Wing Commander Desktop Icons

Nomad Terror

Rear Admiral
Hello, friends.

I have a project I've been working on the past several days, and I have enough results now to share what I've done so far with the community.

I've made desktop icons (in .ico and .png format) for Wing Commander 2, Wing Commander Academy, Privateer and Righteous Fire. The style is more than slightly inspired by the GOG icon style, but all the arrangement and editing was done by me. The PNGs are available in sizes 192x256, 48x48 and 32x32. The ICOs have all these sizes in a single file, and Windows will pick the appropriate image to display.

The icons were made in The Gimp, and I have all the .xcf (native Gimp format) files, but they were too big to include in a .zip file. I could probably email them on request if anyone is interested (it's a 2MB zip file).

I plan to make more in the future, but I was hoping someone might enjoy using the work I've done so far.
 

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Today I worked on Secret Missions 2, Armada, Wing Commander and Wing Commander 4.

I separated the zip file into ico and png because it's already over 1MB combined.
 

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One more update before bed. No new icons this time, but I did touch up some of the 192x256 icons. I also redid the gloss effect on all the 192x256 icons.

Of all these so far, I think the SM2 icon set is my favorite.
 

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Those are two generous offers that I believe I'll take you up on. I'll email you the XCFs (probably with a brief explanation .txt in the zip) after I'm done working today, and then send you deltas from time to time.

Two updates so far. I majorly revamped the Wing Commander 2 iconset using a high quality boxart rip and added the Privateer logo to the 192x256 Righteous Fire icon.
Not uploading updated zips yet, since I want to do more work today, but the showcase is actual size if anyone is desperate enough to crop them out.
 

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Today I made icon sets for Special Operations 1 & 2. I took opposite approaches for the 192x256 icons for these two: SO1 is closer to the original boxart, while SO2 is lavished more akin to the WC3 and WC4 boxart (with Blair and Jazz!).

That brings us up to 10 games so far! Now to ponder which I'll tackle next...
 

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Well, looks like my icons have exceeded the 1MB upload size limit, so I've split it into two showcase images and two ico zips. I'm not uploading png zips anymore just for simplicity's sake. I can send by request, or they can just be extracted from the showcase images or icons.

Updates for today:
NEW ICONS
Armada Proving Grounds (All sizes)

EDITED ICONS
Wing Commander Armada (192x256): New title image from boxart
Privateer Righteous Fire (192x256): Privateer branding enlarged
Special Operations 1 (192x256): Missing chunk of filmstrip graphic reconstructed

Working on this project has reminded me of a belief I have held dear to my heart for years: The logos for Armada and Academy (Game) are the worst Wing Commander logos ever.
 

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This looks very polished and thumbs-up for your software/format choices.

When you feel you've finished your work, would you release your XCF files too, please? Otherwise, I'll just pick up whatever you upload when you're done.
 
This looks very polished and thumbs-up for your software/format choices.

Thanks. :> I started making these just for my own benefit, inspired by the GOG icons, but I figured others in the WC community might like to use or at least admire them as well.

When you feel you've finished your work, would you release your XCF files too, please? Otherwise, I'll just pick up whatever you upload when you're done.

Oh, I'll definitely provide the XCFs. As I've mentioned before several times on chatzone in the past, I'm a huge opensource advocate, and I even bring that to my creative outlets. I'd feel like I were doing the community a disservice if I didn't provide the original files. They're created in such a way that if, say, you like the icon, but not the shine effect, you can just delete it, or add a different one. Or replace the background. Or move elements around.

I already emailed a zip of XCFs to Loaf to host on CIC FTP, but that was last update, so these latest changes aren't reflected in that.
 
I've been putting off the WC3 icon because I've just been using GOG's, but it had to be done sooner or later.

Updates for today:
NEW ICONS
Wing Commander 3 (All Sizes)

EDITED ICONS
Privateer (192x256): Remade from higher resolution art

By the way, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions (or criticism!) for these icon sets, I'd love to hear it.

Does anyone think it would be worth making a SWC iconset in this style? I don't know how Mac OS Classic icons work, or the state of Classic emulators on PC.

How about SM1? I haven't done it, because in the DOS version of WC1, there's no way to directly launch SM1 as far as I know, as it has to be done from within WC.EXE. Maybe the KS version has its own exe? If that's the case I'll definitely make an iconset for SM1.
 

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Hello, friends. Been very busy here. Just wanted to give you a preview of what I've been working on.

wc3-512.png
so2-512.png


What do you think? Many more where these came from, I assure you.

I've also got another project I've been working on that might interest you Mac-using Wingnuts.
 
Cool!, I've been pondering for a while scanning the CD covers for the various WC's, so that the copies I have without proper cases (E.g. EA Classics WC3) can be updated to something shiner! But of course, the boxes are all a little tattied from the years. What are you using to smarten up your images? (are they even scans?)
 
At a guess, it looks like the WC3 one is using the title-less box art (from the birthday updates) as a base, and a custom-drawn tile added on top, together with a layer of translucency to give it the impression of a 'shine'.

The SO2 image is a nice composition of scenes from the game.
 
Right. Most of these are from high quality scans taken from this site. Boxes, posters, manuals, game guides, etc.

The Righteous Fire artwork I source from https://www.wcnews.com/news/2011/08/11/a-tour-of-the-box-factory

Not that it's a complete cut and paste job (though I do do a lot of that). I do a lot of color, hue and saturation balancing, brightness and contrast adjustment, artifact removal. I also add layered drop shadows to most elements to help them stand out.

Sometimes I do some minor reconstructive work. For example, I could not (and still cannot) find a scan of the SO1 artwork that does not have part of it blocked by a sticker, so I just filled in the gap there.
For Wing Commander 4, the logo was pretty much in tatters after I extracted it from the box art, so I completely reconstructed it -- the IV by my own hand in GIMP, Wing Commander text from the Armada high resolution art, TPOF text from the high resolution scanned manual. Then I used that original extracted logo as a template for sizing and positioning.

For the Proving Grounds icon, I rendered the "Proving Grounds" text in GIMP, reshaping the I, U and S to match the appearance of the title art. It uses another piece of Armada high resolution art. I'll probably most likely come back to redo this one later on, but what I have is a good start.

I do use some in-game text from time to time. The text on the smaller Armada icons, as well as the VotK subtitle on the 256px WC2 icon are both from in-game screenshots.

So, yeah, I'm not redrawing these by hand or anything, and I'm not doing anything spectacular that nobody else could do -- it's just a passion for Wing Commander that spilled out through this creative outlet for me. Plus, I sure do love having big pretty icons to click on when I want to play a game. :>
 
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Ahh, maybe I'll try and scan my cd cases, I've got most back at my parents so I'll have to go get them some time
 
Good news. CIC is hosting the latest version of my icon pack. Thank you to ChrisReid and the rest of the CIC staff for doing this for me. :>

http://download.wcnews.com/files/fans/nomad_wc_icons.zip is the latest ico and png pack.
http://download.wcnews.com/files/fans/nomad_wc_icons_source.zip is the up to date xcf pack.

You'll find that, on top of the usual 32px, 48px and 256px sizes, I've included 128px and 512px icons for all but a handful (and I'm still working on these exceptions). These are for another project, but I wanted to make them available for everyone.

You'll also find that the xcf pack contains templates for all the sizes. I've included these so anyone can make icons in a similar style, either to share with the community or for purely personal use.

I'll continue to upload updates onto this forum, while periodically sending the staff updated zip files to host on the site.
 
Yeah, these are great. A folder full of the high res icons is fun just to look at.
 
Updates for today:

NEW ICONS
Wing Commander Academy (112x128, 384x512)
Wing Commander Armada (112x128, 384x512)
Armada: Proving Grounds (112x128, 384x512)

EDITED ICONS
Wing Commander Academy (192x256)
Wing Commander 4 (112x128, 192x256, 384x512)

This post does not include the new icons that were added to the zip linked in the previous post, so these updates are against that zip.
 

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