News from Bot

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

And that's it for the front page! But the party continues! Come on back to #Wingnut on Discord to rejoin the fun! The livestream broadcast will also continue well into the night. There's lots of people we'd like to thank for helping make today possible. This has been a HUGE year for fan projects with a ton of absolutely marvelous efforts in full swing. Howard Day, DefianceIndustries, Popsicle Pete, Pedro, L.I.F./Rufus, UnnamedCharacter, Goliath, Dark Sentinel and Denis Loubet are just some of the people who are killing it this year. This makes our job tremendously fun since there's so much to report on. Once again, KrisV has outdone himself in literally keeping the website online from a technical perspective and doing all of the behind-the-scenes maintenance and upgrades that nobody else will touch.

And completely sincerely, I'd like to thank all of YOU for coming. It's the shared excitement

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We've been around for quite a few years, and new fans have been joining the community for the entire time. It's always interesting to see the spread from old timers that found us in the '90s compared to newbies that weren't even alive back then (we also appreciate people who are old timers but just now found the site!). Vote below to let everyone see when you joined in.

The old poll asked which faction logo was your favorite. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the Confed Star won out, but in a major upset, the UBW beat back the Kilrathi for second place! The Black Lance also had a surprisingly low fourth place turnout.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

We used to celebrate the party on the CIC's original August 10 anniversary, but often that doesn't work out for us logistically anymore. Nevertheless, this year we managed to time the party to fall on Dundradal's actual birthday. Happy Birthday Dund! Hope it's been a good one so far!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Happy CIC Birthday everyone! Cake!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The CIC website is made up of thousands of pages and dozens of sections,

some

dating back to our earliest days. Inevitably, some links will break over time as things get moved around or reworked. For last year's anniversary, we put in a huge

effort

to fix broken links and iron out various visual issues around the website. This year, we continued along this line, but with a heavy focus on our 1998-2012 news archive. Our

current layout

was rolled out in 2012 and was based on (then) modern HTML and CSS features, while our substantial back catalog of news articles was composed with an older stack in mind. In addition, some updates contained minor HTML glitches that the browsers of

yesteryear

probably just glossed over or silently fixed (hence why they went unnoticed at the time of publishing), but that modern browsers no longer put up with. This could result in a link not showing up or stranger effects, like

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Eagle-eyed visitors may have spotted that our logo looks a little bit sharper today. We've made a

double resolution

version available to supporting browsers. The leap in quality isn't quite as large as when the logo was

recreated

from scratch with WC4DVD footage, but it's a noticeable upgrade on high dpi screens nonetheless. Below you can see how today's logo compares to the original from 1998. The CIC itself has gone through a few page design iterations over our long history. We posted an overview for last year's anniversary

here

.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The News Collections section is where we package up sets of news updates that follow a specific theme for easier consumption. Here are a few we've just added:

• Point of Origin, the internal newsletter of Origin Systems, Inc. from 1991 to 1998.
• Star*Soldier Gloss, a page-by-page breakdown of Arena's manual.
• Wing Commander Props, a closer look at various objects from the live action shoots.
• And Wing Commander on the 3DO takes a closer look at two remarkable titles.

Previous collections include our memorials for developers and artists that have passed away, an overview of our anniversary updates and the April Fools slates.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Maintaining different color schemes for our discussion boards used to involve styling dozens of tiny images for the various buttons and labels, so at some point we picked one scheme that matched our homepage reasonably well and stuck with it. Fortunately, XenForo's user interface components are entirely CSS based, allowing a return to user-selectable color schemes! All we have to provide is a matching CIC logo. Look below for our hi-res logo in the various CIC colors that you are familiar with -- and perhaps a few others! You can find the style selection button near the bottom of any Chat Zone page. These updated logos will also make an appearance in our classic Guides and Ships sections.

Display More

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

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

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

The new Flag Commander update with realistic starscape backgrounds is live! As we mentioned last month,

L.I.F.

got some neat skybox software and has been carefully adding cool scenes to the

Homeworld Remastered

mod. Grab the update with the pretty backgrounds

here

. Here's some gorgeous examples and creative flavor text!

The Concordia wasn't exactly the first ship I'd have thought about when it came to pull a gut punch like this one, but I was a pilot, not a brass, so there I was, flying escort in my trusty Sabre. Sure, we were going to be cut off from reinforcements or easy retreat, but the Cats wouldn't see us coming, if Intel didn't mess up too much on that one.

It was a long shot that ultimately paid off big, since I'm able to write about it now. A science officer briefed us about some strange astrogation phenomenon that involved a couple of jump points in interstellar space that somehow got

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Twelve years ago, HCl rolled out a major update to his Prophecy multiplayer patch. When users entered their credentials for Crius.net (then the home of our vBulletin-powered discussion boards) into the the launcher, the game would report back typical game statistics like kills/deaths, ejections and time played to the CIC server where they would show up in our

Multiplayer Scoreboards

section. As time moved on, the forums were relocated to our primary domain at wcnews.com and the software powering them was changed as well (look

here

if you are interested in Chat Zone history leading up to the 2011 Xenforo upgrade). If you signed up for our Forums after this transition, there was no way for you to have your results included in our scoreboards. There's a fix for this issue now and it takes just a few easy steps:

• Sign in on the Chat Zone, or sign up for an account if you don't already have one.
• Visit the

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Just in time for the party, DefianceIndustries, PopsiclePete and team have released another exciting update to the Prophecy and Secret Ops Model Upgrade Pack. It includes multiple new Confed fighters, stations and Nephilim capshiips plus a variety of technical upgrades. It's really just in time this year - this post will be updated in a few minutes with the new package when the file finishes uploading!

And here (115 meg exe) it is!

1. Updated Panther
2. Updated Stations (Callisto, Confed starbase)
3. Updated Tshark
4. New Kraken ship killer
5. New Hydra (SO only currently - we're still working out bugs in WCP but it should be in a week or so)
6. tech fixes: Fixed the corvette bug: once shields fall, the ship actually takes hull hits.

Display More

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

So, what is the biggest and baddest Wing Commander poster ever? While we've seen a lot of them, nothing compares to this beauty. Joe Garrity shows us that it's not the size of your Wing Commander III poster, it's how you display it! Mounted on a brushed plate steel disply board, this monolithic Wing Commander III advertising print is a whopping 8 feet long by 2 feet high and weighs in at over 40 pounds! Originally on display at Origin Systems in the mid-1990s, it was gifted to the Origin Museum by EA/Mythic when they closed in 2014. It was previously

displayed in the Mythic Lobby

along with other Origin/Wing Commander memorabilia. Joe's also provided a nice high res version of this photo

here

.

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Music_Guru

has found an absolutely exciting easter egg in the Secret Missions for Super Nintendo! The method to unlock it easy to input, but the way he discovered it is complex and arcane. Long story short, there's a bonus shipboard series after the game with some amazing conversions, and you've almost certainly never seen this before! Check it out below!

Hello fellow Wing Commander fans and happy 21st birthday to the Wing Commander CIC! Thank you everyone for continuing to make this a fun and thriving community to be apart of!

I'm continually amazed at the new creations made by fans or even finding new things in the original Wing Commander games. However, it isn't too often that a new easter egg presents itself, even after 25+ years. Today, in celebration of the CIC's birthday, I share an exciting new finding, a previously undiscovered easter egg in Wing Commander: The Secret Missions for SNES!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Howard Day

took some time out of his busy post-

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

launch schedule to release an update to the online

rolling demo

for Wing Leader! Much like the actual

WC1 demo

, this isn't a playable artifact, but it shows live assets interacting in the game engine. Even moreso than any trailer, this gives fans a first hand up-close look at what the game will actually be like live. The battle is pretty intense - all those Dralthis start to make me nervous, but fortunately they have both Firekkans and Confed opponents to contend with! Load up the rolling demo

here

.

The live demo's been updated! Includes the intro, menu (static for now) and initial fighting in a Dralthi! as soon as you die, tho, it switches back to Hornet.

Display More

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Pedro

has released an exciting trailer for the

WC4 Fan Remake

! There's lots to unpack here. The team has been mostly focused on features rather than polish, and quite a few features have been implemented indeed! Many distinctive elements from the original WC4 gameplay mechanics appear to be in place to give the project a familiar feel. Check it out below!

I've been working with Defiance Industries to have a video ready for the CIC's birthday of early test footage.

A brief list of things added since the last videos:

• Some early experimentation with updated sound effects (50/50 old vs new)
• View based missile lock-on
• Smoother external camera
• Damage displays
• Turrets (both on fighters and capships)
• Subtle cockpit motion on the primary cockpit camera
• A zoomed out camera (primarily for taking in the cockpit)
• Afterburners, Decoys
• Working cockpit (guns, fuel, damage, speed guns, decoys, targeting brackets)

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Check out these awesome trading cards that

DefianceIndustries

made! They're a set of super cool realistic looking cards with images, stats and history. I really like that silhouette identifier box that teases subsequent cards in the series. This makes me really want a printed set!

Attached is my contribution to the festivities, a redo of some super fun old Topps aircraft trading cards. They were the “friend or foe” series from 1952 and they have kind of a fun retro vibe that looked kind of fun when Wing Commanderized.

Enjoy and Happy Birthday!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

For the first time, the CIC Birthday Party is also broadcasting live in real time! Check us out and join the fun! The text chat party is still in #Wingnut

Discord

. We started a little early with a special episode of

All Wings Considered

a few hours ago. We'll be going for quite a while yet!

Quote from Wing Commander News-Bot

Welcome to the big event! Here's a wonderful welcome video put together by

Fek'Leyr Targ

.

This year I've once again produced a little birthday video, returning to the Gemini Sector.Do you recognise the scene?

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Here are this week's main stories.

The Alliance Festival of Culture has entered the Olgrea system this week with a celebration of literature. Fans of both modern and classical fiction gathered to discuss their favourite novels and meet popular authors.

The Fortunes Corsairs faction has organised an initiative to transport food commodities to the Chamas system. A fundraiser supporting efforts to construct an asteroid base in the system is scheduled for next week, with a grand feast advertised as the main attraction.

And those are the main stories this week.