Fandom Lore: The Mythical 7th CD

Wing Commander IV shipped on an unprecedented six CD-ROMs... but there was a point in development where it seemed like it might take seven! To counter this possibility, the American CD case, a custom design, was made to include seven disc sleeves. As a result, shortly after the game was released the online community was full of players asking... am I missing a CD? On April 18, 1996, an alt.games.wing-commander user named Craig Lambert posted a reply to one of these questions with a tongue-in-cheek story about an incredible seventh disc that let you stay with the Confederation (joking about another frequent complaint about the game from online posters). We thought it would be good to archive the original post for posterity; it wouldn't do to let such a long-running joke slip into oblivion! (Though for future readers, we will note one more time that none of this was ever real; it all sprung from Mr. Lambert's fertile imagination.)

What happens, you ask, if I don't WANT to defect from Confed? The apocryphal answer is below, in reality as virtually true as can be imagined. The legendary "7th CD" carried out this path: perhaps someone somewhere lucky enough to have this rare disk can upload it to the net for your retrieval: I saw it once on talk.bermuda.triangle, but my connection went down after I'd gotten only 457 meg of the file.

Of course you must hunt down Eisen and the Intrepid. Having escaped you in Silenos, the Lexington follows the Intrepid through the jumppoint into Orestes. You must fight through Hawk and Panther, each of whom challenges you, the "Heart of the Tiger" over the comm, then as you approach the Intrepid Maniac switches sides again, helping you and Seether destroy the Intrepid as Eisen broadcasts desperate pleas for assistance. Back on the Lexington, Paulsen congratulates you with all his special charm, and remarks it looks like you'll soon have the chance to finish with an old foe. Seether, meanwhile, gives Maniac a thumping, coldly mocking the cringing double-turncoat for his cowardice. He tells Paulsen not to punish Maniac for his initial defection: "He'll be more useful out there as a target for the Border Worlds scum to waste their shots on" Afterwards a chastened, battered and bleeding Maniac tells you that as soon as he'd landed on the Intrepid with Eisen he realized he'd made a huge mistake. "The captain was dead, most of the crew was breathing vacuum, the ship was a total wreck. No way the Maniac wasn't gonna bail that scrap yard first chance!"

Your next mission brief is to fly against the Kilrathi base in Pasqual: this time you get to hear Melek bitterly denouncing you for your treachery and inconstancy as you toast him and his furry comrades inside their exploding base, which was defended by a mix of Kilrathi Dralthi and BW fighters. Admiral Tolwyn comes aboard the Lexington, bringing you reinforcements in the form of the new Dragon fighters, and he praises you for your destruction of Eisen and Melek and urges you to work closely with Seether, saying 'unimaginable' rewards are available for loyal service. Its a bit unclear if he means service to Confed, or to him personally. He cuts short your qualms about flying in unmarked fighters (the Dragons): clearly you have blown it once again with the prickly Admiral, who tells you to "wise up, Colonel, you only get so many chances to play for the winning team"

Next you fly in the Telamon system, defending the jumppoints from incoming BW forces as planet FT-957 is dusted with the Gen-Select weapon. From now on, all your missions will include an offer from BW forces for you to defect, doing so (after killing Seether & any other wingmen) will go to the losing endgame described below.

You land amidst a scene of chaos and carnage, burning and bodies and wrecked equipment. A harried woman identifying herself as Lt. Sosa greets you. "We could have used your help, Colonel...when it would have made a difference"

"The things I've seen..." you reply, "I have to stop those bastards! They don't care who they kill!"

"It's too late," Sosa replies, "We just sent out our surrender. There's no-one left to fight for."

There is a brief trial scene. You are shown nobly defending the values of freedom and the strength of the human spirit from the stand, vowing to "fight on until simple decency and the true honor of the warrior prevail." The final scene shows your corpse, entangled in barbed wire, dusty swirls of wind tugging at your hair as bored guards are heard discussing your fate, only their jackboots and the muzzles of their rifles visible. "Another worthless mutt trying to break out...saves us the trouble of feeding his useless mouth." "A flyer from the looks of those clothes." "Die in the sky, die in the dirt," the first guard replies, "the weak have to be taught their place sooner or later."

However, its still possible to win on this path. Tolwyn arrives with the Vesuvius, announcing that the main BW fleet has been run to ground, and you will lead the assault on Vice-Admiral Wilford's "pathetic" force of criminal insurgents. Its clear though that the Admiral favors Seether over you, and you understand that Seether's job is to see that you carry out Tolwyn's orders to the letter. First you must open a jumppoint, destroying 3 cap ships and some 24 fighters in 6 waves. The next mission sees you through into Circe for the climactic battle, destroying the assembled BW cruisers and carriers: you fly with a loadout including two flashpaks. Afterwards, Seether orders you to destroy two fleeing transports, one of which has Sosa pleading for mercy over the comm, the other transport has Pliers cursing and reviling you. "Heart of the Tiger," he sneers, "at least the damn Pussys bothered to eat what they killed" Maniac goes crazy and begins firing wildly at all around him, shouting incoherently about murderers, and Seether quickly flames his ship, then deliberately blasts Maniac's escape pod, laughing and telling you he'll do the same to you if you don't follow his orders. Its possible to fight Seether at this point, and even kill him, but endless waves of fighters launch from the Vesuvius until you die, or eject, in which case you get an abbreviated version of the losing scenes. Should you go ahead and destroy the refugee transports, however, you go to this path's winning ending.

A guard is reporting to you, "Commandant Blair, Re-education Camp 34 detainee Transport reporting as ordered, sir. 200 prisoners died in transit, 75 prisoners are too sick to work and require "special" treatment." "Acknowledged" you reply, signing off on a proffered form. You watch the two files of dejected, slumping prisoners in torn and filthy clothing slowly shuffle through the gates of your camp. You see some faces...is that Rollins? Could that woman with the hacking cough be Rachel? Fadeout.

Oh well. At least it beats blowing up planets-full of sentient beings.

Copyright 1996, Craig A. Lambert
All Rights reserved, revered and redundant

Hawk Seen Hawking New Mazda

WC4 Remaster Previews Enhanced Ground Effects

Wing Commander IV’s original terrain—there wasn’t much to work with. I won’t go into too much detail as wcnews has already covered it! Each “mountain” was just a single height value, and as you can see from the example image, sometimes lakes defied gravity, or terrain appeared under buildings. Modernizing this aspect of the game was a task.

The first step was to add tessellation support (scaling polygon density based on camera distance). Even without modifying the heightmap, this improved the geometry: instead of a sharp, pyramid-like peak, the use of linear texture sampling produced smoother, curved hills. Still, the results weren’t acceptable—too many equally sized smooth hills were conspicuous.

A Quick Guide to Planets

Ground missions! Is there any more thrilling expression in the English language? We don't think so. Unfortunately, they're a rare commodity: across Wing Commander III and IV there are a total of only nine ground missions... and they were cut out entirely from multiple console ports! We thought it would be fun to post a quick visual guide that walks through the six planets seen in these special missions.

Building on Strike Commander's terrain technology, Wing Commander III included four ground missions connected to the campaign to build the Temblor Bomb (and culminating in the game's firey finale at Kilrah). Unlike Strike Commander and Wing Commander IV, the WC3 planets were left untextured to improve performance... though they did have somewhat more detailed maps available in the game's nav screen (included below). The game has three distinct planet designs, although it's difficult to notice the differences in a single playthrough since you rarely have cause to compare them.

Alcor V & Hyperion - Alcor is the planet where you rescue Dr. Severin and Hyperion is the first test site for his bomb. Wing Commander III uses the same assets for both planets.

Freya II - The mission at Freya has you attack and destroy an impressive shield generator which is protecting a jump point needed for the final campaign.

Kilrah - At Kilrah, you end the game by flying your fighter through a lava-laden trench that's not at all like the kind of trench you find on a space station.

Wing Commander IV reintroduced textured surfaces for its planets but only had two different ones total: Tyr VII at the start and the optional Circe V in a later campaign. These were all removed from the PlayStation version. We've included the textures used for the surface below; there is also a third set found in the game's files that don't appear in the finished product.

Tyr VII - You first fly a photo recon mission on Tyr followed by alternate rescue missions depending on whether or not you captured all the shots needed.

Circe V - Circe V appears twice in the 'save civilians' series midway through the game. First you shut down a tank battle between mecenaries and Border Worlders and then you later have the option to land troops at a climate control complex (or, if you decide not to help Catscratch, no option at all).

"F" - These planet textures, labeled F, seem to be unused:

Lost Mech Discovered in Wing Commander III!

AD recently found something interesting while exploring Wing Commander III: a pair of unused, untextured models of mechs! They're labeled STMECH1 and STMECH2 and it's not at all clear what they were intended for. Could they have been additional targets for the ground battles? Or weapons loaders that could've appeared on human or Kilrathi capital ship interiors? We also checked Bioforge (1995) and Prowler (cancelled, 1996) and while the art style is understandably similar, they aren't the same mech designs from Origin's contemporary games.

The second Wing Commander novel, End Run, had already established that Confederation marines use 'walkers' during their planetary assaults, though this was almost certainly just a case of author William Forstchen referencing The Empire Strikes Back.

He pulled up to a hundred meters above the plateau and swept over it. Mongol and Chamberlain were lower down, weaving S-turns back and forth, waiting for targets to crop up. In the dust and confusion, he saw the grunts clambering out of their ships, racing through the wreckage, ground fighting vehicles pouring out the forward hatches, hovering up, and then skimming away. The heavy weapons landers touched down, disgorging their massive “walkers” which could traverse any terrain and earned as much armaments as a light corvette. There was a flurry of laser rifle fire, more secondary explosions, one of the landing craft, now serving as a medevac, already taking off and heading back out to space.

GOG Wing Commander IV DOS Fix

The good people at GOG include a download of the original DOS version of Wing Commander IV as a bonus feature when you purchase their digital release (which is based on the Windows 95 DVD release). That's great news for anyone who wants to play Wing Commander IV the same way they did back in February 1996... except that the copy on GOG is broken! Several of the MUSIC files are corrupt which results in an inevitable, game-breaking crash on loading a mission once you arrive at later CDs.

To correct the issue, we've put correct versions of the bad files online here. Simply use this archive to replace MUSIC1 through MUSIC4 in your /Wing Commander IV - DOS Version/CD1 folder and the game will work correctly going forward. If you've already experienced the crash be sure and first load a mission from CD1 in order to clear the corrupt MUSIC file from the game's cache.

Save Archives: Wing Commanders Prophecy and Secret Ops

Earlier this year we posted an archive of Wing Commander IV saved games for pilots who want to quickly access any mission as easy as possible (either for research or fun). Part two is finally here! We've gone through and created characters for Wing Commander Prophecy and Wing Commander Secret Ops with full flight histories and player-created saved games. Have fun exploring some of the missions you may never have gotten to play before!

• Wing Commander Prophecy Saves (140kb .ZIP)
• Wing Commander Secret Ops Saves (135kb .ZIP)

Last Chance for Discounted WC in GOG's BTS Sale

Wing Leader Adds Lumbari & Exquisite Cockpit Lighting

Okay, got the Wing Leader Hornet cockpit lit properly with all the damage and broken bits properly responding to the light angle.

Got the Wing Leader Dralthi cockpit lit and normal mapped! It's way more complex than the Hornet was, with the exterior stuff. I also set up the controls to work with the lighting as well, since they were previously ignored. Enjoy!

2 more Wing Leader cockpits set up for lighting! The Salthi Light fighter and the Strakha Stealth fighter! I had to modify the shader slightly to support the cloaking effect for the stealth fighter, dang, this is really coming together!

Okay, lighting on the Wing Leader Firekkan Valtar cockpit guns added! Subtle, but worth it, I think. :D

Box Flap Appreciation Post

The renaming; the original names are still used internally-

Skate cluster - Tri-Ray
Lamprey shield killer - Siren
Barracuda corvette - Skate
Triton transport - Leatherback
Hydra cruiser - Marlin
Leviathan carrier - Osprey
Kraken ship killer - Narwhal
Tiamat dreadnought - Tsunami

Originator Adds Extraction Features for Arena, WC4, Secret Ops and More

First release in quite a while; version 0.3.06 is mainly a bugfix release, but does add a couple of new things:

• Support for the "demo" version of Wing Commander Arena, which can be extracted from the Official Xbox Magazine Game Disc 76 (the content seems identical; the demo differences are all in how the executable is set up to run on the 360 without a full game license present).
• Support for Playstation's VAG audio format, used by Wing Commander 4 PSX.
• Fixed terrain heightmap export for Wing Commander 4.
• Some improvements to Shape parsing, fixing at least one regression with Wing Commander 3.
• Hooked up texture / image / image set loading for Wing Commander: Secret Ops.

Heavy Sabre Profiled in Impressive New Lore Video

Blender 4.2s EEVEE Next renderer is some powerful stuff, and this will be the first video to take advantage of it. The Downside? It's a much bigger performance hog then before.

With that being said, the next video: Wing Commander - F-57 Sabre, is now up.

Not your father's F-86 Sabre from the Korean War. This Sabre is much more of a beast.

Action Heating up Again in Gemini Sector RPG

Wing Commander Gemini Sector is still kicking. If fact, we are at the start of a new campaign. WC GS is a Discord Server Multi User Simulation with a custom built combat engine for engaging in text-based combat. Similar to a Tabletop game designed for Wing Commander. —Iceblade

Star Trek Logo Reimagined with Wing Commander Vibes

Many but not all recognised this as a homage to the Wing Commander (1990) logo. It's not a game I know much about, but I do appreciate the classic sci-fi typeface STOP, designed by Aldo Novarese in 1971.

Two Preview Sample Tracks Released to Kickstarter Album Backers

Greetings all! I just recently received the session files from the recording in Budapest and thought I'd "tinker around" with a couple of them. I've done a lot of mixing over the years but this time around I might have someone who actually does that for a living do that for the project. Actually, I'm having discussions with the recording and mixing engineer for a very iconic film score composer (will reveal later if it happens) about doing the mix for me!

In the mean time, I thought I would share two VERY rough mixes that I did from what we recorded, the opening from Wing Commander Prophecy as well as a mission piece from WC3. Please bear in mind that both will have major choir parts added next month so all the elements aren't there, but I thought especially the mission piece should be intriguing because the playback on that back in 1994 was, well, what it was for the time. BTW, THIS was the very first piece I composed for the entire series that got approved by Chris Roberts early in the production of WC3, and ushered in, at least for me, the Wing Commander sound. After this piece I RARELY had to do a version 2 of any gameplay or cinematic music.

The Prophecy intro music , IMHO, was barely audible in the original mix, so much that super fan Matt Hiltner, who was there in Budapest, never knew that the Kilrathi theme was in the intro. I put it in the score because the narration was about a Kilrathi prophecy so it seemed logical.

Anyway, please understand that these are NOT finished mixes. Once the choir is added and everything is mixed together it will sound fantastic.

Love to all,

George