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Tech website Ars Tehnica has run a new profile of Wing Commander IV which offers a solid summary of the game's history and raison d'être. It's always good to see the old games and their cultural importance highlighted like this from an outlet with a wide audience! It begins:

If I had to pick a chunk of the 1990s that feels the most 90s-ish to me, it’d be the two-year stretch between 1996 and 1997. 1996 saw me graduating from high school and starting college; 1997 saw me meeting my future wife and falling in love. While I tried to figure out how to navigate the University of Houston’s still mostly pre-digital first-semester registration process (we had to sign up for classes over the phone, with touch-tone buttons, like cavemen!), the larger world kept turning in ways that felt inevitable and good and right. The Cold War was in the rearview mirror—how could we ever have been so worried about nuclear

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Exteban has unveiled a VERY impressive project: a full Spanish dub of Wing Commander II's speech files! It covers both the original speech, the speech acessory pack and the limited speech that appears in Special Operations 1 and 2. That must've been quite a lot of work! Details and instructions:

Hello, I'm Esteban Martinez.

I've dubbed over 400 voice files from the Wing Commander 2 and Special Operations 1 & 2 Speech Pack into Spanish.

I used both professional voice actors and AI for this.

For communications, I added radio noises, and for the Kilrathi voices, I added tiger sounds in the background to make them more similar to Wing Commander 3.

This was made possible thanks to WCTools.

It's compatible with L@Zar0's text translation mod. (more information)

To install it, simply replace the files in the GAMEDAT folder.

I've also captured a short video as an example.

• Wing Commander 2 Spanish Speech Accessory Pack

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The Wing Commander movie club had a great Independence Day watching Independence Day! It's one of those movies that remains just as much fun as it did when we were teenagers. It's hard to argue that it's some great piece of art or that it's especially clever… but you start watching and you're immediately having a ball.

The big connection this time around is David Arnold's Independence Day score, which was heavily used to temp track Wing Commander… presumably because Arnold was writing Wing Commander's overture! Compare the ID4 theme to the one from Wing Commander:

Chris Roberts would go on to hire ID4's alien designer, Patrick Tatopoulos, to rework the Kilrathi. The work never made it to screen but I think you can see the influence!

Maybe the most memorable 'trademark' of ID4 was the aliens' destruction of major monuments. Gamers had already blown up the White House in Command and Conquer a few months

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This is a reminder that we have another fun #Wingnut movie night planned on Discord this evening! The ongoing theme will be movies that are referenced by Wing Commander in some way. Tonight's film is From Russia with Love (1963) and you can find details on why we're watching it in the announcement post here. The movie will start at 7 PM PST/10 PM EST but feel free to drop by and hang any time!

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Great news: AllTinker says it's time to start putting stuff back in! Thanks to AllTinker's genius, we've been using Originator to take apart Wing Commander games for a while now, making endless discoveries in the process. Well, now the shoe is on the other foot because they've released TREKPAK v0.5, a new utility aimed at adding edited files back to those same games… an invaluable tool that should allow giant leaps for modders and preservation groups. We'll let AllTinker explain:

TREPAK is an extractor - and repacker - for TRE and PAK containers, along with (some of) the inner formats.

Note that this is still an early version, so expect bugs and shortcomings!

The goal was to achieve completely accurate repacking, to the point where the same data will produce (even with re-compression) a byte-for-byte identical package. Actually making this happen was far from trivial!

Demo

Here I've replaced some of the

Quote from Elite Dangerous Galnet News-Bot

Vista Genomics has confirmed the successful conclusion of its exobiology initiative across the Sanguineous Rim.
In partnership with Faulcon DeLacy, both confirmed that pilots not only secured vast quantities of exobiological data needed to investigate genetic diversity across the region but also helped confirm that the Nomad improved planetary exploration.
Chief Engineer Frank Endis, who supervised the campaign for Faulcon DeLacy, reported that the Nomad "allowed for more efficient exobiology sampling and research to be conducted than previously experienced by explorers."
"The new Mk II Biological Scanner and Mk II Sensor modules that the Nomad provides also offered explorers and exobiologists more productive journeys thanks to their enhanced range capabilities." he added.
With the trials now concluded, Faulcon DeLacy hopes that the Nomad will quickly become a key feature of long-range