Welcome to the big event! Here's a wonderful welcome video put together by Fek'Leyr Targ.
This year I've once again produced a little birthday video, returning to the Gemini Sector. Do you recognise the scene? ;)
For the first time, the CIC Birthday Party is also broadcasting live in real time! Check us out and join the fun! The text chat party is still in #Wingnut Discord. We started a little early with a special episode of All Wings Considered a few hours ago. We'll be going for quite a while yet!
Check out these awesome trading cards that DefianceIndustries made! They're a set of super cool realistic looking cards with images, stats and history. I really like that silhouette identifier box that teases subsequent cards in the series. This makes me really want a printed set!
Attached is my contribution to the festivities, a redo of some super fun old Topps aircraft trading cards. They were the “friend or foe” series from 1952 and they have kind of a fun retro vibe that looked kind of fun when Wing Commanderized.Enjoy and Happy Birthday!
I've been working with Defiance Industries to have a video ready for the CIC's birthday of early test footage.A brief list of things added since the last videos:
- Some early experimentation with updated sound effects (50/50 old vs new)
- View based missile lock-on
- Smoother external camera
- Damage displays
- Turrets (both on fighters and capships)
- Subtle cockpit motion on the primary cockpit camera
- A zoomed out camera (primarily for taking in the cockpit)
- Afterburners, Decoys
- Working cockpit (guns, fuel, damage, speed guns, decoys, targeting brackets)
- Friendly wingmen
The live demo's been updated! Includes the intro, menu (static for now) and initial fighting in a Dralthi! as soon as you die, tho, it switches back to Hornet.
Hello fellow Wing Commander fans and happy 21st birthday to the Wing Commander CIC! Thank you everyone for continuing to make this a fun and thriving community to be apart of!I'm continually amazed at the new creations made by fans or even finding new things in the original Wing Commander games. However, it isn't too often that a new easter egg presents itself, even after 25+ years. Today, in celebration of the CIC's birthday, I share an exciting new finding, a previously undiscovered easter egg in Wing Commander: The Secret Missions for SNES!
Below I will go over some of the highlights in discovering the easter egg, but if you just want to dive right in and see the easter egg yourself, you can watch the video provided or follow these instructions:
1- On the title screen, select "Continue Campaign"
2- Then enter "ACE" as the handle and "05HMY8?PVR" for the codeIn addition, you can also use a SNES Game Genie and input the following code: DB68-C402. You can then start a new campaign, enter a handle of your choosing, and access the easter egg that way. You can then talk with Shotglass or go to the Briefing Room to enjoy some fun dialog. A quick note is that after the briefing is over, the ship launch sequence may glitch a bit and cause some graphics to quickly flash (please be warned for those sensitive to flashing lights!). You may also be taken to the TrainSim for a "fake" mission as there is no official mission for this easter egg.
As for the story behind discovering the easter egg, it is a long and technical one but a story I may share in more detail one day. For now, I will detail some of the highlights. I was one day looking through The Secret Missions' binary data and noticed something odd. There was a text string in the data, specifically referencing a "Town Meeting" that didn't seem to be from any Wing Commander game. The game's text pertaining to conversations with Shotglass, your fellow pilots, and mission briefings are encoded in the data thus making it more difficult to get some context behind this mysterious text. One idea I thought of is maybe this is a hidden series in the game. The Secret Missions game has 8 total series, 7 on the winning path and 1 on the losing path. I wondered to myself if this could possibly be a hidden "9th" series in the game. In addition, I came across some old Game Genie codes that allowed you to choose which series you started with. With the help of these Game Genie codes, I was able to create a new code, DB68-C402, that would start you at the 9th series. To my surprise, it actually worked and discovered this easter egg!
However, I wondered if there might be an easier way to get access to this secret as not everyone has access to a Game Genie (although emulation could be an option). I got some assistance from an anonymous source about how to get access another way. It was through this assistance that using the handle "ACE" and code "05HMY8?PVR" provided an alternate way to the easter egg. The wonderful thing about this is that no Game Genie code is required! My thanks to this source for their help!
Anyway, I hope you really enjoy this easter egg as much as I did! It just shows that there may be many more hidden discoveries to find in other games! Once again my thanks to this community and I look forward to new creations and discoveries in the years to come!
-Music_guru
Just in time for the party, DefianceIndustries, PopsiclePete and team have released another exciting update to the Prophecy and Secret Ops Model Upgrade Pack. It includes multiple new Confed fighters, stations and Nephilim capshiips plus a variety of technical upgrades. It's really just in time this year - this post will be updated in a few minutes with the new package when the file finishes uploading!
And here (115 meg exe) it is!
1. Updated Panther
2. Updated Stations (Callisto, Confed starbase)
3. Updated Tshark
4. New Kraken ship killer
5. New Hydra (SO only currently - we're still working out bugs in WCP but it should be in a week or so)
6. tech fixes: Fixed the corvette bug: once shields fall, the ship actually takes hull hits.
The new Flag Commander update with realistic starscape backgrounds is live! As we mentioned last month, L.I.F. got some neat skybox software and has been carefully adding cool scenes to the Homeworld Remastered mod. Grab the update with the pretty backgrounds here. Here's some gorgeous examples and creative flavor text!
The Concordia wasn't exactly the first ship I'd have thought about when it came to pull a gut punch like this one, but I was a pilot, not a brass, so there I was, flying escort in my trusty Sabre. Sure, we were going to be cut off from reinforcements or easy retreat, but the Cats wouldn't see us coming, if Intel didn't mess up too much on that one.
It was a long shot that ultimately paid off big, since I'm able to write about it now. A science officer briefed us about some strange astrogation phenomenon that involved a couple of jump points in interstellar space that somehow got tangled together. Don't ask me the physics behind it, I'm sure there is a few dozens papers about the entire thing.
The important thing is that it gave us a backdoor that we would use. Once. These jump points interacted together in a way that made this batch of empty space one of the deadliest traps around, frying anything or anyone stumbling in an insane radiation field... except for one place.
The physicist talked about Cherenkov radiation, interstellar dust and dark matter, but she didn't sell it as she should have: the second most breathtaking sight I ever witnessed in my career. The Iselhorn Corridor, they called it. Of course, you can find the holograms, but let me tell you that no recording will ever come close to that feeling of awe I experienced, in this small cockpit, as we moved forward.
A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675
I don't know if that Salthi pilot was as distracted as Bucky was. Probably not.
We expected the Corridor to be clean of Kilrathi presence, that they wouldn't have found their way through the radiation from their end of the sector, and we were wrong. Thankfully, they never really understood there was another jump point on the other side, so when our scanners found the Cats, they were as surprised as we were, but we had a task force and they had a small research outpost with a couple of fighters.
I was flying CAP with Bucky while the two Exeter went in for the kill. These light fighters couldn't hope to do any serious damage to them, and they neither had the range nor the jump drive needed to send a message away, but they fought well. I hope I would have done the same thing in their place.
This encounter didn't scrub the mission, but we were a lot more cautious afterwards, which saved us on the return trip. I hear that afterwards, the Cats decided to make sure noone would ever go through this backdoor again. They set up large antimatter warheads in the inner dust and dug big enough holes with it that even a dreadnought of theirs would be sterilized by the radiation.
A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675
The real targets were in range, a hidden shipyard providing ships and logistics support for the rear echelon of the Kilrathi. The cats had set up a clever installation around a large telluric planet: a few of the smallest moons - big asteroids, really - were turned into mining rigs feeding a shipyard that was orbiting in spitting range of the planet's surface.
There was barely any defences, the idea was apparently to avoid being noticed by one of our deep strike groups while reinforcing the defences and possibly reinforce any reaction force. They didn't see us coming until it was too late, when the Concordia launched several strike packages at all the mining stations at once.
I remember feeling a bit annoyed on our way back. It had been murder rather than war. I knew they did worse to the colonies in the Border Worlds, but it didn't make me feel better knowing our torpedoes destroyed life support, communications and power on these moons, letting the Cats there die slowly.
A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675
While we left the Kilrathi miners suffocate, the capital ships deorbited, going deep inside the gravity well of the planet, jamming all communications as our Ferret squadrons made sure noone would carry a message of our presence.
In hindsight, we should have connected the dots when we were surprised by a quick reaction force on our way out of the system. The shipyard must have had some stealth fighters that sneaked out of range of our jammers, but by then, our tactics were not yet properly updated, so we had holes in our coverage that the Cats exploited.
It didn't save them, though, as I barely had the time to land before the admiral wanted me back outside to escort one of our destroyers on an attack run on the shipyard.
A Wing and a Prayer: an Ace's View, by Colonel Winfield T. Hart (retired)
Enterprise Press, 2675
This is also the time of year when we refresh our Background and Development Archive sections. These pages try to encapsulate all the useful or remarkable artifacts and bits of knowledge that we report on in our daily news updates, but can be difficult to keep track of over time. We hope these sections can be a good starting-off point for anyone just now wanting to learn about a classic Wing Commander game they found on GOG, or a more seasoned player wanting to research a certain topic in-depth. With the Wing Commander 3 anniversary coming up, this year's efforts focus on that title. Below you can find a birds eye overview of the new additions.
Maintaining different color schemes for our discussion boards used to involve styling dozens of tiny images for the various buttons and labels, so at some point we picked one scheme that matched our homepage reasonably well and stuck with it. Fortunately, XenForo's user interface components are entirely CSS based, allowing a return to user-selectable color schemes! All we have to provide is a matching CIC logo. Look below for our hi-res logo in the various CIC colors that you are familiar with -- and perhaps a few others! You can find the style selection button near the bottom of any Chat Zone page. These updated logos will also make an appearance in our classic Guides and Ships sections.
The News Collections section is where we package up sets of news updates that follow a specific theme for easier consumption. Here are a few we've just added:
Previous collections include our memorials for developers and artists that have passed away, an overview of our anniversary updates and the April Fools slates.
Eagle-eyed visitors may have spotted that our logo looks a little bit sharper today. We've made a double resolution version available to supporting browsers. The leap in quality isn't quite as large as when the logo was recreated from scratch with WC4DVD footage, but it's a noticeable upgrade on high dpi screens nonetheless. Below you can see how today's logo compares to the original from 1998. The CIC itself has gone through a few page design iterations over our long history. We posted an overview for last year's anniversary here.
The CIC website is made up of thousands of pages and dozens of sections, some dating back to our earliest days. Inevitably, some links will break over time as things get moved around or reworked. For last year's anniversary, we put in a huge effort to fix broken links and iron out various visual issues around the website. This year, we continued along this line, but with a heavy focus on our 1998-2012 news archive. Our current layout was rolled out in 2012 and was based on (then) modern HTML and CSS features, while our substantial back catalog of news articles was composed with an older stack in mind. In addition, some updates contained minor HTML glitches that the browsers of yesteryear probably just glossed over or silently fixed (hence why they went unnoticed at the time of publishing), but that modern browsers no longer put up with. This could result in a link not showing up or stranger effects, like half a sentence disappearing from view.
Happy CIC Birthday everyone! Cake!
We used to celebrate the party on the CIC's original August 10 anniversary, but often that doesn't work out for us logistically anymore. Nevertheless, this year we managed to time the party to fall on Dundradal's actual birthday. Happy Birthday Dund! Hope it's been a good one so far!
We've been around for quite a few years, and new fans have been joining the community for the entire time. It's always interesting to see the spread from old timers that found us in the '90s compared to newbies that weren't even alive back then (we also appreciate people who are old timers but just now found the site!). Vote below to let everyone see when you joined in.
The old poll asked which faction logo was your favorite. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the Confed Star won out, but in a major upset, the UBW beat back the Kilrathi for second place! The Black Lance also had a surprisingly low fourth place turnout.
And that's it for the front page! But the party continues! Come on back to #Wingnut on Discord to rejoin the fun! The livestream broadcast will also continue well into the night. There's lots of people we'd like to thank for helping make today possible. This has been a HUGE year for fan projects with a ton of absolutely marvelous efforts in full swing. Howard Day, DefianceIndustries, Popsicle Pete, Pedro, L.I.F./Rufus, UnnamedCharacter, Goliath, Dark Sentinel and Denis Loubet are just some of the people who are killing it this year. This makes our job tremendously fun since there's so much to report on. Once again, KrisV has outdone himself in literally keeping the website online from a technical perspective and doing all of the behind-the-scenes maintenance and upgrades that nobody else will touch.
And completely sincerely, I'd like to thank all of YOU for coming. It's the shared excitement and spectacle of the annual CIC birthday that makes it special. The CIC staff could hang out any time, but knowing that we get to do it in such an environment with all of you really puts it over the line for us!
Last, but not least, I'd also like to personally congratulate LOAF and Dundradal for running such an engaging and creative Wing Commander show. I mentioned to LOAF years ago that this would be a dream of mine, but it would probably be too much work to pull off. I imagined it'd just be audio back then and definitely under an hour, and somehow they pull off a three-hour WEEKLY multimedia variety show. The work Trelane and LeHah do behind the scenes is also very important. I'm completely dedicated to daily website updates to show the enduring nature of our fandom and community, but being able to see the excitement about Wing Commander in each week's live broadcast really takes this to the next level!
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