And the Winner Is... (January 28, 2024)

[ChrisReid]

As January is already coming to a close, we're happy to announce the winners to our annual fan project of the year event! To start things off, we've got two fantastic projects that we are co-awarding Fan Project of the Year this time around.

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The first is Wing Loader, which had a tremendous release in 2023 that fully integrated speech from the Sega/Mega CD version of WC1 into the PC version of the game. With the knowledge gained from achieving this milestone, Destro began work on a larger effort to expand compatibility to other games in the series. This includes the future potential to integrate higher quality video into Wing Commander 3, which we hope comes to fruition!

The other fan project of the year winner is WC4 Remastered. They released a new iteration of the game's playable demo this past year that incorporates a variety of fixes, better joystick support and new in-flight comms.. The team also released a handful of articles detailing specific enhancements that the team is working on going forward, which gives anxious fans a great taste of what's to come.

Our runner up this year is the Confederation project to enhance WC1! We've seen it a lot in the news in recent weeks, but AllTinker was working diligently throughout 2023 to share updates with his talented artwork and digital reverse-engineering. As a big honorable mention, Tinker also was the only person to have two projects on the nominee slate this year. His Originator tool to extract assets from WC game code is a CIC staff favorite!

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Original update published on January 28, 2024

 

[Pedro]

Originator is a huge favourite of the WC4Remastered team too, I can't tell you how much quicker it is to browse through the original files now.
We've made a lot of progress this month and it's definitely sped up development. AllTinker has also been adding in requests for us, so super grateful.

It's the first time the WC community has had user friendly tools, it could be a start of a new era for Wing Commander modding.
It's also built upon a common library which hasn't been released yet, we've started early attempts to replace our file loading code with that as I'm a great believer in code re-use.

 

[AllTinker]

Thanks all, and congrats to the two winning projects!

Hopefully I won't be keeping people waiting too long for the first Confederation public release. Only a couple of things left on my shortlist for Originator.

Big appreciation for all the other nominated projects too, all great to see and be inspired by.

 

[Bob McDob]

I feel like this year has been a really good one for fan projects. There's a lot of high-quality work covering a really diverse range and you could shuffle the nominees and not feel like you'd done a disservice.
It's not like 20 years ago when the top prize was between Standoff and Saga and then a bunch of other things I can't remember. It might have been higher profile but was it actually better? I don't think so.

 

[Quarto]

Congrats to everyone! Looking at the list of projects this year, I find myself thinking that this is a radically different bunch than back in the days when there just wasn't much else of significance beyond Standoff and Saga (sheesh, I sure hope I'm my obviously biased memory is not forgetting something important).

@Pedro, as you keep working away on your WC4 remaster, I remain green with envy that you have time to stick around and do stuff in the WC community. I mean, sure, as you might recall, WC4 was never my choice for a remaster, but I greatly admire what you've done! My somewhat-forced retirement continues, and while I still visit the CIC every few days, at this rate, I can't imagine being more "active" than merely dropping by the forum every few months.

And the Wing Loader project... and Confederation with the Originator tool... damn, damn, damn, such great stuff. Way back in the early days of UE and Standoff, what I really, really dreamed of doing, was actually adding more content to WC1 and WC2, or to Privateer. It may sound weird, but to me, adding WC1/2 content to Prophecy was basically a crutch, the next best thing given the limited tools for modding those original games. I mean, in the end, working with Prophecy proved to be far more marvellous than we could have imagined, and we were able to achieve a lot more than otherwise... but still, I so wish I had the time now to use these tools to make some mods for the earlier games.

But heck, I'd be happy to have enough time to even just put together that bugfix patch for Standoff, promised a decade ago. Not to mention the UE upgrade I wanted to do. Ah, well.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I know I forgot to vote and also see who else was running but Originator was ROBBED. (In all seriousness, wonderful efforts all around; so happy the community is still so alive!)

 

[Pedro]

@Pedro, as you keep working away on your WC4 remaster, I remain green with envy that you have time to stick around and do stuff in the WC community. I mean, sure, as you might recall, WC4 was never my choice for a remaster, but I greatly admire what you've done! My somewhat-forced retirement continues, and while I still visit the CIC every few days, at this rate, I can't imagine being more "active" than merely dropping by the forum every few months.

Good to see you again.

I can assure you I don't have time. Now have three daughters, and I should really improve my Japanese, get some exercise. Milestone wise last year was really tough; hence why we only have 3 updates, I just didn't get much time, but got a load done over the Christmas break. I keep expecting another programmer to show up and help out with the work, but it never happens. I put in work when I can, which tends to be about 1/3rd of the year during lunch or when everyone has gone to bed.

It dawned on me the other day that even if we hit our release date of the 30th anniversary of WC4 - we'll have been in development slightly longer than the period of time from WC1 beginning development to WC4 releasing! So much less a demonstration of free time and more the little bird sharpening its beak on the diamond mountain.

The OpenGL patch was a chance to do graphics work when I was stuck in gameplay. When I moved to core tech I stopped, but now I think the WCIV remake is a chance to meet my old stated dream of working on something as great as WCIV. With a family my priorities changed, I like where I am; we're happy where we are and there's not a lot of AAA in the area. Even Osaka would be far enough as to massively reduce my family time. So whilst I'm proud of a lot of games I've worked on, I can't say any of them set the world on fire. Working on Wing Commander IV is a good way to work on something as good as Wing Commander IV

 

[Destro]

Congratulations everyone! It's an honor to be nominated and to stand along side so many other amazing projects. I am (of course) super excited for WC4 Remake and Confederation but Originator blew my mind when it came out late in the year. It's hard for me to believe that my little project could hang with the cool kids. Thanks to everyone and cheers to 2024!

 

[Quarto]

The OpenGL patch was a chance to do graphics work when I was stuck in gameplay. When I moved to core tech I stopped, but now I think the WCIV remake is a chance to meet my old stated dream of working on something as great as WCIV. With a family my priorities changed, I like where I am; we're happy where we are and there's not a lot of AAA in the area. Even Osaka would be far enough as to massively reduce my family time. So whilst I'm proud of a lot of games I've worked on, I can't say any of them set the world on fire. Working on Wing Commander IV is a good way to work on something as good as Wing Commander IV

Oh, I know what you mean there. Look at me, somewhere around thirty games under my belt, and hardly any of them worth even mentioning, even today it feels like Standoff is the biggest and best thing I'd ever done . And given that I'm currently sticking mainly to university, with only a little bit of part-time gamedev on the side, it's likely to stay that way. I was hoping working at a university would be a way to ensure greater stability, and plenty of time for private projects. And yeah, stability is true, I certainly don't need to worry about being fired at the end of a project. But time? Hah. When I started here in 2020, it was just about fine (other than some sort of pandemic, or something). But since then, with every year, it just gets busier with the teaching load. It's gotten to the point where I'm literally telling my higher-ups that if the present academic year repeats itself, then I'm basically going to be finished. The supreme irony is that I do actually love teaching...

But... there is one game of mine that might actually be worth mentioning in the context of your family! I don't know how old your daughters are, but you may want to check out Bee Simulator, which I worked on back in 2018. It's far from perfect, but I tested it on my own daughters, and they very much enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I have no Steam codes to give out - heck, I even had to buy a copy for myself (I loved working with that particular dev team, but man, our publisher was stingy). It was a breath of fresh air, though, working on a game where I had to write dialogues kids would enjoy - so much fun!