ATTENTION! ATTENTION! The great big Dralthi parade is about to begin! Be sure to cheer for all your favorites!
Starting things off here comes the earliest known design, the KF-100 DRALTHI from the Wing Commander movie!
Star Trek Discovery Title Sequence clips with Wing Commander Overture by Kevin Kiner & David Arnold.Please, for god’s sake, don’t sue me.
Another genuine treasure in the mail today: that time the Kilrathi Emperor met Putt-Putt. (What a compilation!). This set includes Wing Commander 3, the WC4 Demo and Super Wing Commander all in one box!
Issue 55, May 1997Mini-previews featuring Wing Commander 4, Fighting Force, and Mission: Impossible.
Hi Kat lovers! It didn't seem right to have a nifty Tiger's Claw render and not give our Kilrathi brethren some love. It's a 4K wallpaper, so feel free to adorn your monitors should you feel so inclined. You might also notice a new ship in here, just sayin'.You can also get a quick peek of the fleet in action here:
Our first runner up this year is the WC4 Fan Remake! The team has been releasing a steady stream of articles at their new website, WCRespace, that explain the complex process they're going through to retouch and improve all aspects of the original game. It also doesn't hurt that the movie sequences will natively integrate ODVS' enhanced videos either. Experts in coding, art and even music have all come together to help make this project the best it can be. They're shooting for a playable demo as soon as this year, so stay tuned for more awesomeness on the horizon!
Another honorable mention and second runner up this year is wcdx. Stinger has been hard at work on this comprehensive compatibility patch for more than six years, and the latest releases touch WC1, WC2 and all four of their expansions. Over time the project has grown to do more than just get Kilrathi Saga running on modern computers. It's going back and adding back features from the DOS originals that didn't import smoothly to Windows in the first place, such as missing background space art and awkward audio glitches. You can grab it here!
Wing Commander - The Kilrathi Saga: “Cat O’ Nine Tails” (Fan Collage - Digital Art)
As we hurtle towards the demo release we have a shortage of large features to report on, but we’ve done a bunch of smaller tasks that I’m going to outline here.
"Either you're an earthworm or an eagle."
Launch Deck, BWS Intrepid.
Paladin: So here you are, an instructor. Not a general, or a senator. And you could have had everything.
Maverick: “Everything” means I keep flying. So if you ask me, I’ve got everything.
Paladin: I envy you, laddie. At times I wish I’d made the same choice myself. So, how’s that farm?
Maverick: <laughs> I’m not a farmer.
Maniac: I’m talking about rolling a bomber, not a fighter.
Newbie: You’re kidding!
Maverick: You know, of all people…
Maniac: I’m not enrolled in training!
Maverick: …Maniac taught me one thing.
Maniac: Wha– hey, pal. Uh, Senator. I– What? What?
Maverick: Well you said, “either you’re an earthworm or an eagle”.
Maniac: I said that?
Panther: Hey, Colonel! We’ve got a fresh batch of newbies to shake down.
Maverick: They can wait a bit. I think I’ll log some flyin’ time.
Maniac: Er, Senator, about…
Paladin: Maniac… shut up.
Manda's artwork on cloth prototype is ready and the detail is very good. :) A lot of wing Commander and Ultima references in a single artwork.
Happy New Year Wingnuts! It's been a while since I've posted anything to this thread, mostly because I've been heads down on the remaster work mainly. But all Thunderbolts and no Ferrets makes Jack a dull boy. So I went back to the animated series and made a WCA Ferret. It was a self-set 2 hour modelling challenge (I made it), and then the textures were done later. You only see it in one or two episodes, but it kind of looks like a cross between an F-5 and an F-18. It's a strangely handsome spacecraft.Here's how it's depicted in Academy versus its Wing Commander 2 incarnation.
A couple of new things to mention is this one. Firstly, as part of our efforts to improve on the base game in Wing Commander IV Remastered, I'll be fixing up any audio errors I come across - including missing dialogue. For reasons unknown, Catscratch's line "Oh my God, you're him!" (which was present in the CD-ROM release) was missing from the DVD edition of Wing Commander IV. I managed to extract it from the stereo audio of the CD-ROM release and seamlessly integrate it into the remastered version, maintaining the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound audio format. You'll have to take my word on that, given that I can only upload to YouTube in stereo - but you'll see come the final release. :)So here's the remastered version, AI upscaled to 4K UHD, 60fps HFR. I also used a new method to increase the frame rate for this video: RIFE AI. I previously used DAIN AI (Depth-Aware video frame INterpolation), but RIFE (Real-time Intermediate Flow Estimation) is new, exciting, produces fewer artefacts and most importantly (from my perspective) takes 66% less time to process.
Frank Savage: So at that time I was a hobbyist game developer. I taught myself C and C++. My education was in Electrical Engineering. So I knew the mathematics behind 3D stuff, but I had never applied it. I never tried to do anything with it except for a couple of courses in college. I was a huge fan of the Wing Commander series. I had Wing Commander license plates on my car in Illinois where I was living in Chicago at the time. I would go to GenCon every year. GenCon was a game convention used to be held in Lake Geneva and Wisconsin and then eventually moved to downtown. Milwaukee, and that was where I first saw Wing Commander at GenCon the year before. I went and played Wing Commander every day literally every day when it released. Went to Gen Con the next year and they had this demo for this game that that I had never seen before called Strike Commander and watch the demo and saw like unbelievable graphics for that time. There was another person watching it with me a GenCon and we were laughing. Think about how like how if you can do this on a personal computer imagine what the simulators that we terrain people must must look like.And I talk to Warren Spector who is who is there recruiting for origin at the time told him the story of how I played Wing Commander every day how I knew some of the mathematics behind this and taught myself C and C++ and he said, "Wow, you sound like someone we should hire because Strike Commander needs people to come work on it." And I said, well, okay like "I would love to get in the game is like this would be a dream job of mine." So I wrote a letter accompanying Warren back to Origin that had like my my experiences and you know the stuff that I've been doing with games and Warren told me he's like look, we're in the throes of shipping Wing Commander 2 right now. It probably won't won't come out we won't talk to you for some amount of time because the game is still about a month away and we're not sure. So I said okay, that's fine. Like I've got you know, I have a regular job that time.
I was working the IT department at a home improvement chain so you can see like how steeped in gaming I was at that point. I was a huge gamer, but I hadn't really done a lot of stuff professionally. Origin actually reached out to me that week and they were going to fly me down to Austin, Texas. I've never been to Austin in my life. And the last second they said well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to actually have you be interviewed by by one of the people on the team and over the phone. And then if that goes well then we'll think about what the next steps will be and there's probably gonna be three people talking to you that Friday night and I said, "Alright, that sounds great."
Never let it be forgotten:
Here's an excerpt from the end of Privateer 2 where we see the player (and others) escape Kronos' doomed flagship. Unfortunately only the published 320x200 version survives so it can be hard to see some of the neat details. Let's try and identify the ships!
Both of the ICIS trailers were originally presented as Shockwave Flash files. While these have been in our archive for more than two decades, with the recent deprecation of Flash on the web, we thought it'd be a good idea to get these into a more accessible format. There are alternative methods to still play Flash videos, but we've provided modern 4K video download links below so you can save and view at your leisure. Note the third video's low 240x180 resolution was pretty standard for internet video at the time. At ten megabytes, it would have clocked in at nearly a tenth of the actual game's enormous download size.
If you weren't aware, YouTube provides automatic language translation captions, so it's accessible to anyone. Click the CC logo at the bottom of the clip and the gear icon to select a language. Although the translation isn't perfect, you can tell how excited the author is to share his memories of the series. He also goes on to explain how great examples of mid '90s FMV games like this helped lead us to to rich stories in modern games today. Check it out for yourself below!
Hello everyone! A little video on a series that I'll do from time to time to talk to you quietly about games that I liked. No analysis, or jokes, just the feeling of games that marked me. And I start with Wing Commander!
Anyway... I think, well, machine learning can certainly do some amazing things, but then again, it can also be used for "silly" and interesting experiments, like this one.
With recent improvements to Topaz Video Enhance AI's models, I thought it was finally time to attempt an upscale directly to 2160p 4K - and I have to say I'm pleased with the results.While my previous videos have been available as 4K streams on YouTube, I rendered the actual fooage at 1080p Full HD, then used traditional bilinear scaling to double up to 4K - because YouTube uses a higher quality codec for 1440p and 2160p streams than 1080p (VP9 vs. h.264).
In this example, the footage is upscaled to native 4K (an increase of 600% in scale!) - and I think it's finally time to move to this model for the development of Wing Commander IV: Remastered.
As in previous recent uploads, I also used DAINApp to increase the frame rate to 60fps.
The Legislative BranchThe Terran Confederation’s legislative branch is a unicameral body known as the Confederation Senate, the Congress, the General Assembly, the Council or the Great Assembly (commonly, the Assembly.) Members of the Assembly are called Senators. The Assembly Master is the presiding officer of the Great Assembly and is elected from the overall body annually. The Master's traditional seat at the head of the Senate is referred to as the Master's Chair. The Assembly Master wears a cloak of office and has a gavel with which he may direct debate in the Great Hall. Cloaks are traditional garb for anyone presiding over or testifying to the General Assembly. The legislature consists of approximately 1200 Senators who represent different geographic districts which range from individual nations like Earth's North American States to to planets like Altair to primary star systems with multiple colony worlds. After the conclusion of the Pilgrim War, Pilgrim enclaves were granted representation in the Assembly. Districts may have multiple representatives; for instance, Senator Jamison More was one of the representatives from Primus III. Members of the Assembly are immune from arrest and prosecution while serving.
The Assembly traditionally meets at the Hall of the Great Assembly in Washington DC just east of the site of United States capitol building. In 2654, the Assembly was bombed and the original building destroyed. In the aftermath of the attack, interim senators were appointed to replace those lost and the Assembly reconvened in a Washington DC zero gravity sports complex. For a period, the capital was moved to Terra Station, an Earth-orbit arcology. By 2669, the capitol building had been rebuilt and the assembly again met there. The floor of the Assembly is open to the roughly twelve hundred senators plus representatives from news services, lobbyists and other politicians. The Assembly Master and six other presiding officers sit at the head of the body abreast of the speaker. The Assembly has the right to pass a declaration of war. Such a declaration was issued against the Pilgrim Alliance in 2632, the Empire of Kilrah in 2634 in response to serious acts of piracy and then again in 2668 following the ‘false peace’ when four carriers crossed the border. Unusually, the Senate issued other war declarations against the Kilrathi in response to specific attacks.
The Spaceshipper: Model maker Bill Pearson: Alien, Moon, Space Precinct, Wing Commander, Flash Gordon, Outland, Red Dwarf...Production Designer Peter Lamont hired Bill Pearson to develop model spacecraft and a number of hero props based on his team's concept art for Wing Commander in 1998. Bill did the work in his UK studio and shipped it over to Luxembourg for the shoot. Let's look at some items!
He built this magnificent (and enormous) physical model of Paladin's Diligent free trader ship. The models weren't to be used in the film but they really were good enough to be. Chris Roberts doesn't do things in half measures!
Hey all! The ever entertaining Bonkus Maximus will be hosting the greatest crossover in the history of mankind. Mark your calendars, January 5th, assuming we survive this year, will feature Bonkus in Palan, avenging the losses that the team of the TCS Majestic took 10 years earlier in the Gemini Sector RPG. Let's salute the magnificent individual and cheer him on on his Twitch stream.
And those are our nominees for 2020. Please vote below!
The old poll asked which non-PC platform was your preferred system for a new Wing Commander game. Xbox Series X edged out ahead of the Playstation 5, but by a lesser margin than the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. The results were flipped compared to the original Xbox One and PS4 match up back in 2013. With all of this new generation's cross compatibility, you can't go wrong with either one!
Legos were surprisingly big in 2020. Bricks with Wings made some great stuff, and Malcav did too. Then we managed to end the year with a bang in the form of LYP Studios' gorgeous Morningstar model.
This was a fun overview of the highlights, but there were plenty more day-to-day updates for these projects and others. I'm already hearing about some good stuff bubbling up that we'll be able to post in the days and weeks ahead, so I'm very confident that 2021 will continue with more of the same! We're looking forward to going through it all with you!
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