SabreWing off on a Wild Tangent

Howdy. Been lurking about here for a while.

I recently built an online space combat sim called SabreWing: http://www.sabrewing3d.com. Has pretty obvious WC influences. What am I saying - REALLY obvious.

On the sly, I'm ruminating on doing a Wing Commander 3 TC using my current codebase. All the hard work is done, it's basically a media conversion. Most of media work has been done by other users in the community, converting the 3D ship meshes to intermediate formats. I have a lot more freedom than with using pre-existing games though, since all the code is mine, and I won't have to do wierd workarounds for the right effects.

Why Wing Commander 3? It's the best one, of course. The last WC with Kilrathi. WC4 with all those PEOPLE was just boring. (blasphemy, I know)

Anyway, I did some preliminary tests and was very pleased with the overall WC3 'feel' that could be achieved. ("YOU CANNOT DEFEAT THE DRAKHAI!")

On to my questions. I've searched round about on Thomas Bruckner's site, and HCL's legacy files and info, but haven't found what I'm looking for.

Is it possible to extract the cockpit graphics from WC3? They aren't MAT's are they? I've made some attempts at manually reconstructing them from the (meager) screenshots of WC3 I've managed to scrape up. Unfortunately, I'd like to have the hand animations intact, which isn't possible if I do that. I don't even have WC3 anymore, and just can't bring myself to shell out 200 bucks for a copy of Kilrathi Saga on EBAY when I don't know if this is even possible. That said, are they extractable from the demo (if extractable at all)?

Can the inflight comm movies be extracted to any usable format?

How about comm voices? Sound effects?

Any help with these questions would be greatly appreciated. If you've already extracted them yourself, and wouldn't mind sharing them, that would also be fantastic.

Media in hand, it would take about a week of evening-time to rework SabreWing to use exclusively WC media. Boy, I'd like to relive the WC3 glory again (with hardware acceleration, of course) and I know some other folks would too.

Thanks for any info you might have!

Trivia Reminder

Please remember to submit Week 19 trivia game answers to Chris Reid by midnight tonight -- Week 20 questions will appear monday morning.

WCA Mirror - Episode 3

Thanks to TyeDyeBoy for hosting part 2 of our Wing Commander Academy run-through. If you missed it the first time, grab episode three here.

Making the Movie - Part 1

Here's the second of our three part release of the Wing Commander Movie's electronic presskit. This week, you can download (thanks to BlackLance.org) part six -- interviews with the cast and crew. It's probably the most interesting 'making of' segment -- it features a very excited Freddie Prinze Jr., and a seemingly bewildered Tcheky Karyo. Check back next sunday for the last part!

• Trailer - Version #1 (5,038k - 1:21)
• Trailer - Version #2 (2,320k - 0:35)
• Featurette - with text (16,222k - 4:47)
• Featurette - without text (16,256k - 4:51)
• Film Clips (9,950k - 4:19)
• Selected Soundbites (30,336k - 12:31)
• Unedited B-Roll (31,868k - 8:49)

PoGo Away

EA.Com, Electronic Arts crazy online division, has aquired Pogo.com, an online family games service. Read about it here.