Announcing 2013 Winners! (January 26, 2014)

[ChrisReid]

Another annual contest has run its course, and we have a new set of winners! For the past few weeks, Wingnuts have been voting for the Wing Commander fan projects and web sites that made the most impact in 2013. Most of you are familiar with the process, so let's get to it!







Howard Day's Concordia Hangar has won in the category of Wing Commander Web Site of the Year! This time around, a lot of endeavors blurred the line between "site" and "project," but one thing was clear - fans are getting a huge kick out of being able to walk around some of their favorite fighters aboard one of their most favorite ships!

Daedalus Station is the runner up for WC Web Site of 2013! The site's style is out of this world, and their monthly Destiny's Way magazines are as slick as they are charming. And it doesn't hurt that the Maslas Brothers behind it are also putting together a sharp looking WC fan game!

This year we had two projects that were neck and neck for the lead throughout all the voting, so we've awarded two winners for Fan Project of the Year.





The first are the Collected Works of HCl! He's always a busy dude, but HCl redoubled his efforts in 2013 with research that helped enable the GOG releases and increase our understanding of WC video decoding. He released patches that ensured people can upgrade their Prophecy games to the DVD version and also added deinterlacing to Privateer 2 movies. Not wanting to leave any corner of the series untouched, he even made big breakthroughs this year in editing WC3+ ships into WC2/Academy!

Also winning Fan Project of the Year are Klavs' Models! He stunned Wingnuts everywhere with both gorgeous digital renders and incredible fully-textured physical 3D prints. His images are often paired with witty flavor text, and he's always up for trying something new - be it a more traditional sketch, custom scale physical model or breakthrough 3D printing technique.

Last, but not least, we have the Runner Up for Fan Project of the Year - Wing Commander: Defiant Few. The audio drama is heavy on excitement, adventure and great sound effects. It revitalized WC fan fiction in 2013 by combining good stories with engaging voice actors, and fans eagerly await future chapters in 2014.

And that's what we have for 2013! If you want to read about more great undertakings, check out our year in review and nominee list.

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Original update published on January 26, 2014

 

[Dundradal]

Congratulations to all the winners!

 

[delMar]

Congratulations!

Well deserved!

 

[HCl]

WOW thanks a lot guys, i'm honoured! And i'm very glad people in the community are interested in the patches and hacks i've been working on!

By the way, small update:

Still looking into translating my WC2 scripts into HTML5 / Javascript, hopefully i'll have something to show soon (to be fair, embellished GUIs are not something i'm good at, but it should be functional and simple to use ... and of course, being HTML5+JS, the source will be accessible to everyone to tweak / improve / integrate into something else, if you're so inclined)

Also, I ended sidestepping a bit into researching the Incident files in WC2, the main motivation being that they are used to trigger animations. Well, it turns out, they are the same format as the WC2 Series files, and what I found in those files is a very nice scripting system, which seems to be used for everything in the game, making use of a variety of assets (RLE sprites, palette files, speech files, and so on). Also, Incident files reference Series files and vice-versa (both being regarded as "FILM" files), and several functions seem be be defined with bytecode, which leads me to believe the WC2 Gameflow part is really a small VM. And this is something I find very very cool! Hopefully the animation converter will also generate a very basic script for playing a converted animation at some point.

The format of these files is now understood at a macro level, which means all chunks can now be parsed into meaningful information. Only for the meaning of the various bytecodes is still unknown, i'm still documenting that. Hopefully i'll have more news on that soon!

 

[Quarto]

Also, I ended sidestepping a bit into researching the Incident files in WC2, the main motivation being that they are used to trigger animations. Well, it turns out, they are the same format as the WC2 Series files, and what I found in those files is a very nice scripting system, which seems to be used for everything in the game, making use of a variety of assets (RLE sprites, palette files, speech files, and so on). Also, Incident files reference Series files and vice-versa (both being regarded as "FILM" files), and several functions seem be be defined with bytecode, which leads me to believe the WC2 Gameflow part is really a small VM. And this is something I find very very cool! Hopefully the animation converter will also generate a very basic script for playing a converted animation at some point.

Great stuff! It makes sense that all of this would be the same basic system. It's funny, as time goes by, I'm more and more impressed with WC2 from a technological point of view. I used to think that while it's a great game, it really made very little progress from WC1. And on the surface, it kinda looks like that - but down in the guts, they reworked so much. It's clearly a robust and reusable system, and you get the impression that WC2 has more in common with something WCP (with everything scriptable) than WC1.

By the way, since the end credits for WC2 (well, actually, one of the addons) say that the game was "filmed" in MuchowVision, this guy might be someone to talk to if you want to get some info on the code.

 

[Klavs81]

A great and fantastic honor! Thank you so much everybody. I feel like I'm walking with giants, the hard work of all these other guys put my little ships to shame! Thanks so much for the continuing love, abuse, honor and support!

 

[kyrgiannis]

We would like to thank everybody for their vote of confidence especially when there are all these other amazing projects out there. We are really honored!

The Maslas Bros

PS: Klavs man. Please don't be so modest about your work. You make the rest of us feel bad!