Flat Universe Tournament Fast Approaching Update ID

The final countdown starts now for this weekend's big Wing Commander Flat Universe tournament. It happens at 16:00 UTC June 23-24, and interested players should register by Friday. There are some very cool multiplayer modes that will be deployed in the new version of the game and even a spectator mode. A few previously announced new ships will also be making their debut. Be sure to check it out!
Two days are left before we load our fighters with dangerous arsenals and start to hit each other with guns and missiles. What you already know is the date of the event (23rd/24th of June). What you don't, however, is the hour. We are really sorry for not being able to determine the exact time sooner, but we had to collect enough data from the Enlisted FlatPilots to make the best possible decision for every time zone out there. So let me enlighten you:

Red Flag 2678 starts at 16:00 UTC

Those of you who haven't had the chance or the appetite to pre-enlist to the event can still subscribe here until this Friday (22nd of June). If not registered, you are still welcome to come around with your friends and say hi on our discord channel, chat with other FlatPilots or play against your friends with the latest features that FlatUniverse will introduce to you in the upcoming version. Of course, you could always watch the Tournament matches as a spectator.

Furthermore, we are now in the position to announce some more of the upcoming features of the Tournament version of Flat Universe. For those who will participate on the event, brace yourselves for the following type of games:

  • 1 vs 1. Flying both pilots the same ship.
  • Faction 1 vs 1 (Kilrathi vs Confed). The available vs ship pairs will be announced by the FlatUniverse staff at the time of the match.
  • Team vs team. Flying both teams the same ship.
  • Faction team vs team (Kilrathi vs Confed). The available vs ship pairs will be announced by the FlatUniverse staff at the time of the match.
  • Crazy Challenges, like catch the fool with the Broadsword etc.
  • Spectator mode. As I mentioned before you will have the opportunity to watch every match you desire on the front row as a spectator.
Public chat will stop your loneliness. If you don't have anyone to play Flat Universe against, pass by and make some friends or foes. Daedalus station is coming back to life again with interactive animated menus, rooms and consoles, minefields, asteroid fields, and last but not least AI GUN Turrets.

We are very excited for this event and we are eager to burn to pieces some familiar faces out there this weekend.

Meet you inside our reticles,

the MaslasBros

Spanish Special Operations are Extra Special Update ID

After seeing the Spanish WC2 that Christian Klein recently acquired, the next natural question was whether DROSoft had also localized the Special Operations. The answer is yes, and it comes in an awesome double pack just like the Spanish Secret Missions! Both are in the same box with the game summaries translated side-by-side on the rear of the packaging. The contents within are fairly straightforward, but the combination of the two expansions makes this a very cool collector's item.

:)

Join The Terran Confederation Space Force! Update ID

FekLeyrTarg has released his mini Wing Commander fan film. It takes the form of a recruiting commercial that could be used during the Kilrathi War. There's a nice mix of assets here from a Privateer-style building to Sabre fighters to the hefty Rigakh class cruiser. The clip isn't long, but it's a great example of what kind of potential is out there. We encourage more people to create things like this!
Produced as part of a semester project, I proudly present: "Terran Confederation War Propaganda - A Wing Commander Fan Film" This short film was made to show some of the potential both for "Wing Commander"-based fan films as well as the classic meshes from the "Privateer 3D Archive".

WCSO Model Upgrade Pack Adds Comm Relay Station Update ID

DefianceIndustries has completed the first large scale base for the Secret Ops Model Upgrade Pack. This is a cool design, and the tiny little flight deck is a nice touch. In addition to making it much more detailed and gorgeous to look at, he's also significantly amped up the destroyability. There's potential to take out individual components for a future project, which is pretty neat. Enjoy the pictures!
Further updates! Got the first of the major stations imported: the Confed Relay. It plays a larger role than the other stations, especially in WCP where Blair lands on one only to get subsequently captured because Blair and Decker's marines apparently missed the 8-foot tall bug hanging out in the landing bay sipping a Mai Tai - or the obviously alien fighter which launches from the station from one of the two landing bays which are currently full of Tigershark and/or Hercules LC...oh well, it's best not to think too hard on it!

One of the other improvements to this mesh is that it now will actually be destroyed. The original simply replaced the destroyed components with...themselves! So really if you destroyed a relay in vanilla WCP or SO, it would basically just turn gray on the HUD and make exploding sounds (because the only hardpoints were in the mesh). I know, I know - it was never meant to be destroyed. But now it can be used in future projects (were someone so inclined) and it could be destroyed and actually look good.

There are two versions of it actually - I made an original version with a single destroyable mesh so as not to affect game balance, there is another version where the core, hangar, and individual antenna are separately destroyable - however the only way to totally destroy the relay on the second version is to destroy the core and the 4 antennae.

I also tested the docking pathing for WCP, the LC and Tshark land appropriately.

Happy Father's Day Update ID

Many countries celebrate Father's Day today, and we know a lot of Wing Commander fans have recently become dads out there. My little one just turned 16 months old, and I'm happy to that see she grabs a controller and starts pushing buttons whenever she gets a chance.


The CIC is more of a news site than a blog, but it's also a community hub more than anything, and it feels right to share this personal story with the community. This Father's Day is a tough one for me because my Uncle Jim passed away yesterday.


The two of us used to play NES and Super Nintendo games frequently in the '80s and '90s. The Mario games were big, plus Zelda obviously, puzzle games like Tetris and Doctor Mario and Wing Commander on the SNES, of course. We learned together how to put together PC hardware and how DOS worked. Whenever one of us messed up a sound card jumper setting or couldn't get the drivers right for a game to run, we would call each other and work it out. I very fondly remember how eager we were to install Windows 95 when it arrived on a giant stack of floppy disks. He was very enthusiastic about new technology and helped put me on a path towards many of the cool techie things I'm engrossed in today. Plus, he'd recommend everything from books he thought I'd like to what the best shaving gear was. After my grandfather passed away when I was little, he was more of a father figure than anyone but my mom.


He had quite a story. As an underage teenager, he enlisted in the navy and served in the Pacific during World War 2. While going to school at the University of Washington, he worked 100-hour weeks for the gas company bringing heat to Seattle during the cataclysmic winter storms of 1950. And prior to retirement, he was an executive at Boeing, where I'm now a manager myself. His tales about how part of the city was on AC current and part on DC current when he was growing up were crazy, and the magnitude of technological change he witnessed in his lifetime is hard to imagine. Yet he was always so excited about what was coming next. He'd say that he wished he could come back in a hundred years and see all the amazing stuff we have then. A couple years ago at about age 90 I helped him set up his first smartphone - I hope I'm on top of the latest gadgets in the year 2070. Going back to the mid '90s, he gave me the computer that I used to get established in the online Wing Commander community, which I used to make my first Wing Commander website and eventually code the first pages here at the CIC. Had he not passed me down that machine, I wouldn't have been able to play Prophecy and Secret Ops when they were new with all of you. Who's to say if I would have been able to be engaged enough to help found the CIC, report news daily for the past 20 years, and make all of the lifelong friendships that I have. Life could have been very different.


So for helping make me the person I am today, so that I could be here helping keep the Wing Commander community going strong and being friends with all of you, Happy Father's Day Uncle Jim. I'll miss you very much.

The Attack Begins... Soon Update ID

There's tons of great Wing Commander fan projects out there, but it's not every day that we get a teaser for a new one. FekLeyrTarg has had a hand in quite a few different endeavors over the years, and his latest will be a new short fan film. Projects like these have been proposed a number of times over the years, but we haven't seen very many come to fruition. They have a lot of potential to be pretty cool, and FekLeyr even made a graphic to announce his reveal this Monday, so we're pretty excited to see what's to come!
On June 18 2018, 8 PM Zulu, a new short Fan Film is going to be released.

Wing Commander's Better than Super Mario Brothers Update ID

Who knew IMDB made little video shorts? They've just posted a clip to celebrate the recent 25th birthday of the Super Mario Brothers movie. It talks a bit about why the film was the way it was and how it was critically panned. Wing Commander gets a funny cameo as the film that's actually ranked one better than Mario Brothers in the all time IMDB ranking of video game-based adaptations. Check it out here.


May 28, 2018, marks the 25th anniversary of 'Super Mario Bros.' The very first live-action adaptation of a video game, ever, was based on the hugely successful series that helped pull the gaming industry out of the 1983 crash. But when it came to its big screen potential, only one man had the vision, producer Roland Joffé.

Games on Film Covers Wing Commander Update ID

The Games on Film podcast has recorded an episode that's all about Wing Commander. They spend more than 80 minutes talking about the franchise's background and the environment that existed in 1999. Then the commentators spend quite a bit of time talking through the highs and lows of the film itself. One thing that sets this review/discussion apart from the cliche comments you frequently see is that they thought the space action was on the boring side but were actually intrigued by the Pilgrim angle. Since their focus is all about video games that have crossed over into theaters, they make a good point that FMV-centric series seem to have an inherently difficult time gaining acceptance since it's so easy to break with cinematic styles that their fans are used to. You can check out the full episode here.
Harry and Rory journey into the deep reaches of space - and the even deeper reaches of the DVD bargain bin - for the most anticipated science-fiction film of 1999 (at least for the members of the Freddie Prinze Jr. fan club): Wing Commander. We compare the cast of the movie adaptation with the stars of its FMV-featuring source material, while talking beanie hats, mini disc technology, and alien space cats. We also discover Harry's number one fear - and it's not being forced to sit through Wing Commander again! This podcast contains SPOILERS for Wing Commander (1999).

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