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I've wondered what a WC1 speedrun would look like, so thank you for posting this. I could see that there were two short routes and both went through Rostov, so I thought you would have to navigate through the tedious asteroid fields of Rostov 1. But of course with sufficient knowledge of the...

Ingenious speculation here, and WC1 ships do indeed have a moment when explosion is imminent but you can still target them, and then you lose targeting and it's just animating the explosion. The Claw has an unusually long sequence where it cannot be targeted and sparks a bit before finally...

I remember trying to manage assets for a project in the days of DOS filenames - 8 character name + 3 character extension. I'd never experienced anything different, so didn't think much of it at the time. But today, thought of doing so for something the size of SWC makes my skin crawl. I'm also...

Pacing I agree with all of MannerOfLoaf's comments above, especially the first one. In a more general sense, you want to think about pacing, especially if you have a design where the game is divided into missions and you can only save while in between them. The scale of missions in WC1 was...

I think that damage to Target Track disables all missile lock on (including torpedoes) and the Improved Target Tracking System for guns. (Dart DF, Pilum FF and Porcupine Mines will still work.) So yes, you lose torpedo locking and ITTS to the same event. I don't think anyone has fully dug...

I don't think there's any more information to ask for. The two books ("Through the Moongate" and "Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide") show that the sequence of events was exactly as you suggest. I am concerned about this paragraph from "Through the Moongate": I think someone...

Here's a paragraph that I wish every developer of flight sims would read, right up to today. For starters, it would be nice if someone had told the programmers working on Wing Commander Armada: The Death Star sequence in A New Hope draws a lot from a specific Second World War movie, 633...

The Morningstar was fun, but the Mace exposes a place where the script and gameplay don't like up. Maniac says he likes it. But his AI doesn't know how to use the Mace, so he never does. (I think - has anyone witnessed it?) Of course, if they had implemented it, we'd get annoyed with him...

Yes, I remember being baffled by many box and magazine screenshots that couldn't be reproduced in the actual game. Even when desktop publishing tools that could accept image files appeared, how could you capture the screen? In the days before multi-tasking operating systems, this wasn't easy...

Wow. I'd seen this done with the "finger of death" cheat. However, I thought that even if you could survive against the four Gratha, it was just about mathematically impossible to inflict enough damage on them with nothing but lasers before running out of time. That's some straight shooting to...

I didn't intend to be critical... mostly. The WC1 AI is far more sophisticated than most games of the early 1990s. WC3, WC4 and Prophecy have radically different (and better) AI, and they should, given improvements in processing power. They're not comparable to WC1 and WC2. In WC1, I consider...

I'm talking about the wingmen who show up on your targeting interface with their callsign, that you can issue orders to, and that you talk to between missions. Here's Angel in Gimle 1. So what are the other sort? Other allied fighters just have their type, like this Raptor in Gimle 1...

There's some material on the AI in the book Wing Commander I and II: The Ultimate Strategy Guide. Pix, of Pix's Origin Adventures, put a scan of it on his Downloads page, although you'll have to hunt around a bit to find it. It doesn't discuss the wingman AI, although they would use the same...

First, as Panther1.0 says, what speed are you running at? If in DOSBox, this is the "Cycles Count". It shows up if you're running in a window. If you're running fullscreen, press Alt+Enter to switch to windowed (and Alt+Enter again to switch back). I think the GOG releases are set to 4,000...

I know you're talking to EA, not Hollywood, but I'm picturing a Wing Commander movie filtered through the mindset that appears to have given us Sonic. It reboots the series back to WC1. It's a "darker, gritter" reboot. Since the WC Movie Rapier was already made out of Cold War plane parts, they...

This is a very peculiar image, because of its palette. In the bottom right corner of the video, you see the first 32 colors in the 256-color MCGA palette. Color 0 is in the upper left, and they increase first down and then to the right. That's a unique set of colors to have in the first 16...

We have a sample of 8 Star Wars movies to date. 6 have had male leads. To bring gender parity to the force, they would still need to lead another 4 with women. Even if they did choose the leads at random, they would have a 25% chance of choosing two women in successive films. It's not an...

From the Wing Commander: The Price of Freedom novelisation by William R. Forstchen and Ben Ohlander, excerpt provided with the boxed version of WC4: These three lines are loaded with detail about the perceived value of pilots, gunners and academy training. Incidentally, this is the pilot you...

It's easy to assume that a low-performance craft is obsolete, but in our own 21st century this is rare. Police forces buy up-to-date production cars. They do not drive Formula 1 racing cars or Main Battle Tanks, because neither type of vehicle would help police do their job 99.9% of the time...

I'm fine with space shooters that ignore Newton, but rolling just makes no sense. Please make A and D YAW (or give me the choice if some of the airplane pilots out there expect ROLL). I'd quite like to see this, but only if implemented with great care to maintain pacing. I like FTL, but it...