Display MoreAllTinker 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 of course the work of various members of the community over the years.My immediate goal (which may well still take a couple more years) is to fully re-implement Wing Commander 1 & 2, favouring making subtle improvements here and there over perfect accuracy. It's not the only motivating factor, but the main one is honestly the lack of speed limiting in DOS WC1/2... I can't deal with it anymore. I've tried modifying the original machine code in various ways, but without the source code I've given up on achieving what I want with the original engine. I've tried Kilrathi Saga, but that doesn't do it for me either.
In concert with rebuilding WC1/2, I've been working on a mission editor, not only to view/debug existing missions, but to create new ones; and new campaigns, including new cutscenes/dialogue and so on. The whole thing is built around a scripting system, so even before I open source it (which I plan to do), it should be possible to make very complex addons.
Once the technical aspects have been worked out, the only limit that remains is creativity. And Tinker's got that covered too with this nifty Firekkan pilot in a Confed flight jacket!
And I'm not sure if this is going anywhere or worth showing, but speaking of adding new stuff here's a rough sketch of a potential Firekkan Confed pilot (with original art reference on the left). I'm not sure if they'd wear something so similar to regular uniforms though (maybe?).
