Focus on the Wing Commander II Demo (February 16, 2024)

[Bandit LOAF]

We recently spent some time dissecting and analyzing the Wing Commander preview for the Amiga. Now we've followed that up with the same treatment for the Wing Commander II rolling demo! The Wing Commander II demo was put together by Origin for Winter CES 1991 and was first shown on January 10 of that year. It was the first Wing Commander to include speech (featuring voices recorded by the developers) and remains the release with the most time between the demo and the final product (roughly eight months). It's most famous for some of the wonderful extra graphics it contains, including an alternate model for the Bloodfang, a closeup of a Kilrathi guardsman and an animated scene in which Prince Thkrahath enters the Emperor's throne room. We've collected videos, assets, history and even hehind the scenes stories from the development team!





There's even a new patch available for download for the community, courtesy of AllTinker who noticed a graphical bug with the original demo. If you look closely at the capture below you'll see that space is the wrong color around the planet and moon. Simply download this and replace the included file in your demo directory to make them correctly transparent!





You can access the WCpedia entry here.

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Original update published on February 16, 2024

 

[Dondragmer]

Do we know who created the Bloodfang used in the demo? It looks like the same rendering style as the WC1 ships, so was it Mary Bellis on the Amiga with Sculpt3D?

(No, it was Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Candlestick.)

I'd be even more interested to know when Origin requested enough frames to smoothly rotate the Star Post / Kilrathi Imperial Palace. That surely has to be Mary Bellis's work? Something I only noticed when you posted the WCpedia entry is that it is rendered the light source above and behind it, where the renderings for use in flight all have a spotlight positioned in line with the camera.

I admire the use of the game rendering engine for the opening shot of the demo, especially when the camera pivots. I think it's a pity that in the final game all the launch and landing animations are pre-rendered, instead of using game assets the way WC1 did. While rendering every frame was more precise, it also meant all those animations were necessarily brief, and only certain ships could be shown launching and landing at locations other than the Concordia.

Showing the planet and stars rotating past outside the window was also a nice touch.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I believe the Bloodfang model here is Jake Rodgers and that it's the first ship done with Autodesk. I suspect the Star Post was sourced from material they already had on hand. Mary had told me that she didn't do anything beyond the original set of ships; her credit in Secret Missions 2 was because they forgot the contractually obligated one in the base game and not because they did any additional work. (Chris Douglas did the Hhriss for SM2--and he did the updated Bloodfang for the final game.)