2006.195 (July 14, 2006)

Dozens Of Dashboards At Your Fingertips

A lot of aspiring modders or Wing Commander fans who are thinking about getting into fan projects ask about reference material to start with. Not a lot of people have a back stock of screenshots and resources like this available however. Howard Day has made it slightly easier for these fans now with a thorough Cockpit Reference Pack. He's collected art from virtually every flyable craft from WC1, WC2, WC3, Academy, Armada and Privateer. If available, most ships have side, rear and exterior shots as well. Since he extracted the art files directly in most cases, many images are in 320x200 resolution. Zooming in works fine though, and the small files have reduced the pack's size to a tiny 2.5 megabytes for almost 150 pictures. And this isn't just fun for people interested in designing games. If you don't recognize all the Wing Commander images below, you should grab the pack here to study up!

Reactor Leak, Many Dead And Missing

bakedpotato called to let us know that the Lancers Reactor community hub for the Freelancer and Starlancer games is currently suffering technical difficulties. Their main server had a hard drive fail, and it will probably be a couple more days before the site is up and running again. TLR and the CIC have a similar reader base because of Chris and Erin Roberts' involvement with Digital Anvil. They continue to maintain a very active modding community for Freelancer, and the site occasionally carries news for games such as Dungeon Siege 2 and Darkstar One .