Unknown Enemy Revamp Picks Up Steam

The Wing Commander

mod for SecretOps turns 15 next year. For some time now, the team has been wanting to release one last major update, to incorporate all the advances the modding community has made over the years. The initiative seems to be gaining traction once again, according to Quarto's recent

. The OpenGL rendering system from Standoff has been integrated, and there is an in-game fiction viewer. Besides fixing mission bugs and general source code maintenance, Quarto will also be truncating and condensing the game's 100+ pages of fiction to make for lighter reading. By now there's actually quite a few people who haven't tried 2001's hottest Wing Commander fan mod - it'll be great when this gets reintroduced to a whole new generation of Wingnuts!

What else needs to be done? Really, mission bugfixing and the fiction are the main thing. After all, this isn't a new project, it's just fixing up an existing one. The other small task I have is to throw some additional ships into the object viewer - in the couple of years after UE, we developed two more fighters that were supposed to appear in UE2, to show how the Border Worlds are gradually transitioning from a messy collection of mainly ex-Confed junk to their own new ships, technologically modern but seriously underperforming compared to Confed stuff (think Sweden's SAAB jets versus the US Air Force). Obviously, I have no intention of messing with the game deeply enough to actually have these ships even in the simulator, but the object viewer is a nice place for them, and if anybody else wants to do more with them afterwards - hey, they're there. This is not a big job, or even a small job, it's a no-job... just as soon as I find the relevant files! But that last bit... not so easy.