Annual CIC Contest Kicks Off (December 16, 2007)

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
There's just two weeks left in the year, so it's time again to conduct our annual Web Site and Fan Project of the Year Awards. Reading through the list of nominees really makes you realize how amazing 2007 was. It's easy to point to all the official franchise activity over the past year, but the fan activity has been just as impressive. Just look at all the great undertakings this time around. These weren't all the projects and sites that did something in 2007, but this is a good sampling of some of the most active and useful. All others have 2008 to aspire to! The CIC has set up a special voting page to conduct the vote. Each Wing Commander fan can select one option for Web Site of the Year and one for Fan Project of the Year. Good luck to all the nominees!

  • Fan Project of the Year Nominees
  • Das Erwachen grew in 2007 with the completion of its second fan novel. In addition to coming up with this exciting story, the team behind it has conducted parties to read selected passages and has had success with printing collectable copies of the books.
  • Flight Commander was upgraded to version 1.5 in 2007. New features continue to be added to this flexible Wing Commander modding engine, so it's more powerful than ever. The project has been so successful that it's spawned its own annual contest to recognize some of the best FC mods in work.
  • Privateer Ascii Sector is an innovative project that takes all the excitement of Privateer and translates it into two-dimensional ascii characters. The game capitalizes on its unique environment to add new features to the Privateer mix and quickly went from announcement to playable game in 2007.
  • Privateer Gemini Gold works hard to recreate the original Privateer experience as authentically as possible. A new version was released this year that adds upgraded ship models, graphical tweaks and many bug fixes.
  • Queeg's Wing IV Movie quickly went from idea to three-hour production in early 2007, thanks to Queeg's experience making the Wing Commander III version in 2006. Downloads of the film generated over a terabyte of traffic in just the first week!
  • Standoff is one of the most popular and long-running projects. It's a mod to 1998's Wing Commander Secret Ops and continues to impress fans with its attention to classic detail and continued expansion of the Vision Engine. Episode 4 was released this year.
  • WC4 Homeworld 2 Mod's graphics are top notch and AI is getting better. This project was a surprise hit in 2006 and won last year's award. The mod received continued tweaks and upgrades throughout 2007.
  • WC Saga's Prologue was released of New Year's Eve 2006 to kick off a year of activity. They have continued to release test material for their upcoming full game and have fostered the creation of fan-made missions as well.
  • Wing Commander TacOps is an exciting tabletop/board game ruleset that debuted in 2007. As the year's gone by, additional markers and aids have been made to help fans play on their own. The rules continue to be refined and Wingnuts are currently testing out ways to play the game online as well.



  • Web Site of the Year Nominees
  • gulikoza's page is the home of the dxmci patch for the Wing Commander 4 DVD version. Not content to sit back after giving fans the ability to play WC4 DVD without its original hardware decoder board, gulikoza continues to tweak the patch and provide additional help to fans who might encounter unique problems. He's also experimenting with DOSBox tweaks.
  • HCl's Wing Commander Editing Site is the home to some of the most exotic and amazing patches, tweaks and tools for Wing Commander games. After ten years of unbelievable breakthroughs, HCl continues to dig deeper into his code and create new advancements.
  • Jetlag's WC CCG Site gives many fans a look at part of the series they might have missed. Even those lucky enough to pick up a few boxes of cards on eBay have a ways to go before they can complete their set. Jetlag's easy-to-navigate site lets everyone look up the stats or artwork that they need, and it even provides high resolution scans of each card.
  • Pericles' Paper Inside is the home on the web for an expert 3D paper artist. His physical sci-fi ship models are very impressive. Although he also builds ships for other franchises, most of his work revolves around Wing Commander.
  • WC Saga's website is frequently updated with news, sound samples, polls and concept art relating to the WC Saga game. It's also the main download portal for the Saga Prologue and test missions that have been released.
  • Wedge's Wing Commander is a huge reference site organized by Wing Commander game. It has a ton of original content and also links to other resources on the web. The site received a big overhaul in 2007 and moved to a new domain.

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Original update published on December 16, 2007
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Just wondering... do we get any sort of acknowledgement from voting? I see no change in the page after clicking "Vote" and I don't want to keep trying too many times lest I be dismissed as a vote spammer. Are cookies necessary?
 
Once you vote, it changes to "Thank you for voting for Web Site of the Year" and you can no longer select an option. Cookies are part of the process, so they are probably necessary. I'm not sure if it's recording your vote or not, but additional anti-cheating stuff is keeping you from recording more than one vote regardless of cookies.
 
What an incredibly rich year for fan projects - I really can't decide who should win... and you don't even realize until it's all listed together.
 
Cookies are required for visual confirmation. Any additional votes will have been discarded even with cookies disabled.
 
Strange, I voted for the site of year and it didn't change...then I voted for the fan project and it worked. I went back and voted for the fan site to try again and it worked...strange indeed.
 
Do I have to be logged in for my vote to count? I just voted and it said "thank you for voting" but I noticed that I was not logged in.
 
Heey...I'm nominated :D
I have decided some time ago that due to serious lack of time to maintain dxmci patch, I'm gonna release the sources under GNU GPL. This way, somebody else can pick it up if changes are required. I just need to find the time to modify the sources and add license info...
 
I also encountered (technical) problems with the vote.... :(
But I think it worked now.

And I agree with you, LOAF: It was a great year for the community. It is really a tough decision because so many people in the community would deserve to get a prize for what they do for us in their free time.
 
I'm guessing that it was an issue with the browser cache and your vote was recorded the first time. That should be fixed now.
 
Wow - TacOps got nominated, too? I'm honored!
Although one vote is hardly enough to do justice to all the effort people were pouring into their projects this year. I myself can't decide between at least three projects which definitely deserve the recognition... Well, I guess there's only one real winner in 2007 anyway: the whole CIC community! :)
 
Wow - TacOps got nominated, too? I'm honored!
Although one vote is hardly enough to do justice to all the effort people were pouring into their projects this year. I myself can't decide between at least three projects which definitely deserve the recognition... Well, I guess there's only one real winner in 2007 anyway: the whole CIC community! :)

It wouldn't be out of place to vote for yourself. I haven't played your game, but there was a time where I was working on a hex map roll playing space game, but couldn't come up with one that was fun. I've followed yours casually and you've certainly made it much farther than I did, so don't count yourself out!
 
Wow - TacOps got nominated, too? I'm honored!
Although one vote is hardly enough to do justice to all the effort people were pouring into their projects this year. I myself can't decide between at least three projects which definitely deserve the recognition... Well, I guess there's only one real winner in 2007 anyway: the whole CIC community! :)

It wouldn't be out of place to vote for yourself.

The way the email was worded, the person actually phrased it to say he was nominating IronDuke because of TacOps. We just went with TacOps though. :)
 
The way the email was worded, the person actually phrased it to say he was nominating IronDuke because of TacOps. We just went with TacOps though. :)
:p Either way, I would never vote for myself (or one of my projects), that's for sure. Which reminds me, I still have to place my vote...! ;)
 
I have decided some time ago that due to serious lack of time to maintain dxmci patch, I'm gonna release the sources under GNU GPL. This way, somebody else can pick it up if changes are required. I just need to find the time to modify the sources and add license info...

This is a sadly-too-rare example of the open source system working exactly right! Thank you very much.
 
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