WCDX Restores Pinups, Planets & More!

Stinger has published another big update to his WCDX patch for Kilrathi Saga. It restores even more of the original DOS games' features to the Windows edition of the earlier Wing Commanders. Background planets now appear in space and the joystick can be used for menu navigation. SM2 for DOS added in the ability to click on the pinup posters against the far barracks wall, but this never worked in the Kilrathi Saga... until now! wcnut confirms that the package also functions in wine for Mac OS X users. Grab the latest beta here.

It took a bit longer than I'd planned, but 1.2 beta2 is finally here! Here's my list of fixes:

• Planets are now visible in the stellar background and in the Wing1 victory sequence.
• SM1 and SM2 now correctly search the local path for streams before looking for a CD (Wing1 already did this).
• Fixed window title.
• Joystick menu navigation now works correctly, showing the correct cursor and help text.
• My initial fix for planets made them visible, but locked their orientation to your display. After watching a few YouTube videos, I found that my memory had been faulty; the original planets in the DOS versions actually did keep their orientation relative to the universe. Further, since the planet in the Wing1 victory sequence is drawn using the same code, planets also are drawn scaled at all times (just usually with a scale very close to 1.0). My original fix prevented the planet in the victory sequence from growing larger as the Tiger's Claw approached. This has now been properly fixed.

The joystick cursor issue took a lot more work than I was expecting. The bug may actually have been a result of some of the changes I made; it's possible that this feature worked correctly in the originally released Kilrathi Saga. Originally, the joystick handling code for the gameflow sequences would reposition the mouse cursor by calling the Windows SetCursorPos API. I think the resulting mouse "movement" would then trigger the code that updated the cursor image. As part of my changes aimed at making the game play nice with Windows systems, I removed all calls to SetCursorPos, so the second part of that sequence couldn't happen. Instead, I've reworked the joystick code to explicitly tell the rest of the game that the cursor position has been updated, and the gameflow sequences respond by updating the cursor image in the appropriate fashion.

Happy flying!

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I've just released wcdx-1.2-beta3. In addition to fxing the planets loading bug, I've corrected what was possibly the most crucial oversight of the entire KS release:

That's right, I've added the poster back into the game! Originally added for Secret Missions 2, this highly important feature was left out of the Kilrathi Saga editions entirely. I have recreated the functionality from scratch, so the poster is now available for your viewing pleasure. Not only that, but I've added the functionality to all three games: Wing Commander 1, Secret Missions, and Secret Missions 2!

You're welcome.