Here's a quick graphic showing the known service dates for Confed fighters from the games (2654 and after); as you can see, it's largely not a case of designs replacing each other between WC1-3!
Here's version 0.3.05, which mainly adds a few more missing bits of Privateer 2 text, brings over some of my old work-in-progress Bioforge stuff, and adds support for Wing Commander Arena models. [For] Wing Commander Arena's models, which are binary Ogre3D models - I wrote a custom parser rather than use Ogre itself. Originator itself doesn't display the normalmaps currently, but it does export them; it'd be easy enough but I'll wait until I do a bit of a refresh of the viewport rendering code at a later date.
Years ago I was reverse engineering Bioforge, but stopped when I discovered the OpenBioforge project which seemed much further along - if you're into the idea of an improved Bioforge source port, be sure to keep tabs on that (e.g. here). Anyway, I've brought over a good amount of my old work, including my half-finished script reparser, and support for images and some more of the in-game text. I may bring over my animation code eventually too, but it'll be part of the object/ship viewer.
Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe is the master pilot's guide to all eight Wing Commander games. Every ship and weapon is discussed; every mission is explained; every winning strategy and tactic is detailed; every undocumented feature is laid bare. You get years of Wing Commander experience - without giving up your day job. It's the Bible of the Wing Commander Universe!
Casey we got bugs!!! Printed this in Burnt Titanium. I like the look it gives. She just looked so good in the sun and wet.Can't forget the build video:
Another Defiance Industries Wing Commander Prophecy Upgrade model.
Over Christmas and the early part of this year progress has been excellent, not only have we added all the missing UI menus but two more missions are now fully playable. Unfortunately it’s now ODVS’ turn to be overwhelmed with work so we will hold off showing those menus until he can replace my programmer art with his usual high standard.
For this article we will take a look at Mission 2 (Hellespont: Escort and Patrol). The first five missions or so all have some unique additions and will be getting their own update – hopefully once they’re done things should move very quickly.First a warning about the screenshots we will be showing for a while – due to selecting the wrong swap buffer format we realised that we had been presenting in linear color space, not sRGB. What this means is dark colors were darker than they ought to have been and lighting was hard to balance. We are still in the process of re-tuning visuals. Long term the lighting will be improved as a result however and we did take the opportunity to start work on HDR monitor support.
This is TRUCK, CART and CARGO which drive through Perry Naval Base. Truck and cart also appear on the mining base.
Privateer was originally intended to include an animated refueler and loader at nearly every hangar which would interact with your landed spacecraft. The animations were cut from the game and the refueler removed entirely. The 3D model for the Refueler has been discovered marked inactive in PAD.3DS in the WC3D archive.It does appear in a screenshot used in print advertising and then three times on the box of the game itself. The Refueler also appears in a number of other screenshots of pre-release builds of the game. Refueler is the term used in the game's development material; it does not have a canonical name.
I'm chipping away at some longer-term features (and Confederation), but here's a new version (0.3.04) which is mostly focussed on Privateer 2.I've added support for "BASE" images, which allowed me to complete the remaining palette hook-up logic. The major text formats used by the game are also now supported. I've added support for the IFF-nested sample sets, which gives access to the majority of the remaining (non-movie) audio. IFF shapes are also now (manually) exportable; along with a few miscellaneous bug fixes and such. :)
LOAF recently ran across this nifty issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus. It's positioned as a preview of Privateer just prior to its imminent launch, but the "article" is provided by Origin itself. I wonder when it was written, because it's pretty aspirational for being published just a few weeks before the game shipped. It's interesting to spot the differences between this and the final game!
Did we ever figure out ethics in game journalism? Here's a case where the magazine just let one of Privateer's designers straight up write the preview... and it's totally reasonable and promises only what they end up delivering.Here's a nice visual comparison of when CGSP also had covers of Privateer 2 and Privateer 3!
Picked up these really cool diorama shadow boxes on eBay recently. The maker/seller is great and made the Wing Commander one at my request. I’m trying to get him to make a Descent one now!
He has a ton of these for various classic games and series. Well worth a shout out!
Not the best painter I know, but from a distance... LOL
Here's another couple of things for the heck of it; the extended 'Claw for the landing animation, and the victory animation (the first frame of it at least; the whole animation is good to go though).
In terms of stuff I haven't done for the widescreen mod, there's only one thing now: the side views of the ships in the hangar, and they're very difficult. I experimented with some cheat methods, e.g. a big clamp holding the ship, or other stuff in the foreground to hide the missing part... But nothing has really worked too well. Looks like the way to do it is to do it. :p
This morning I grabbed a shirt out of my closet, saw it said WING COMMANDER on it, and got a bug up my butt to do a Wing Commandery thing today. After a morning of screwing around in Audacity, here's almost ten minutes of the mission accomplished music from Prophecy, for when you want to reward yourself for doing a good job.
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.
Last week, we talked about Privateer 2's palette feature which allows any ship to appear in the livery of any of twelve factions. We didn't mention that this was being noted in the service of helping AllTinker add the correct default style for every ship in a future release of the incredible Originator. There were actually two additional options we didn't show in the last post: the Heretic's actual color yellow and blue scheme and this final seemingly unused one (note how this one also changes the color of the cockpit glass from green to blue).
In this process of studying this, we did manage to find somewhere in Privateer 2 that the system is actually used: for generating the 'booth database' images of ships! If you look closely at the different registration entries (and a few other places) you'll see different ships appear in all sorts of different colors! The system isn't actually used internally but it's obvious the game's artists captured them in whatever the dev environment was like. Take this Kalrechi, for example, which matches exactly with three different palettes you saw last week.
We've gone ahead and cataloged 130 different ships that appear in booth imagery and identified the color scheme for each one! Also included are the 'poster' images included in Origin's Official Guide to Privateer 2, most of which are taken from this same source. The full spreadsheet is available here; check the additional tabs for the booth database and the palette key.
What about the Heretic on the US cover? That's painted from the ship used on the booth splash screen by Origin artist Sam Yeates and it seems like it must have originally been a Heretic in military colors (with additional details added during the paintover). What about the stripes? From the Freij imagery you can see that the build of the game used for capturing the booth ships actually used the 'victory stripes' in more places and that they were replaced by black-and-yellow diamonds for the release! (Note also that the monochrome versions in the manual have the diamond texture.)
WARNING: This update contains imagery which may not be safe for work. We've redacted any thumbnails to remove nudity but there will be text links to the original images.
Back in 2019, we published a Visual Guide to Pin-Ups in Wing Commander which remains, as you might imagine, a popular resource. Last weekend, we received a question from ParadiseRegaind about the two Strike Commander pin-ups: they looked to be photo-realistic... were they based on real pictures?
We agreed that at least the female pin-up seem to be a paintover... but of whom? Our collected knowledge of early 1990s cheesecake was extremely limited and so I put the call out on Twitter: did anyone know this woman? A user named TNEQL answered the call: it's Pamela Anderson! Ms. Anderson had been a Playboy model in the early 1990s who became a massive international star after leading Baywatch. TNEQL had found the exact photo in an August 1994 issue of Playboy Netherlands:
As you can see, the original pinup was a nude; the Strike Commander artist (possibly Paul Steed) added the bikini but didn't otherwise change Ms. Anderson much! But wait... 1994? That's the year after Strike Commander was published and likely two to three years after the paintover was done. What's happening here? The 1994 issue was likely a reprint of an earlier Playboy photo shoot... but it wasn't immediately apparent when or where it was from. This called for a little research!
The research through old issues of Playboy featuring Ms. Anderson prior to 1993 did lead to this great ad featuring a black Kilrathi...
... but it ultimately provided no answers: the photo did not appear in any of them. Luckily, a search of eBay actually got us closer: a trading card from 1996 featured a pair of photos that were clearly from the same shoot. The card's caption confirmed that it was from a June 1990 "newsstand special" photo shoot. A lucky reverse image search led us to all three photos, linked here without thumbnails because they contain full frontal nudity:
This is trading card #10 in the "Best of Pamela Anderson" series. What we still don't know is where the version of the photo used for Strike Commander was originally published. "Newsstand special" refers to Playboy publications beyond the main magazine, so it was likely some sort of special issue or calendar that the Strike Commander team happened to have at hand. Ms. Anderson was 24 when these photos were taken and her career exploded soon afterwards... it's a little hard to recognize her as the star we know today! But we'll keep searching for the source and update when it is found.
Oh, but what about the man! It's pretty obvious that the joke here is that a nerdy man's face has been pasted on top of a bodybuilder... but who is the man? We're pretty sure the answer is that it's Strike Commander designer Prem Krishnan who was the butt of good natured ribbings in several places in the game. Mr. Krisnhan is otherwise tuckerized as "Wipeout" or "Mr. Zap" in the game's materials because he famously deleted the entire project from the mainframe causing a minor crisis midway through development. Luckily, most of the work was recovered and the 'zap SC' story became an Origin legend.
Of even more interest to Wing Commander fans is another piece of information we learned during the research: the pin-ups seen in Secret Missions 2 are not paintovers. Veteran Wing Commander artist Denis Loubet was kind enough to explain that they are the work of Glen Johnson (also known for the original Wing Commander character and ship concepts).
That’s the amazing Glen Johnson! He drew stuff like the picture was already on the page and he was just tracing. I’d never seen anything like it. 👍
— Denis Loubet (@Denis_Loubet) February 8, 2024
DefianceIndustries gave me permission to do some test prints of a couple of his WCP Model upgraded designs. We have started with the Piranha and the Midway. DI warned that they were but under-detailed, but I decided to give it a try anyway. We'll start with the Midway.Flying alongside her Kilrathi War contemporaries, you can see just how much of an absolute unit the Midway is.
Next up the 1:72 F-106 Piranha alongside some of her Kilrathi War era precursor light fighters, most by the super talented Klavs and one random Arrow. (And yes I might have mis-scaled one or two).
As DefianceIndustries sends me more, I will work on converting and printing them. We are thinking the Vampire a bug fighter along with some more capships.
To answer that question, we thought it would be beneficial to conduct a survey that would list out EVERY English-language quit message displayed by a Wing Commander game in MS-DOS. None of these are the result of memory errors, they are simply the executables telling DOS to print text upon exit. Before Privateer, games only displayed a message when they were quit through the UI (ie, selecting an airlock) but from 1993 on quit messages displayed when the player quit through alt-x.
Wing Commander demo: Wing Commander, at a software store near you...
Wing Commander: You step out of the airlock and into...
The Secret Missions 2: You step out of the airlock and into...
Wing Commander II demo: {nothing}
Wing Commander II: Leaving Wing Commander 2...
Special Operations 1: Leaving Wing Commander 2...
Special Operations 2: Leaving Wing Commander 2...
Wing Commander Academy: Thank you for Playing Wing Commander Academy!
Privateer: Thanks for playing Privateer. / JEMM unloaded.
Righteous Fire: Thanks for playing Righteous Fire. / JEMM unloaded.
Wing Commander Armada: Thank you for playing Wing Armada
Proving Grounds: Thank you for playing Wing Commander Armada::Proving Grounds
Wing Commander III demo: {nothing}
Wing Commander III: While you sleep, they'll be waiting . . .
Wing Commander IV demo: You stop that! You scare my chickens!
Wing Commander IV: You stop that! You scare my chickens!
Privateer 2 demo: {nothing}
Privateer 2: {nothing}
Ever wonder about the 'You stop that! You scare my chickens!' line from Wing Commander IV? According to a February 1996 issue of Point of Origin, it's an in-joke for the team rather than a reference to anything else. The Employee of the Month article about Pete Shelus notes that "those crunch dinners [on WC4] are particularly memorable for him, especially the free-association session that led to the infamous quote, 'You stop that! You scare my chickens!'"
It was a crowd funding project very similar to Star Citizen that was launched by Piranha Games way back on September 9, 2014. At the time, the game's director claimed that Electronic Arts had given them the Wing Commander license but that they had opted to turn the game into an original IP instead. This story didn't pass the smell test but it did seem clear that Transverse had, probably recently, been developed as a Wing Commander game: the space combat-filled trailer had little to do with the setting described by the crowd funding website and concept art and other behind the screens details revealed Wing Commander terminology throughout the material that had been created. Now, thanks to the website of art director Christopher M. Hunt we have better information about what really happened behind the scenes:
Electronic Arts contracted Piranha Games to create demo re-envision the Wing Commander franchise as an MMO. The first stage was create a trailer in the Unreal engine to give the fans some insight into the universe, story, and elements of game-play to drive crowd funding. I directed the entire trailer from the script written by the Creative Director. For six months, I worked with a small internal team to design, build all the environments assets, and animations from scratch in Unreal. When EA backed out of the deal, Piranha rebranded the pitch as an original IP called Transverse. Despite the fact that this was a short-lived project it really fun to develop. Here are a few screenshot from the scenes in Unreal. Jan 2014 – Sept 2014
It sounds like Electronic Arts wanted Piranha to develop a Wing Commander Online that would compete with Star Citizen... but that they weren't happy with a milestone and killed the project. Piranha took the work they had already done and in under a month had reworked their pitch as the public facing Transverse concept. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be! It's also interesting to note that this is EXACTLY the same trajectory as Star Citizen, which similarly began life as a Wing Commander project for Electronic Arts and had its pitch adapted into a crowd funding proposal with an original IP (that, again, didn't quite match the clearly Wing Commander trailer!).
We've created an archive of all the published Transverse material we could find including the material from the Transverse crowd funding website and images from the online galleries of a number of the project's artists. You can access it here.
We noticed something very special in an unexpected eBay listing about two week ago: an account listing deleted materials from Pinewood Studios which had posted a used copy of the script to "Darkside". Darkside is the little-remembered original name of Privateer 2: The Darkening, the one it had when the live action film shoot began in 1995. Material from behind the screens of Privateer 2 is rare and special so we were anxious to win the auction and scan the script for the community. Luckily, it worked out!
We have previously preserved a nearly-complete Draft 7 script donated by Erin Roberts. This is a slightly earlier Draft 5 script and it is complete, including the introduction missing from the last version. We've noticed a number of other smaller changes (like missions being set at different bars) but have not had time for a thorough comparison yet. Watch this space!
You can download a PDF of the Darkside script here (91M).
Fan art from 1994! We found these vintage renderings of two Wing Commander I ships while digging through historical Amiga material for our recent demo writeup. These may be some of the earliest surviving Wing Commander fan art!
The files were created by a fan named "Pink" who rendered them using Real 3D v2 (now Realsoft 3D) for the Amiga. These files were originally added to the AmiNet Amiga collection (likely via a BBS) on July 11, 1994! Each one includes a readme file with additional notes:
Short: 736x566 Real3D V2 raytrace. A Raptor starship from Wingcommander.
Author: bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Type: pix/trace
Architecture: generic
The scene shows a fully armed Raptor Attack fighter from the
Wingcommander game. I modelled it using the blueprints that came with
the game, so it's as accurate as the blueprints (and they weren't
accurate at all :-)
Pink
Short: 736x566 Real3D V2 raytrace. A Raptor starship from Wingcommander.
Author: bsieker@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Type: pix/trace
Architecture: generic
The scene shows a fully armed Raptor Attack fighter from the
Wingcommander game. I modelled it using the blueprints that came with
the game, so it's as accurate as the blueprints (and they weren't
accurate at all :-)
Pink
Some cool bespoke menus from Wing Commander IV for the Macintosh.
DifferencesInterested in learning more or trying it yourself? I decided to spend some time tonight putting together a WCPedia page on the Amiga demo! Hope to do similar for other demos in the coming days.
- The preview uses 64-color Extra Half-Brite (EHB) mode while the final version of the game uses the standard 16-color mode.
- Colonel Halcyon's uniform is grey with a green undershirt and a red insignia.
- The pilots running during the scramble are noticeably closer together.
- During the takeoff and landing cutscenes the Hornet cockpit slides forward instead of lifting up. It displays more damage than the game allows during landing.
- The Hornet cockpit is incomplete and does not have any active instrumentation.
- The landing cutscene shows the Hornet landing upside down and then backwards.
- There is one fewer flight deck crewman during the landing cutscene.
The next release refines the scaling slightly further; matching the wingspan of the Dralthi IV between WC4 and Prophecy - the rear of the ships are roughly lined up so this is a more fair size comparison, but not exactly perfectly precise.
The new camera movement makes examining models slightly easier; especially larger ones. I may change how the camera works in future...
The next release also improves the Privateer 2 palettes. It's now using the "true" base palette and the BRender look-up tables properly, it's a lot less washed-out - although I do need to verify/refine my gamma curve. Here's a proof-of-concept for the palette swaps for the different faction colour schemes:
Here's a quick example of the new loose file support; loading SM1.5 into WC1 (via the zip straight from wcpedia):
I've started working on some stuff I need for Confederation; in this case saved games for WC1. I plan to eventually add the ability to edit these within Originator (and those for other games) once I've finished researching/verifying the data.
Version 0.3.02/0.3.03 is mostly a bugfix and quality-of-life release, but does have a bunch of new/improved features.
- Fixed palettes for FM Towns Wing Commander Armada.
- Removed hard requirement for Proving Grounds for PC Armada.
- Privateer 2 palette improvements; proper base palette and BRender LUT usage.
- Finished an initial pass on picking up the remaining Origin FX containers for Wing Commander 1/2.
- More text support for Bioforge and Wing Commander 2 (PC & FM Towns versions).
- Fixed a bug where changing the game path wasn't properly applying without restarting.
- Added the ability to unload games and manually-loaded files.
- Changing the path for a game optionally causes an automatic reload.
- Added the ability to see/configure the names for disc/other image files for games which use them.
- Added support for the Prophecy 3dfx Test.
- Fixed Bioforge model axis orientation.
- Added basic translation (lateral camera movement) to the model viewer - hold middle mouse.
- Overhauled manual loading of files quite extensively.
- Files can be attached to a loaded game, improving viewing support.
- Files can be loaded from any drive/directory.
- Fixed a couple of bugs in the loose file loading where it would fail to open containers/files.
- The file opener now remembers the last path, with a "Home" button to return to the Originator working directory.
- Added support for "inbuilt" external files; e.g. loading Kilrathi Saga saves from the Users directory.
- Added a savegame viewer (WC1 only currently; work-in-progress).
Privateer 2's spaceflight has an interesting design where each ship model has just one set of textures... but they are designed to change their appearance based on which of ten or so palettes are selected.
We are off and running well into the 2024 now, so it's time to conclude our annual new year's poll. We've swapped in a new one about stealth fighters in Wing Commander. The question this time asks which craft you think sowed the most chaos, did the most damage and wreaked the most havoc over the years. This is by no means an exhaustive list of cloaking fighters. In order to make the list of options more concise, we've narrowed the field to generally "enemy" presenting ships. So you won't see Blair's Excalibur that destroyed Kilrah, Earth's defensive screen of cloaking Arrows, the Recon Excaliburs that first scouted the Nephilim or the 28th Century Arrow Eclipse. But there's still some fun picks to choose from below!
It is more than 20 cm long (about 21-22 cm I guess) ... I didn't take the glass cabin off to take the photos. I love it. ;)
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