Academy Fan Mission Pack From 1997 Resurfaces (May 31, 2015)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
In the midst of many talented Wingnuts discussing modification of the original WC games, Shades remembered that he had an "unofficial expansion campaign" that he could never get to work. The set of 48 missions was included in the 1997 Chartbusters #16 collection of miscellaneous freeware on CD in the UK. UnnamedCharacter correctly pointed out that the files were in Wing Commander Academy format, which is actually not hard to get going. There are two packs of 24 missions, which is the maximum number that the game supports at one time. Simply backup your own savegames and drop in the files from either disk "one" or "two" into Academy's "missions" subfolder. They will then appear under the Load menu in the simulator mission terminal. Grab the pack here (55 kb zip) and let us know what you think!









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Original update published on May 31, 2015
 
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Triple-B said:
I just checked the files and found out, that there is no storyline to the campaign :(
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's how Academy works. :)

In the long history of fan projects, there's about 100 to 1 that have a story but no appreciable missions built. It's kind of refreshing to see it the other way around for once. You're welcome to write up a narrative that matches the campaigns that have been made though. :)
 
SOSIM was basically the same way, though there sort of was a loose story stringing the missions together. And the start of related fiction for one of the campaigns.

Yeah, someone could write up fiction to go along with the missions complete with briefings. Perhaps multiple writers (written in a forum RP like manner for between mission scenes).

What details come with the missions?
 
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ChrisReid said:
Yeah, that's how Academy works. :)

In the long history of fan projects, there's about 100 to 1 that have a story but no appreciable missions built. It's kind of refreshing to see it the other way around for once. You're welcome to write up a narrative that matches the campaigns that have been made though. :)
Click to expand...

I remember that there were plenty of Campaigns with storylines written as a txt attachment. So one could read a short briefing before playing the mission.
It would have been great to know, what the author intended with this campaign..
 
Even though this disk was released in 1997, many of the file date stamps are as early as 1993. It's possible those are somewhat inaccurate, but clearly we're not looking at fan content produced in the internet age. The intent of the news post wasn't really to give people an afternoon of entertainment playing Academy. The value is in the digital archeology - this is practically prehistoric - so it's amazing even the missions survive to be shared in 2015 at all. Just reading those cryptic filenames is like finding caveman scrawl on a stone tablet to me. If we do later find the story associated with it, that's even better, but again the really neat part would be that a story from the early '90s survived on floppy disks and BBSes long enough to get burned to a CD that lasted long enough to get posted online today.
 
It could've been, but it may have just been a standalone disk of random stuff they could bundle and sell for a few dollars. There was a lot of that in the late '90s when CDs became popular.
 
Chris, thanks for the write-up and link to this mission pack for Academy! I've been trying them out all day, now.
Yeah, Chartbusters was a UK/German set of add-on material for video games back in the early 90s. Here is an image of "Chartbusters #13" jewel case cover from over at Moby Games web site.
chartbusters13.jpg
 
Silent Hunter, I have installed my Academy from CDROM and run it from DOSbox (and D-fend Reloaded).... so I don't know the details of your GOG install. You might try creating a new missions folder inside of your WC Academy folder, then place the 24 files from either Chartbusters #16 disk one or disk two in that new folder.
 
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