Kickstarter campaign has launched!
The original disk version of System Shock included a number of mini-games you could collect during the game's cyberspace mode and then play whenever you had a quiet moment. These were small, simple games that loaded in the player's left VDU - versions of things like Pong and Tic-Tac-Toe. For the subsequent CD version of System Shock the designers went all out and included a major homage to Wing Commander: Wing 0, a tiny Wing Commander shooter.Wing 0 features a 13-mission campaign complete with traditional Wing Commander plot elements: wingmen, speech, traitors, nav points, talking heads, familiar fighters, autopilot flybys, lasers, dogfights and so on... all done in a 148x139 corner screen!
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"...for the CD game I outdid myself with a relatively complete Wing Commander minigame, Wing 0--written just before Wing 3 was released, it's both an homage and a parody, featuring, for example, one pacifistic wingman who refuses to fight (and strangely never gets attacked either, because he's actually a traitor!!!), a mission where you get something like 8 wingmen, and a final 'aww, what the heck, let's send you out by yourself to defeat their entire armada' mission."
Hosts Ben Lesnick & Jared Huckaby (with Special Guests including creator CHRIS ROBERTS) as they play Wing Commander from beginning to end for it's 25th Anniversary, and learn about the history of the game in the process!
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00:00:00 - Pre-Show
00:17:10 - Livestream Begins, Introduction and History
00:59:00 - Gameplay
01:13:00 - Interview with Denis Loubet, Artist for Wing Commander
01:38:30 - Gameplay
02:10:35 - Interview with Joe Garrity, Creator of the Origin Museum
02:31:25 - Gameplay
03:10:23 - Book, Manual, and Strategy Guide Retrospective
03:20:00 - Interview with Chris Reid of WCNews.com
03:40:00 - Chris Roberts, Creator of Wing Commander Arrives
04:00:15 - Chris Roberts Plays the Game for the First Time in 25 Years
04:13:00 - Gameplay
04:31:00 - Lunch Break
04:47:30 - Gameplay
06:21:30 - History of Ports to Other Systems
06:47:20 - Gameplay Through to the Finish
I celebrated....by giving it all away! I feel a strange sense of Melancholy, I am pleased others get the chance to play it and see it, but the gap in the shelf reminds me of what I've done.
The classic F-36 Hornet light fighter from Wing Commander appears in Sky Rogue. For best results, put any gun type weapons in the right weapon slot, and use the WC1 Skin."Blow things up over land, sea, and air, on an infinite number of procedurally-generated islands. Choose one of a diverse set of aeros and kit it out with a dizzying array of weaponry."
Today Wing Commander fans are celebrating the series' 25th birthday! The original game shipped to stores September 26, 1990 after eighteen months of development, and the rest is history... It's hard to find words to convey the magnitude of this event as a milestone to the fans. New WC products have only been released in about half of the years that have passed over the last quarter century, but their significance to the players can be seen in the daily devotion of Wingnuts everywhere. We continue to be amazed by the drive to both preserve artifacts related to the franchise and blaze new trails in innovative fan projects. So take a moment to reflect on this anniversary, and then we'll be right back at it with you tomorrow!
Wing Commander turns 25 years old tomorrow (!!!), and Episode 62 of Around the Verse is celebrating in style! Sandi Gardiner and Ben Lesnick's news desk is decorated with WC1 memorabilia, and they conduct an extensive interview with Chris Roberts about his thoughts on how the series came to be: what the early days at Origin were like, how the first missions were drafted and what his tips to save the Ralari are! Jump straight to 22:00 for the Q&A.
LOAF will also be driving a huge live stream event all day tomorrow. He'll be playing the original Wing Commander, sharing trivia and interacting with a variety of special guests. The fun starts at noon on the US West Coast (3 pm Eastern, 11 pm BST UK) on Twitch here. Drop by #Wingnut to chat with fellow Wingnuts along the way.
There’s a star system named after me in the Wing Commander universe. It’s the result of an overworked designer at Origin needing to fill a giant map with hundreds of names quickly, but it may still be the single thing in my life that I’m most proud of. But where there were hundreds of systems to fill in, there were only a handful of encompassing quadrants. They reserved the names for real legends: there’s a Roberts Quadrant, of course, and then each of the executive producers got one… Mark Day, Rod Nakamoto, David Downing, Adam Foshko.
And then a select few Maverick team members had the honor. Ghorah Khar, the treasonous Kilrathi planet from Wing Commander II, is located in the Isaac Quadrant, named after the genius behind the RealSpace engine. The Ladyman Quadrant, named after Origin’s master of manuals, encompasses the Terran Confederation’s leeward expansion. Half the battles of the original Vega Campaign took place in the Douglas Quadrant, after the man who redefined the look of the series’ ships in Wing Commander III. And my star, the Lesnick System? I’m proud to say it’s located squarely in the middle of the Shelus Quadrant.
Pete Shelus started his career at Origin working on Tactical Operations, the Strike Commander mission disk and quickly proved his mettle. His credits on Wing Commander III are confirmation of the whizbang engineer he’d quickly proved himself to be: “Polygonal Collisions,” and “Math & Algorithms Consultant.” He went on to help out with Wing Commander IV and to serve as lead programmer on the 3DO port of Wing Commander III, still to my mind the single greatest after-the-fact PC-to-console conversion ever developed. He worked on the plan for Chris Roberts’ aborted version of Privateer 2 and when Chris to form Digital Anvil he became the Maverick Team’s lead programmer on the so-technically-ambitious Wing Commander Prophecy. After all that, he went on to keep creating worlds with Warren Spector’s teams at Ion Storm and Junction Point.
But that’s all on MobyGames. I’ll tell you right here that Pete was someone special. One of my happiest memories was visiting Origin back in 1998, shortly after the Secret Ops release. Pete was one of a handful of Maverick Team members present that day, and he treated a scraggly teenage fanboy who was almost too nervous to speak like he was just as important as any journalist or executive producer. That meant so much to me at the time, and I try and carry it with me to everything I do today. By all accounts, that was the universal reaction to him. Check out his February, 1996 ‘Employee of the Month’ submission from Origin’s internal newsletter:
We stayed in touch, over the years, and he was always kind enough to answer some esoteric Wing Commander technical question or clear up some other bit of trivia from the old days. Long after anyone’s involvement with the franchise was a distant memory, he was still so gracious as to make it seem like you were making his day by writing to him to ask about this-or-that.
Several years back, after another one of these all-too-common tragedies, I put out a call for memories of the great 3D artist Paul Steed. Pete was among the first to reply with memories of his friend, and I sent him a note with my condolences and catching up. He wrote me back the following, which today brings me to tears:
Thank you and thanks to your team for keeping Wing Commander alive. I still remember the day I met Chris Roberts at some promotional event at some computer game store where he told me I should apply for a job at Origin. I did, and he hired me. How lucky can a guy be? Who gets to work on their favorite computer game franchise? Almost nobody. But I did.Pete, you were a great engineer and a better man. I’m glad to know that you appreciated those days at Origin, that you valued the experience that made so many of us happy and that you had pride in the incredible things you did and made. It’s always cold comfort, but the games and the stories your expertise made possible will live on past any of us. And you will be missed.I'm forever grateful for my good fortune, the friends I made on the way (like Paul Steed), and people like you who support the game that started my career. Thank you.
If you have a memory to share or would like to include your condolences on WCNews, please e-mail news@wcnews.com.
Here's another test build. This one implements the stretch and extra buffer copy. There are some known issues:Thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming! I may not be able to quickly jump on these issues, but I definitely want them documented here so that I can refer to them later.
- The window resizing experience (dragging the window border in windowed mode) looks wonky, but doesn't break anything.
- Multi-monitor support may be broken under certain specific scenarios. I'm not at home right now, so I don't have a second display to test with.
Remora, the argueably most useless fighter. Sliiiightly over 1k triangles. The mesh may require additional tweaks, but in very general I'm happy with the overall shape.
What else needs to be done? Really, mission bugfixing and the fiction are the main thing. After all, this isn't a new project, it's just fixing up an existing one. The other small task I have is to throw some additional ships into the object viewer - in the couple of years after UE, we developed two more fighters that were supposed to appear in UE2, to show how the Border Worlds are gradually transitioning from a messy collection of mainly ex-Confed junk to their own new ships, technologically modern but seriously underperforming compared to Confed stuff (think Sweden's SAAB jets versus the US Air Force). Obviously, I have no intention of messing with the game deeply enough to actually have these ships even in the simulator, but the object viewer is a nice place for them, and if anybody else wants to do more with them afterwards - hey, they're there. This is not a big job, or even a small job, it's a no-job... just as soon as I find the relevant files! But that last bit... not so easy.
The Secret Ops pilot pack we reported on earlier had one minor oversight: it didn't account for Prophecy's German subtitle files. Lt. Overload has put together an updated version of the pack that can be downloaded here (56 megs). Simply unzip it into your Secret Ops installation folder and you're good to go. If you play Secret Ops in English and you've already installed the original patch, there is no need to download this new release.
Being on a covert mission, the Cerberus is a small carrier with a limited complement of fighter pilots. This patch adds back in all the pilots from the Midway, and even a few Kilrathi.
Many pilots were cut from Secret Ops, and I created something that re-adds them alongside the characters in the game. This new pack adds back every single pilot from Prophecy such as many Midway redshirts, some aliens, and the Kilrathi. One thing I also added was WCP versions of Cerberus' pilots, without overwriting their original files. That means you can have old Maestro and new Maestro side by side at the same time, for example.
This is a great modders' resource, because Secret Ops had a very limited range of voices you could use, and this pack blows that wide open. Want to bring back Dallas? Now you can. Want to put Hawk side by side with some cats? Now you can. Want to pretend Blair is still around? Now you can.
Scientists in Japan have set the record for the most powerful laser ever fired, producing a 2 petawatt pulse - that’s 2 quadrillion watts - using a device known as the Laser for Fast Ignition Experiment (LFEX). While they could only sustain it for a mere one-trillionth of a second, the team claims it had a concentrated energy equivalent of 1,000 times the world's electricity consumption.
Located at Osaka University, the LFEX laser projector is about 100 metres long, and combines four carefully positioned glass 'lamps' to amplify a laser beam over and over as it travels along the length of the device. This set-up allowed the team to produce an incredibly concentrated amount of power while consuming only a couple hundred joules of energy, which is about as much power your microwave uses in 2 seconds.
The cockpit of the Hornet is not airtight; there are holes in the side walls. Bare with me, I will try to explain using a series of images.The first row of images are the familiar cockpit views. The second row are the masks, which indicate the "transparent" areas of the cockpit views; I highlighted a series of stray pixels. These pixels line-up with what could be considered controls in the side wall of the cockpit.
You can fairly easily see the effect of this in game play. Just line-up the Tiger’s Claw or the stellar background, move the ship slightly and you will see these little dots change colors to reflect the background. You can also see these pixels change when taking enemy fire.
Wing Blender is an import/export script for Blender 2.65+ that allows you to export a VISION engine (Wing Commander: Prophecy, Wing Commander: Secret Ops) IFF 3D model, or import a VISION engine IFF 3D model into Blender.This means you'll be able to do most of your work in Blender, and then simply export it to the game without having to pass the model through multiple conversion programs (3D Exploration, peoview, ModelC, etc.).
This project is the successor to OBJ2WCP, a crappy old OBJ converter written noobishly in Java.
On today's Side Quests I nerd out hardcore and gush over Wing Commander: Flat Universe, an awesome fan-made creation coming along nicely.
Hi all! Been a little more than two years since I had an update. The CIC has been kind enough to host my files so I went about updating all the links and adding a few extra things to the site. I also released a new big project I had been working on:Many pilots were cut from Secret Ops, and I created something that re-adds them alongside the characters in the game. This new pack adds back every single pilot from Prophecy such as many Midway redshirts, some aliens, and the Kilrathi. One thing I also added was WCP versions of Cerberus' pilots, without overwriting their original files. That means you can have old Maestro and new Maestro side by side at the same time, for example.
This is a great modders' resource, because Secret Ops had a very limited range of voices you could use, and this pack blows that wide open. Want to bring back Dallas? Now you can. Want to put Hawk side by side with some cats? Now you can. Want to pretend Blair is still around? Now you can.
Most of the alien comms will have alternate "death cries" when they die. It is now randomized between 2-3 death comms instead of just one. Same goes for several generic Kilrathi pilots (not the aces). Thanks to Quarto for helping me figure that one out. Also included is a list of the redshirts, which ones are duplicates, and which are completely unique. So you don't accidentally make a wing of the same voice actor. Obviously, do not use the people labelled "DoNotUse". They do not work. They were not working in Prophecy, so they also do not work here.
If you guys have any issues with the patch, let me know. Currently they don't really do anything to a vanilla version of the game, but I might release some missions to show the new possibilities. :)
It's playable! But that's about all I can guarantee for this release. So far, I haven't done anything beyond making the game playable (already a minor miracle; I have no idea how these games ever worked before); this is a very early alpha. I still have a ton of work to do to get this up to my usual standards. In fact, I haven't even played all the way through the first mission yet! So far, I've observed some issues with input and sound, where some lines of dialogue in the intro are being skipped as if you'd hit a key. The cutscene frame rate also seems higher than it should be, but maybe I'm just remembering it wrong.Things I've completed: The game starts and doesn't crash when you look at it funny! Hooray!
Things I haven't completed: Anything else. Really.
I'll try to take some time to fix major issues that prevent people from playing the game (provided they're reasonably simple to tackle), but I can't handle feature requests just yet. That said, feel free to post any requests or issues you come across so that I can refer back to them later.
Happy flying!
The first episode of a new diary series where I try to learn 3D modelling and build a spaceship. This introduction outlines the background and intentions behind the project and talks a little about the ship I'm going to attempt to build. Watch me try to learn to do 3D in Blender and build a Wing Commander freighter.
I mentioned that these are first passes, why is that? Well... it's because they don't match up exactly with each other. It's too late for me to go into all details but as an example. The widest part of the front boom where the cockpit is, it is widest on the front view, narrowest on the top view, and just slightly narrower in the bottom view.So what does this mean? Well, it means I have to go back, pair up the line art pieces with each other and decide which part of which version I want to take as the 'correct' version. While the web version of the image above sizes out to be about 4" wide, I want to build a 12" model from these designs. So if I scale everything up by a factor of 3, and I have one part from the bottom that is 1mm wider, then the same part from the top view, but the rear version is 1mm to the left, I'll wind up with a part that started out as a rectangular cube but when built comes out as a lop-sided rhombus. So guess what I get to do over the next few days....
I'll warn everyone now, this is going to take a while to complete. It will also be my first totally scratch built and self-designed model. The real challenge... I have no actual 3D design experience or systems. So I'm doing this all as I figure it out. Who wants to go on an adventure?
This kind of started off as a hospital ship, (but it's) taken on a life of its own as a large Marine Transport. Lots of big hinged cargo doors and space for about 12 Marine Assault Craft or about twice that many shuttles. Scales out to about 297 meters.
Actually, I'm kind of liking the hospital ship look, just took a little red, is all.
The launch video for Transverse was done using Unreal 4, which is the first time that I had to work with PBR lighting. The short amount of time that we had to finish the video didn't allow for an in-depth R&D with the engine and the new lighting method. Nonetheless, we were able to work as a team to produce and ship a pretty good looking end-product, in my opinion. Not to mention the opportunity to work on something different than what I normally do as an environment artist, which in this case, making cool-looking spaceships.
Dear Wingnuts, it's been long time since we last gave you an update of our progress. The CIC birthday came just in time to give you a good taste of our development so far. But let me tell you in further detail what this version is all about.1. Graphics: As you might already know the whole graphics part of our game engine has been upgraded, plus the game performance is more balanced than ever.
2. Barracks - Load/Save: In the previous release the player could access only the hangar deck, the control room and the officers lounge. In this release the barracks is also ONLINE. The game starts from there (just like in WC1) and you can register and select your pilot from there.
3. Additional Cutscenes - Animated Characters: The hangar deck and control room of Daedalus is no more an empty space. There are animated characters around. New takeoff and landing cutscenes have also been added.
4. Features: Now I am getting to the more interesting part! 14 new unique systems have been created and added to the gameplay. The Nav Map, Nav System and Autopilot are fully functional. The player is no longer lost in space with the best addition of all: Jump Drive. Now you can take the transport for a free flight and explore the world of Flat Universe, jumping from system to system just like in Privateer. Of course there is no friendly traffic in the systems nor pirates to fight with but still the player can enjoy the graphics and have an extended taste of the gameplay. Additionally, 8 new training missions have been added with a performance report in the end of every mission. Last but not least there is an in-flight screenshot function. Now, you can grab the moment of your flight experience by hitting F12 and the screenshot will be saved into your Flat Universe home folder.
5. Bugs: We could say with confidence that in this release there has been an extensive effort in debugging and it is confidently one of our most stable distributions so far. However, there was one drawback to one of the features that we included on our previous release. That is, the automatic patching system. From now and on we will continue our distribution with the old favorite: download the whole package. We are very sorry for the inconvenience but it seems that this feature will have to wait for the time being.
Feel free to tell us what is on your mind and remember that we are counting on your feedback. It is for you, the community, that this project is created for and you will have to enjoy it along with us. Have fun!
the MaslasBros
Hey guys! Here's the long awaited recording of our WC movie livestream! Watch along with us as Ben comments and trivias us through Chris Roberts' first feature film!
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