Wing Commander

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I'm comparing the UI in different Wing Commander III ports! Here's the callsign selection screen on the PC, 3DO, PlayStation and Macintosh. "Maverick" is my entry except on the PSX version which plugs in BLAIR automagically!

Here's the Victory's main menu on the PC, 3DO and PSX. The Macintosh port doesn't do any of this diegetically, it's handled all in the operating system's UI (boo).

Duty logs, aka save/load!

And here are the (gameflow) options screens.

Here's a really fun one: if you access the menu during the last two missions of the game (where you're flying from covert asteroid depots instead of the Victory) the menu changes to reflect the new location! And in the 3DO version only each depot gets its own name.

Vera: Are there differences in the Victory Streak too?

There are! They redid the layout so it would fit in the thin 3DO boxes and added all sorts of additional art. Even a System Shock

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When ODVS first set out to remaster the video from Wing Commander games, the DVD source footage for WC4 and Prophecy was an obvious choice. It wasn't clear whether the very low quality WC3 material could be significantly upgraded. But not only was Owen able to pull together a complete cut back in July, but now he's taken it up another level and made version 2.0 available! Everything is here in 1080p at 30 frames per second, and the overall contrast has been fixed throughout. Check out the trailer and grab it below! Note that there is not yet a way to integrate the clips into the game, but this pack solves a big chicken-and-egg problem. If enhanced videos didn't exist, fans wouldn't have a reason to figure out how to include them. Now they do!

• Wing Commander 3: version 2.0 (3.7 gig zip)

To celebrate Wing Commander CIC's birthday and the thirtieth anniversary of the Wing Commander franchise, I'm

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I did this quick for a Discord discussion and thought it was pretty interesting: the difference in resolution between a Wing Commander III cutscene (320x160!) and a 4K movie. (AKA why they couldn't just reuse the game costumes, props, fx, etc for the movie...)

You can find a complete index of downloadable source videos (again, in the original 320x160 format!) here. On the opposite end of the spectrum, ODVS has used his advanced AI editing techniques to enhance and upscale the footage to HD quality here.

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This is also the time of year when we refresh our

Background

and

Development Archive

sections. These pages try to encapsulate all the useful or remarkable artifacts and bits of knowledge that we report on in our daily news updates, but can be difficult to keep track of over time. We hope these sections can be a good starting-off point for anyone just now wanting to learn about a classic Wing Commander game they found on GOG, or a more seasoned player wanting to research a certain topic in-depth. With the Wing Commander 3 anniversary coming up, this year's efforts focus on that title. Below you can find a birds eye overview of the new additions.

• Background: Essential (fan-created) tools and patches, noteworthy articles, manuals, Saturn and Jaguar port information.
• Game Design: Storyboards, the production book, the ESRB tape.
• Artwork: Various props you'll recognize, many sketches, mysterious ships

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Prolific game streamer and dedicated Wingnut Bonkus_Maximus is about to kick off a big series with The Heart of the Tiger. He's played plenty of classic Wing Commander on his Twitch channel before, but he's decidedly out of practice in WC3. This provides a prime opportunity to jump into the game anew for a fresh experience. You can join in live here on Twitch starting Tuesday at 8 pm Eastern time. There's also still an opportunity to vote at the CIC Forums on the difficulty level you think he should attack.

Fellow Wingnuts,

I'm going to start my full, expanded playthrough of WCIII (Including winning and losing track missions) on Twitch starting on Tuesday, February 9, at 8pm (20:00) Eastern time (GMT -5). I went through the Orsini missions just to be sure the game runs smoothly on stream, and I haven't otherwise played it for a long time. I wanted to start a poll for the difficulty level, which I

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Sidequest has posted a thorough retrospective of Wing Commander 3. It comes from an interesting perspective. The author has a lot of experience reviewing games, but was born after WC3's 1994 release. As such, one of the first things he calls out was the game's low resolution and high compression in cutscenes. While there's no doubt that this is an issue, if you lived through it at the time you would recall how the high end graphics (both in flight and for video) brought hardware of the time to its knees as it was. He also struggles a bit through the lack of tutorial help in-game, which was also typical of the era. But it's wonderful to see how people power through these difficulties and nevertheless have a blast with the game!

Thanks to Spacedock for spotting this one!

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Today we've got a retro review that AD found in the August 1995 issue of the appropriately named Man!ac magazine. It's a German publication, so we've provided a rudimentary translation. It's easy to get a sense of what they have to say: lots of excitement around the video cutscenes and some commentary about the cool spaceflight. The final score is 86%. I really like the 3DO screenshots here. You see a lot of the same PC images pop up in most reviews, so the more colorful comm VDU clips really stand out!

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Reaperman4711 has posted a video of him playing Wing Commander 3 on "period hardware." To me, that sounds positively ancient and even older than "vintage hardware." With that being said, there's a certain nostalgic joy to watching the game running on a nearly thirty year old beige box. On one hand, it's mind blowing how easy it is in 2021 to do a one-click GOG Galaxy install on your M1 Mac and launch the game with no effort. That frictionless experience is critical for bringing new blood into the Wing Commander community today. But there's a sense of accomplishment that goes along with getting your sound card IRQ settings set and firing up the game from a DOS prompt. And watching someone else who's done that work is the next best thing - enjoy!

Here is Wing Commander 3 gameplay, from an old MSDOS computer. There are some "immersive" ship-wandering cutscene conversations, followed by two early

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Brian demodulated has posted a wonderful throwback to 1991. He found his old vintage copy of Wing Commander 2 recently, and as awesome as that is alone, it also still had the faded original store receipt. Sometimes unique little bits like that can tell their own nostalgic story - and Brian has one to go along with this buying experience below! If you have an old '90s tale to share about finding WC in stores, drop it in the comments and share. You can find more of Brian's classic gaming stuff at demodulated.com.

I found my old copy of Wing Commander II at my parents' house this weekend. A truly beloved artifact. I can't begin to tell you how immersive this game was for little me. The box includes my very faded original receipt from Steals Direct in Toronto in November, 1991!

Looking at this box again reminds me of the experience. My dad took me to this enormous PC and software superstore, I picked

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BritizenCon

is an annual event for fans of Star Citizen in the UK. In conjunction with

JR Design & Fabrication

, the main panelists at the event were able to sit behind a really cool desk inspired by a setting in the game. On top of that, the WC fans there also built a really cool arcade style kiosk with built-in Wing Commander games! They designed a cabinet around a 27" monitor and loaded up Wing Commander 2, Armada and more on the systems. Everything was topped off by a keyboard and joystick built into the frame so that fans could simply walk up and jump into the games. You can read up further on how everything came together

here

.

Second on the list was to recreate some of the trading consoles and re-purpose them as Wing Commander arcade machines. As soon as we had this idea it had to be done!!

Painted and in place at the event they certainly went down well with the crowd and the people we spoke

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Wing Blender

has gotten its first update in more than a year. The program is a

Blender

importer/exporter for ship models that allows for easier manipulation of the items in Wing Commander Prophecy or Secret Ops. It's been a useful app for fan project modders, and the new version 2.2.1 can easily cut import time in half! You can grab the program

here

and get tips on its use at the

CIC Forums

.

Anyway, if you've tried to use the importer, you'll know that it is sluggish as hell. I've been trying to work on that. I made a few optimizations to the importer recently, which mostly involve using flat typed arrays instead of lists of lists, and it turned out to be MUCH faster than what I had. With my most recent optimizations, I was able to cut the import time in half! Well, at least for the more detailed meshes. AST_S_01.IFF hasn't shown much improvement in terms of import time, but that's because the other

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Billboard is a trade magazine for the entertainment industry which reports on the production and marketing side of films, television shows, music and others. In 1996, that included the burgeoning CD-ROM industry. We've found an interesting story in the February 3rd, 1996 issue about the marketing plans for Wing Commander IV... which include some things we'd never heard of, like print ads in American Airlines' in-flight magazine! It's a fascinating look at how Origin was preparing to sell a game that, frankly, didn't need to be marketed to us at all!

"Wing Commander IV' Set To Take Flight

Movie Game To Get Theatrical -Film Promotion

BY DOUGLAS REECE

LOS ANGELES -

ORIGIN Systems is hoping to shrink the gap between film and game with its upcoming release, "Wing Commander IV: The Price Of Freedom." The interactive movie game, which will be shipped worldwide the first week of February, will be promoted

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Howard Day has new some artwork to share, and it coincides nicely with our new CIC Poll. He's beautifully recreated a WC1-style briefing room - complete with red light, weathering and podium/lectern. It's not supposed to directly be from the Tiger's Claw, but it's a pretty sweet recreation from a ship of that era! There are also some nice updates to Maniac and Chef, two of his key pilots.

Here's the latest on the TCS Orszaga's briefing room - Supposed to be of a similar build/era to the TCS Tigers Claw, just smaller and a bit more battle-worn. Oh, and the latest on Chef and Maniac!

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LOAF has been greatly expanding the WCPedia lately, and one of his newest pages is an exhaustive collection of William Forstchen's work. The author is well known for his six Wing Commander credits, but he's done a lot more than that over more than four decades writing professionally. A particularly cool addition to the archive are numerous scans of his submissions to Boys' Life, the magazine of Boy Scouts of America. Many have a sci-fi bent that will be familiar, even though Mr. Forstchen is more recently better known for his historical and hypothetical war dramas. Learn more and find his Boys' Life stories here!

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DefianceIndustries has textured his retro Wildcat model. As a hypothetical Hellcat predecessor, it shares a lot in common with the later medium fighter, but it also has some wonderful throwback flourishes like the the trailing vane extensions on the fins. The colors are a nice homage to a classic era as well. You can just kind of imagine it going out on a dangerous patrol alongside a flight of Scimitars!

I finally got around to texturing my Wildcat model. I like how it turned out, although it looks like if you try and anime-style a Hellcat, you get a Super Rapier. Still though, it was fun little exercise. I went with the WC1 style paint, but I may revise it and go for a more 60's style raw aluminum look, it makes the heat distressed panels around the engines look a bit less jarring. But given the lore that the engines on a Wildcat are old, inefficient, and due an upgrade, I figured I'd channel the

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DefianceIndustries

' conceptual

Wildcat

has gotten a handful of tweaks. In particular, the recognizable wingtips, nose shape and engine position have been changed to improve the lineage connection to the Hellcat. The ship's also gotten four external missile hard points, which make it look rather tough!

I got noodling on my doodling again (sorry it's been a long week already). And the things that to me say "this is a Hellcat" are the downward pointing wing tips, squared-off and stubby nose, overall delta shape, and 3 main drives. Otherwise it's a Bearcat XD. So I didn't want to just throw a 3rd engine on the back, it would ruin the tail assembly, so I tried offsetting an engine along the centerline. Above the hull oddly caused the ship to look A) too much like a viper and B) it kind of messed up the lines. So I stuck the engine on the ventral hull and I think it looks pretty good - it blends in better

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DefianceIndustries

took a break from recreating well known ships from Wing Commander to do a concept sketch. The Wildcat fighter is introduced in Action Stations, and the implication is that it was a precursor to the Hellcat just like their

WW2

ancestors

. The result draws some clear parallels to well known designs while simultaneously introducing multiple unique design elements that could be considered throwback retro cues. And with its four guns and twin engines, it looks like a potent little fighter!

Oodles of Doodles. One of the advantages of having all day mandatory training is that you have time to do some doodling... not that I'd ever recommend anyone do that of course, your full attentions should always be on your course work...

Anyway I started noodling on what a Wildcat might look like, as a predecessor to the Hellcat it should share some design similarities but would look a bit more anime

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We've got an exciting update in the WCPedia to share today! LOAF has spent weeks carefully compiling everything we know about the Wing Commander Customizable Card Game and putting it all together in one massive article. It starts out with all the basics on what the game is, where it came from, what it looks like and even has news clippings from when it was released. LOAF has exhaustively re-scanned each card so there's a beautiful new capture of every single one. Card pages have all the stats and even the classic '90s CIC card-of-the day reviews. There's also a close look at the gorgeous art that was created just for the set. A number of Wingnuts have recently been getting back into the game, so these resources should be a big help! You can find it all here.

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Dennis Mull is restoring items after a recent move, and he's hung some fantastic Wing Commander collectibles! One poster I particularly love is his framed Academy key art. He's also got a cool Privateer ad print as well as a Mike Winterbauer WC1 SNES canvas reproduction.

I’m just putting up my pictures after moving and one of them is an original Academy promotional poster.

Dennis has a wonderful collection - here are a few more shelves full of goodness!

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There's a piece of IMDb trivia that claims the poster in Blair's quarters is Freddie Prinze Jr.'s future wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar. I hate to ruin a non-Star Wars-related Wing Commander factoid but...

... it's not true. It's one of several propaganda posters made for the Tiger Claw sets (note the Confed flag behind her) and like the ones in other quarters and the lounge the lady is a stock photo model from a collection licensed by the production.

I don't know who she is but as you can see I've found the source photo for the first time! Plus another one from the same shoot. Today she shows up frequently as the graphic for scammy social media accounts in search of wealthy American husbands.

I also found her on a Czech translation of a romance novel by... Jude DEVERAUX! Which is pretty on-the-nose, IYKYK.