News Collection: On This Day in WC News

2023.332 (November 28, 2023)

3D Printed Tarsus Sports a Banging Paint Job

Today we've got a really beautiful little Tarsus by Cpt. Streets. What really stands out here is the intricate and highly detailed paint scheme. It's got lots of very fine accents that are very pleasing on the eyes.

2022.332 (November 28, 2022)

Vintage Review Tweaks WC2 Name

Panther has dug up an interesting Wing Commander 2 review from the October 1991 issue of Advanced Computer Entertainment. A curious element is that they title this "Revenge of the Kilrathi." This is just a mistake or stylistic rebranding. The game was publicly announced as Vengeance of the Kilrathi, so this isn't a case of early marketing change (like with ACE's August 1990 preview of Wing Leader).

2021.332 (November 28, 2021)

WC4 Remake Adds New Capship & Other Enhancements

The WC4 Fan Remake team is back with a new report on the steady progress they have been making in recent months. DefianceIndustries has implemented a fantastic update to the Caernaven frigate - just look at that thing! Pedro has also upgraded the game's physics engine, better integrated menu updates and added improved video features. You can read all about these updates and the path towards a playable demo in their new WCRespace article here.

2020.333 (November 28, 2020)

Livestreams Done Differently

We've been sharing Plywood Fiend's unusual musings for some time, but in case you haven't watched his playthroughs of Wing Commander and Unknown Enemy for yourself, he's boxed up the highlights into one neat package. It's a super mix of his custom intros to the various series of the game. Per his instructions, send all invoices for any time wasted straight to Plywood Fiend. Finished...

2019.332 (November 28, 2019)

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's Thanksgiving in the US today, so we here at the CIC hope you all have a great day and find some great deals online. Although there's really very little relation to the historical pilgrims and Pilgrims from Wing Commander, this is also a wonderful opportunity for us to remind you about an awesome relic in the archives. The CIC is proud to host the otherwise unreleased Wing Commander Pilgrim Truth, Peter Telep's third novel written to tie into the WC Movie. Come for the exciting Wing Commander story - stay for the rad chapter header art by NinjaLA!

2018.332 (November 28, 2018)

Immersive Italian Retrospettiva with a Twist

Dardael has made a fun new Wing Commander overview video. For starters, it's all in Italian, and we love to see fans spread the word in different languages to reach as many people as possible. On top of that, he's gone through and added extensive subtitles so English speakers won't be left out. He's also upped the production values a notch here by dressing up as a WC1 pilot and inserting himself into various scenes via green screen!

2017.332 (November 28, 2017)

Avoid The Node

Dark Sentinel still has some of the fearsome capships like the Hydra under construction in his shipyards, but he's let loose a smaller pair of ships this week. This time we get to see the Ray node and its smaller Remora counterparts. When Prophecy was released twenty years ago, this ship was a real oddball. But as drones and autonomous vehicles have proliferated in recent years, such a ship makes a lot more sense and is potentially more realistic than the single use fighters we normally see.

2016.333 (November 28, 2016)

That's A Heck Of A Scratching Post...

After all the Confed Forces got a bunch of big bases, the Kilrathi were left needing a place to stay. The new stations outlined here are a great start! Melek's starbase from WC4 makes an appearance as the trading port in the Wing Commander mod for Sins of a Solar Empire. Nomada_Firefox has also designed a really cool shipyard for the largest dreadnoughts - it's built right through an asteroid!

2015.332 (November 28, 2015)

German WC Saga Released!

The long awaited German language version of Wing Commander Saga has been released. A special launch trailer was also provided in the run up to their counter hitting zero. On top of the audio conversion, the game got new subtitles, an enhanced fiction reader, better game flow navigation, in game graphical improvements and support for newer technology. English speaking players have also benefited from the development process as elements are made available for Saga Plus.

2014.332 (November 28, 2014)

Saga Pilot Manager Is Now Multilingual

Luke has released a new version of his pilot/profile management tool for Wing Commander Saga and WC Saga Plus. Besides the usual tweaks and fixes, this release adds support for language selection. For now, English and German are supported. You can download version 1.

2013.332 (November 28, 2013)

Happy Thanksgiving

The CIC would like to wish our American visitors a Happy Thanksgiving and a good day to Wingnuts around the world! The CIC staff is mostly laying low Thursday, but we would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about Wing Commander Pilgrim Truth. After the WC Movie novelization and Pilgrim Stars books were released in 1999, the conclusion to the trilogy was never published. Fans were held in limbo until just a couple years ago when author Peter Telep graciously helped us post the entire story online!

2012.333 (November 28, 2012)

Klavs Cooking Up Kilrathi Heavy Hitters

Klavs has a few more physical ship models on the way, and these present some fearsome opposition to his mostly Confed lineup. The Gratha and Jalthi are now in the design phase, and they look pretty imposing when compared with the workhorse Scimitar. Hopefully the cost of rapid prototyping continues to decline so that large versions of these ships become practical to make someday!That means I can afford to prototype a couple new ships for the holidays!

2011.332 (November 28, 2011)

Return of the Wing Commander Computer

After successfully bringing an old Macintosh back to life to play Wing Commander games, LOAF has done the same with a classic PC. It's not as simple as firing up an old clunker though - the resulting machine has five different sound cards to play the custom MIDI music designed for each game, plus a 3DFX Voodoo card, a DOS NIC and more. Also, different requirements forced the installation of DOS 6.22, Windows 3.

2010.332 (November 28, 2010)

Saga Cruisin' Along

The WC Saga mod is still refining capships, and they've posted pictures of their "final" Tallahassee cruiser model. The forward gun and missile launchers are now well defined and the entire ship has gotten a texture makeover. Check out more pictures and background info on the ship here.The Saga team is proud to show the final version of the Terran heavy cruiser.

Wing Commander IV Storyboards - Scene 178

Scene 178, Eisen leaves the Intrepid. These may be incredibly rough sketches but I will say this: Melek never looked better (which is to say that this sketch would have been a better Melek in the game itself).These storyboard images were recovered from a backup CD containing materials belonging to Origin's web development team. They were dated November 17, 1995 and were likely planned for a never-completed web feature.

2009.332 (November 28, 2009)

Fourth Batch of Kilrathi Concept Sketches

Here are some more of those concept sketches that Cybot078 has been working on. The Kilrathi ship designs from Wing Commander 3 were the inspiration for these, although some appear to have both WC2 and WC3 themes in mind. More can be found in our news archives and on the Forums.

Get Your Deals Here

Hopefully you were able to take advantage of some great deals on Black Friday. If not, or if your local store didn't have a big sale, here's some of the best deals on actively stocked Wing Commander products. For everything else, great prices abound on Half.com and eBay.

2008.333 (November 28, 2008)

Flight Commander 1.6 Released

eddieb announces the release of Flight Commander 1.6. Feature requests and bug reports can be filed here. You can discuss this release on the Flight Commander Forums.

Making the Games: Shadow Force Design Document - Chapter 4

This is the final of three 'chapters' of separate Shadow Force Design documents. This one describes improvements the team wants to make to the Secret Ops concept - in particular, to the 'mission movie' feature (telling the story in-engine). It also features a good rundown of the proposed Shadow Force plot... and some insight as to plans for the Nephilim (or, "Junior").

2007.332 (November 28, 2007)

Intercept This New WC Saga Fan Mission

Kevin Caccamo has created a new custom mission for the WC Saga Prologue. Just unzip this file (1.5 meg zip) into your Prologue directory and select "Convoy Intercept" from the game's campaign select screen. As an extra bonus, the game has you flying a SWC/WC Arena style Rapier II, which is included in the download pack.

Point of Origin: Vol. III, No. 31

Happy New Year - and welcome to Vol. III of Point of Origin. This year starts similar to the last... with Strike Commander, two Ultima titles and Privateer in development.

2006.332 (November 28, 2006)

WC4 Homeworld 2 Mod Preview Released

Aaron Thomas has released a package to give anxious fans an early look at the WC4 Homeworld 2 mod. This test demo is mainly intended to let people play around and marvel at all the amazing things that have been added to the engine. Be aware that artificial intelligence has not been implemented and things such as multiplayer connections may not work properly yet. Lots of new ships, sound effects and interface graphics are all ready for you though.

Flight Commander In A Flight Suit

Everyone's favorite Flight Commander programmer, Eddie Benowitz, sent along these nifty pictures from his Halloween party last month. Guess who had the coolest costume? When he's not working on Wing Commander projects, Eddie programs robotic space probes. It sure looks like they know how to have a good time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory!

2005.332 (November 28, 2005)

Vampire Complements Hornets In Tim Peel's Gallery

I was cruising around for a new wallpaper last night and came across a Tim Peel creation that never made it to the front page. This image features Cameron Wu's Vampire speeding away from an Earth-like planet and its moon. Earlier this year he incorporated Howard Day's Hornets into a gorgeous sunset shot. They're 1024x768 and 1280x960 respectively.

New Wallpapers Sectioned

We've had some great artwork in the news since we last updated the Wallpapers section. Here's what you may have missed in the last ten months or so. Atekimogus, Kilrah Moreira, Cyberion, Maj. Striker, Starman, Tim Peel, Lorddarthvik and Bob McDob all worked hard to make your desktop look better.

2004.333 (November 28, 2004)

Annie Get Your Gun Chart

One of our more popular articles has been updated -- the Wing Commander Gun Chart. The gun chart collects all known specifications for the energy weapons throughout the series in a single spreadsheet -- allowing for easy comparisons between different makes and models of guns. The new version now lists both the 'in game' and 'manual' stats for Wing Commander: Privateer. Several of the guns which appear in Privateer were altered between the printing of the Gemini Sector manual and the final release of the game...

Comic' Get It

As we reported last Tuesday, Kenshi is searching for a story writer for a Wing Commander fan comic book series. In order to drum up more support, he's done a 'colorized' version of his original preview sketch! Check it out and get your proposals in -- but you'd better hurry, the winning storyline will be announced tomorrow!

2003.332 (November 28, 2003)

Freelancer Soundtrack Released

An anonymous tipster noticed that Amazon has a little picture for the new Freelancer soundtrack that has been released. They don't have the actual item in stock, but the previously mentioned Best Buy link does for $12.99. I don't recall Freelancer's music as being super memorable, but it's nice that it apparently was popular enough to create this addon package.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving

Today in the US and many places around the world, the Christmas shopping season begins with a bang. I and many wingnuts will be venturing out today to brave both sides of the retail counter. Several places have some cool GBA deals if you've been waiting for the right opportunity to slide into Prophecy Advance. Toys R Us and Amazon have a limited edition exclusive Starlight Gold GBA SP bundle available beginning now.

2002.332 (November 28, 2002)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Americans out there today! Hopefully you get a day off and can do something nice. If not, stop by #Wingnut. There'll at least be a few grumpy Canadians to cheer you up.

Holding The Line Chapter 145

Raptor doesn't celebrate turkey day so he sent along the latest HTL chapter. I'll let him tell you about it:Hey all, Raptor here.HTL continues with the third and final chapter to Scraps Of Honour 11, "TillDeath Do Us Party". As you saw in the last chapter, Colonel Onslow had putdown the near riot at the Valentine's Day party with typical Border Worldstact and subtlety, or rather the lack thereof.

WCPolaroids: Casey (13/24)

Doesn't anybody ever do up their flightsuits?

2000.333 (November 28, 2000)

Capships Have Always Been Highly Contested

Lancers Reactor has posted the full rules for their capital ship contest -- you can read them here. In the meantime, check out these previews of Wing Commander ships in the works!

A Second Chance?

Wing Commander actor Mark Hamill was interviewed by eUniverseLive... the really interesting thing is that the interviewer claims that FOX has just announced a second Wing Commander movie! Too good to be true? We're doing everything we can to confirm or deny this -- but stranger things have happened.

Further DVDetails

Mark Day, who worked on both Wing Commander IV and the Wing Commander IV DVD posted a reply to the oddities Hades noted about the WCIV DVD at agwc...Wow... you must have been bored :). Actually the scenes without music/sound were either duplicates and/or the sound from a different file was played when that movie was played, (if my memory serves me correctly).

FreeLancer's Just Another Word...

A 13.3 meg FreeLancer trailer has been released! It's available here at Gamespot -- who also compare it to the Wing Commander saga.

Jumping the (Big) Gun

The Final Conflict site has posted a new rendered movie -- a Hades jumping. You can grab the sequence here (1 meg).

UE Progress

The Unknown Enemy site has been updated with news about the project -- they've completed a splash screen, have finished mission one and are working on mission two. An offline version of their fiction viewer is apparently now ready, and the fiction itself is being tuned right now. The project is looking for people capable of designing missions, cut-scenes and ICIS briefings -- contact Pedro if you can help.

Fleet Action News

Voidsurfer was nice enough to forward this update on the Fleet Action Homeworld mod to us!We're still alive and kicking *twitch*The call for new team members is *temporarily* closed - it might open agian, but I need to hear back from one person first. Sorry if I didn't notify your site about it. We had more than enough applications and "reconfirmed/reassigned" team members almost immediately after the openings were posted.

More That Never Were

An anonymous source was kind enough to send us a list of more past games cancelled by Origin... check out this incredibly interesting list.Crusader 2Crusader OnlineLords of UltimaStar Wars OnlinePrivateer OnlinePrivateer 3 (two or three times)Wing Commander OnlineBattleCryWing Commander: Strike ForceJane's F-18 (1995)Jane's F-15 (1996)A Wing Commander First Person ShooterA Wing Commander C&C CloneGolf Commander (I shit you not)Cyclone Alley (a Paul Steed game)Joe Garrity (of the Origin Museum) also added to our original list...1.

Mech Warrior Redux

Chris points out this review of Mech Warrior 4 at FiringSquad. Once again the game is compared to the well-known Wing Commander series.

1999.332 (November 28, 1999)

It's That Time of Year Again

You may have noticed that our Christmas Lights went up yesterday. Stay tuned for more holiday related stuff in the coming days and weeks.

DALnet K-Lines AOL

Five percent of our visitors may have noticed that they cannot access any of the Wing Commander channels on DALnet, where virtually all Wing Commander based irc channels are located. The easiest solution appears to be to switch to a local free isp and connect to aol via tcp/ip. Some of the more popular ones are NetZero and FreeI. You can complain about this mess at tosirc@aol.

New Home for Fleet Commander

TrashCan let us know Fleet Commander has a new homepage on a new server. You can check it out here.

Star Arrested in Food Fight Frenzy

Zeus Padanga reports from Hades. Zak Skintight, lead singer of hit pongo band The Buttock Men, was in prison on Hades last night, facing charges of affray, disorderly conduct and mass murder. Apparently, during his last concert, broadcast planet-wide, Zak shouted 'food fight!', leading to riots and food wastage on an unprecedented scale.

1998.332 (November 28, 1998)

Guide to the Universe

Ever wonder why Amazon doesn't sell the upcoming Wing Commander Confederation Handbook? So do I... I was checking out the UK version of Amazon when I found that they do! And they have one sweet high res picture of the cover...

Reintroduction

Hadrian, who never rests until everything is perfect, has been doing even more work on the intro for the upcoming CCG project. Get your MPEG player ready, download the updated intro, and enjoy.

Tech Up

Intel has released v3.1 of their reference drivers for the i740. "The primary focus of these drivers were to fix the various freezing problems some I740 owners were plagued with. Third party Chipset support was finally added for those not on an Intel motherboard, the Intel740 as Primary adapter in multimonitor systems is enabled, and a whole bunch of other fixes are included" (I'm so damn lazy, just a cut n' paste on that part).