Origin Museum Interviews the Vampire

Wing Commander Airing on HBO & On Demand

A space pilot (Freddie Prinze Jr.) with an encoded message, his sidekick (Matthew Lillard) and their superior (Saffron Burrows) fight attacking aliens.

WC Vet to Lead New UT Gaming Academy

Texas is an epicenter for the computer and video game industry. It has the second-largest concentration of game companies in the U.S., with more than 155 development and publishing companies throughout the state providing around 4,000 full-time jobs, according to the Texas Film Commission in the Office of the Governor.

The academy will be industry driven – instead of a graduate degree, students will earn a post-baccalaureate certificate, which offers fewer restrictions than a traditional academic degree and will enable the program to remain relevant and responsive to industry trends.

"The Denius-Sams Gaming Academy will create the most-intense program of its kind, in which aspiring professionals enlist in an all-in adventure, rather than complete mere credit hours," said Roderick P. Hart, dean of the College of Communication. "The program will prepare students to become creative team leaders who will drive the creation of games in the future, and ensure the vitality of the gaming industry."

A Little Austin Adventure with LOAF

I'm back in Austin visiting LOAF this week, and here's a tiny peek at our exploits. First things first, we hit up three vintage game stores and scored some WC merchandise at each one! It's always so great to see the store clerks light upon mentioning the Wing Commander name. Apparently, my rental was built for just this scenario and has a slot designed to carry an SNES cartridge. These images are followed by a picture snapped of us at the offices of Cloud Imperium Games/Roberts Space Industries.

We also caught the series finale of The Office on Thursday night and assembled all 18 ingredients from Michael Scott's Pretzel Day super pretzel to celebrate. And we even got some good old fashion Texas shootin' in! Last, but not least, we were at the premiere of Star Trek Into Darkness Wednesday night. Check out this link and like the photo to help LOAF win a Star Trek prize pack!

Strike Commander Gains OS X Compatibility

Do you feel like it's the time to spread your wings? Strike Commander is an action-oriented modern-day jet fighter combat simulation from the creators of Wing Commander, for only $5.99.

Slick Sabre Slicing Shapeways Soon

Blair put the eight of us in line astern formation.

Single file, with one Sabre behind and slightly below the next, the carrier could only hit the leading ship, and the rest of us would be protected from the defensive fire while we went for torpedo lock.

The tactic would guarantee that most of us would make it to torpedo launch. It was inspired, except that Blair forgot about his own skin, like always. The leader of the formation would be absorb the brunt of the Kilrathi point defense, sparing the other ships, but sacrificing himself.

Not to be out done in the suicidal bravery department, I firewalled the throttle and broke formation. Couldn't let him have all the glory, could I?

Cuhna squalled at me, but quickly shut up as I bored in on the carrier. Dry launching everything I had, I threw it into a 960° slew/spin, firing intermittently at the carrier while we corkscrewed along its length. I heard wretching over the ICS, but I also felt the 'whump' from the turret as Cuhna also fired at the carrier whenever it flashed into view.

Good girl.

My torpedoes didn't have a chance at penetrating the carrier's shields without a lock, but the Kilrathi were concentrating on us anyway, throwing up everything they had to take us out. Hopefully, it was buying the others a smoother ride.

As I spun over the bow of the ship a flight of Jalkehi flashed past, launched forthwith to put an end to our monkeyshines. Blair would be close to launch now, but I had to keep the fighters off the strike team while they gained a lock.

I charged into the Jalkehi formation, fighting them for what seemed like hours. All the while Cuhna whumped away with her little turret. At some point, I noticed the whumping had stopped.

Then the sky lit up like a second sun.

-Maniac

'Hazardous Duty' Pitch Revealed!

Origin alumni and consummate archivist Binky has discovered another great treasure: the 1997 Origin pitch video for Wing Commander: Hazardous Duty. Hazardous Duty, named after one of George Oldziey’s music tracks for Wing Commander Prophecy, was an attempt to spin Wing Commander off into an FPS game. Binky saved a VHS of the demo all these years and recently digitized it for the ages!

The Wing Commander FPS project would have been built on the then-modern Quake engine and pitted Terran Confederation marines against space pirates and Kilrathi warriors in the Border Worlds. The plan was for it to stand out in the FPS market (and connect back to the initial IP) by featuring a more elaborate AI “wingman.” A very basic demo was done in-house by the Maverick Team (largely a reskinning of Quake, with some level design.) While the project was ultimately not funded by Electronic Arts, the multiplayer was enjoyed for some time in-house by the team!

Check out the pitch video here:

BREAKING NEWS: Wing Commander on Blu Ray

Space Sim First Look: Wings of Saint Nazaire

Community member Howard Day is working on an indie space sim "in the vein of Wing Commander and X-Wing." The ship models look incredibly detailed, and the cockpit view has a pleasing '90s vibe. Wings of Saint Nazaire is being built on the Unity 3D engine, which means it'll run on Windows, Mac, Linux and even some consoles!

There are two reasons for the Sprite-based ship rendering in the game. The first is a desire to emulate the original Wing Commander games. In other words, straight-up nostalgia. The second is that it actually gives many advantages over normal 3d-polygons and textures: You can display as many ships as you'd ever want, You don't need LODs, You can very cheaply show complex lighting, glows, and shadows on every ship, They don't take much more memory than a normal set of textures and model ( the Copperhead 3d model would be 15MB in memory if it was a full 3d model, it's just 2 more at 17mb as a sprite set), The ships will look the same on every systems, and best of all, they feel like the ships from Wing Commander. I should be clear - the choice to do things this way was mine - the progammer agreed, as he also liked the way things looked when done as sprites. As AD noted - we're also doing modern multi-light source lighting on all the sprites. It's super neat to see a ship explode and light up all the floating junk in the scene that you'd just seen floating by the cockpit. It's very cool.

The team has a video up that first shows off some rendered models and then switches to actual combat action around the 1:45 mark. If you have the Unity webplayer plugin, you can play the alpha right in your browser for free.