John Cordell wanted to let everyone know that although the next version of Gemini Gold is still a little ways off, the team is working hard to polish up certain parts of their fan remake of Privateer. It might seem like these guys have been around for a while, but the GG project was actually just announced one year ago this week. In that time they've sharped up their code and made many graphical improvements. Recreations of the game's art continue, and the team has just successfully rerendered the landing area at Oxford and smoothly integrated their own ship models. The Moon(s) do look somewhat out of place though. Oxford is where I mainly hung out back in my Privateer days, so I'll be anxious to see what else they do with other locations on the planet.
As you can see we are really making progress - only need a bit patience for the next major release and you will experience a lot more Privateer like it was "back in the days"...
Multimedia Mike has made some breakthroughs in the study of movie files used in the 3DO port of Wing Commander 3. He has written an article on custom movie file formats used for the 3DO in his multimedia exploration journal here. It looks like the core files used in both the DOS and 3DO versions are similar, but the console port uses BUN files instead of more familiar TRE files. It all looks pretty technical to me, but someday this might help video artists cleanly extract the higher quality WC3 cutscenes included in the 3DO version of the game. Mike also recently conducted some research into Origin's Xan format which was used on most of the games with live-actor FMV. Thanks to AD for pointing this one out.
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