Both Your Houses" is absent on Peacock. For the DVD release, VEI was able to replace the missing ten seconds from that episode with footage from LOAF's archive.I also neglected to mention yesterday that there is also a fully free tier available to everyone. It's heavily supported by ads (compared with minimal ads on the Peacock "Premium" and zero ads present on "Premium Plus"), but that means anyone and everyone can watch Wing Commander now. Comcast customers' free package is equivalent to Premium. The platform is currently available on Apple devices (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV),
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04
Jan
We have an exciting new addition to the archives today: a script for the third episode of Wing Commander Academy, "The Most Delicate Instrument." Over the years we've preserved shooting scripts (and a number of drafts) for all of the Wing Commander games and the 1999 film... but tracking down Wing Commander Academy teleplays has proven much more difficult. Until today, only two of the thirteen episodes were represented in the archive. These documents are especially fascinating for hardcore Wing Commander fans as they include not only scenes cut for time but also names of characters, places and ships in stage directions which were never spoken in the aired episode. You can download the The Most Delicate Instrument script in PDF form here. Stay tuned, two more episode scripts and several treatments will be added in the coming days.
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17
Jan
As promised, a second Wing Commander Academy episode is now available! Today's script covers episode nine, "Walking Wounded." The episode starts with a cut scene that was intended to better establish Maniac's character for the episode, a scene taken from Wing Commander IV where he uncomfortably hits on a new Tiger's Claw bridge officer. You'll find everything from confirmation that the long-suspected captured Confederation ship design is intended to be a Sabre to the names of the doctors and nurses aboard the hospital ship! You can download the script in PDF form here.
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30
Jan
…LAZY SATURDAY SPACESHIP POST! I thought it might be fun to sort of roughly compare the Wing Commander Academy ships that originated in Wing Commander 2 with their original meshes. And you know what? It was fun! The Sartha:
The Kilrathi Jalkehi heavy fighter, which appears in a single episode! (Word of Honor)
The furball Grikath bomber, a series regular:
And the Kamekh corvette! The coloring is a little more like the all-tan Privateer version (which was the same mesh retextured).
On the Confed side, we've got the Ferret. This appears in only one episode BUT somewhere there existed an unseen toy prototype of it, the only one made for the series. Wish I knew more!
The Epee medium fighter. This one shows up a few times on the show but it always seems like it didn't get a fully fleshed out model sheet...
... which is also the case with the Sabre, which actually looks like a different design in its two -
04
Mar
…Renowned comic and storyboard artist Tim Eldred has posted an awesome article about how he got involved with Wing Commander Academy and how it influenced the rest of his career. It's a combination of being in the right place at the right time as well as having the knack for visualizing the series' key concepts in engaging ways. He's got lots of fun concept art in the piece, including these two glorious shots. We've posted versions of them before without the color, but they really pop here fully illustrated like this.
When I sat down to watch Episode 3 (on a Saturday morning), it was a revelation to see my work on TV for the first time. In addition to what I mentioned earlier, this was also a case where some characters I designed were moving through scenes I created. It looked like I had somehow drawn every frame of this Saturday morning cartoon. I was also surprised to see that some of my shots were
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14
Aug
…ODVS has something new and a little different on the video enhancement front. He's put together a quick test cut of the Academy intro transformed into 1080p. He stresses that this isn't a carefully curated version to maximize quality, but even the quick and dirty experiment is pretty slick. He won't be able to actually remaster the show due to copyright considerations, so it's not worth the effort to painstakingly clean this up much further. Nonetheless, it's very cool! Note the embedded view below is sharpened, but still low resolution. Grab the actual 1080p file here (16 meg mp4). You can right click to download, but many browsers will play it natively as well. You can buy the show on Amazon for $8 or watch it streaming on Peacock. Maybe someday one of the official NBC Universal-authorized sources will go HD!
I've actually got several Wing Commander projects on the go at the moment, but I
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15
Nov
…The subject came up on the CIC Discord and I was surprised some folks didn’t realize that the aces in Wing Commander III had custom, souped up versions of the standard fighters. Let’s go, there’ll be a spreadsheet at the end!
Victory Streak introduces us to five Kilrathi ace pilots, one per ship type in the tradition of Wing Commander I. Three of them appear in the PC version and two were cut but still have cool ships hidden in the game’s guts. All five appear in the 3DO port without special ships.
The aces themselves all look the same… in fact all the Kilrathi VDUs in the game use the same footage with updated dialogue. Each one does have its own set of taunts:
Aside: the 3DO and PSX versions use color versions of the Kilrathi pilot… and in the spirit of using every part of the animal, Wing Commander Prophecy reuses them with new audio instead of making/rendering new cats.
Time to meet the cats! For each -
31
Jan
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And here’s a fascinating Wing Commander I behind-the-screens story I had never heard from Denis Loubet! We alluded to this in our big post about how radar works, but never reported on the original anecdote:LOAF: Is there anything more thrilling than the Wing Commander I box art? Despite the claim that “what you see is what you play” it’s not a screenshot but a digital piece carefully composed by the incomparable Denis Loubet!
Loubet: I invented the radar display as a super-quick way to know which direction to turn to bring a target into view! I think it worked really well.
LOAF: Wow, I had no idea! It felt so natural to me, I could never go back to the Elite-style radar.
Loubet: I had to do some fast-talking to get it in the cockpits! I’m glad I did!
The idea sprang from an idea I had for a flat 360 degree display, where the image got more and more compressed and distorted toward the screen edges -
20
Feb
GOG.com is having a sci-fi midweek sale that's briefly discounting Wing Commander - and many more space sims! Each WC package is just $1.49 or a whopping $11.92 for the entire set of DOS and Windows games in the series. Of course, most of the people reading this already own the games, but there's a whole new generation of gamers out there who barely know what Wing Commander is. The GOG sale ends late tonight, but their frequent discounts are an excellent opportunity to bring new people into the fold! Also, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is now included since it has been recently released on GOG. It's a wonderful WC-inspired game half off now for just $14.99! RGO makes it easy to pretend you're playing a brand new Privateer spinoff.
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21
Feb
EmuMusicFan has completed another set of regal Kilrathi drawings based primarily on the characters of Wing Commander Action Stations. Prince Thrakhath's father and older brother, Gilkarg and Ratha, are up first, and since this is from earlier in the war, Thrakhath himself appears younger. We also see Second Fleet commander Admiral Nargth. Although he's not in AS, Baron Melek is also included as a bonus sketch. I think this art style is sharp, elegant and has a subtle Asian influence that is well suited to the Kilrathi.
"Va ka garga ka naru ha gara. Those not of the blood must have their blood spilt. "
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29
Aug
Is there a better aesthetic than ~1994 Origin CD-ROM design?
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24
Jun
CD1188 Entertainment has posted a neat video of the latest AI upscaling and image processing techniques. They're using a screenshot from the WC3 introduction to demonstrate how amazing the technology is. AD asked the Wing Commander community's resident neural net expert, ODVS, for his take and he provided some additional context:
They're using Gigapixel AI with its new Facial Recovery algo (which was just released). I'm already doing a deep-dive into experimenting with it for motion. It's impressive, but you hit the uncanny valley pretty hard. Sadly, they've currently only trained it for static images. I suspect it will be a while before it gets incorporated into their motion-friendly models, but I have no doubt that's coming. I am already doing experiments, though.
Even if this isn't quite ready to actually animate videos with, the technology remains incredibly impressive!
