News Collection: On This Day in WC News

2020.066 (March 6, 2020)

Moongate Surveys in Your Mailbox

Surveys have been released for Through the Moongate, from Wing Commander and Ultima VII to Portalarium. This means that people who pledged for the book on Kickstarter can now go in and confirm their addresses for shipping. There are two big points associated with this, however. First, the team has made it super easy to add supplemental items.

2019.065 (March 6, 2019)

All Cats are Gray in Space

In anticipation of all the Hellcat love planned for tomorrow's episode of All Wings Considered, Klavs has cooked up renders of both the Grumman and Douglas Aerospace versions. They're a couple of beauties! For all the other big fans of these craft, tune in Thursday for a full rundown on these trusty birds - and much more!How timely, my very favourite airplane!

2018.065 (March 6, 2018)

SNES Speedruns Set New WC Record

Speedruns are another element of modern video gaming that haven't yet taken hold in the world of Wing Commander. CirclMastr is working to change this with some quick runs of WC on the Super Nintendo. This is an extremely competitive area where challengers use precise measurement tools and work aggressively to shave off every fraction of a second they can get. Since the goal is ultimate speed regardless of method, anything goes as long as it's not cheating or external manipulation of the game.

2017.065 (March 6, 2017)

Spring has Spring for GOG

The good people at GOGhave kicked off their annual Spring Sale, which discounts over 500 games and collections up to 90% off. All eight Wing Commander packages are 75% off, with no need to stack multiple games for the discount... making this a great time to fill in the holes in your collection, or to share your favorite Wing Commander game with a friend. The sale runs through Sunday, March 12 and you can find each of the individual games below.

2016.066 (March 6, 2016)

Origin Games That Weren't: Silverheart

In 1995, while he was finishing Wing Commander IV, Chris Roberts had another live-action video game in pre-production at Origin. Silverheart was to be a third person action-adventure game in a post-apocalyptic/medieval setting. It never materialized, but a tie-in novel outlined by English multiverse author Michael Moorcock was published in 2005. Now, director of photography Layton Blaylock is offering us a glimpse of what might have been with the test footage below.

2015.065 (March 6, 2015)

WC Workshop Offline, But Not Forgotten

delMar popped in this week to give a status update on the WC Workshop site. He suspended development last year due to personal issues, but he would appreciate feedback on what direction the project should go if it were started up again. During the workshop's brief time in operation, delMar managed to come up with a neat method of customizing the talking head portions of WC1. However, overall structural limitations made further WC1 modding a tough prospect.

2014.065 (March 6, 2014)

AD's Almost Lost But Not Forgotten Chris Roberts Interview

Here's a little something I've had on the back-burner for a while now. After Outlander came out LOAF got me in touch with Chris Roberts and I sent him a number of questions about the Wing Commander movie. I had a pile of follow up questions that hopefully Chris will be kind enough to address someday, but, alas Chris got sidetracked (presumably with Star Citizen) and we never did finish the interview. Some of the details have since been released in other interviews and statements from Chris, and some details like what formats the movie has been released on are outdated, however we figured it was about time to release what we had to you all:LOAF - As promised, I'm putting the two of you in touch to talk about theWing Commander movie.

2013.065 (March 6, 2013)

That's a Sprite for Sore Eyes

Bearcat and FekLeyrTarg reminded us recently about a cool ancient project that Jetlag undertook to screenshot all the various angles that were rendered for WC1&2 ships. This feat was accomplished with HCl's Ship Viewer program. We've shown off the WC1 lineup before, but the WC2 slate never made it into the news. Both are available below!

2012.066 (March 6, 2012)

Amiga WC Computer Does What It Does Best

LOAF's Amiga Wing Commander Computer has made it back to the States, and it has a new name! The system has been dubbed 'Lazarus' after the ship from Action Stations that sufferred immense damage and then was restored. Most importantly, the sound has been fixed, which allows anyone in the general vicinity of LOAF's desk to hear some of the best Wing Commander audio around. Up next is an attempt to transfer the Amiga demo to the machine via null modem cable.

Watch the Amiga Demo at Pix's

What's so cool about the Amiga WC1 Demo? Like the DOS WC1 Demo, it's not actually a playable package - the program simply uses source files to show off various elements of the game. It's also based on a prerelease version of the game and sports some unique differences because of it. Check out a video of the demo in motion at Pix's Origin Adventures blog here.

2011.065 (March 6, 2011)

Origin's Prima Guides Pointed Out

LOAF has taken Prima's strategy guide cover Christmas card and circled each of the Origin entries in yellow highlight. All of the Wing Commander ones are listed below. There's also many Ultima titles, a bunch of Janes guides and even Crusader and Strike Commander in there.Row 1, #12 - Wing Commander I & II: Ultimate Strategy Guide Row 4, #19 - Origin's Official Guide to Wing Commander Prophecy Row 8, #12 - Wing Commander III: The Ultimate Strategy Guide Row 13, #15 - Wing Commander IV: Unauthorized Secrets & Solutions Row 16, #17 - Origin's Official Guide to Privateer 2: The Darkening It includes a fold-out poster showing the covers of the hundreds of game guides they've published over the last twenty years...

Space Sim First Look: Eterium

Regular CIC visitor Andrew Luby is hard at work on the XNA space sim Eterium, an independent game being developed for the XBox and Windows. The game is about eighteen months along and seems to be shaping up pretty well. In addition to the screenshots below, several videos have been posted that show off different gameplay aspects. Wingnuts should be able to see several design elements inspired by Wing Commander right away.

2010.065 (March 6, 2010)

Drop Bomber Ballots Here

The new poll asks what your favorite bomber is. There's plenty of fighters that can take out a massive warship and many ways to launch a torpedo, but what's the best ship to do it in? You have quite a few to choose from!The last poll inquired about landing methods.

2009.065 (March 6, 2009)

Saga's Military Green

WC Saga's Tolwyn recently updated the official website with a status report and some screenshots of their space backgrounds. It sounds like there's a lot going on. The (playable) prologue chapter is already available for Windows, Mac and Linux.We mentioned in a previous update that all the missions for Episodes 1-6 are gameplay complete.

Making the Game: Mission A4

This is the final cut 'A series' mission; it's worth noting that these were removed from the game concept very early on - there's no stray code floating around anywhere. Never the less, it would be interesting to see what some of the capable fan projects might be able to make out of the specifications put forth in these documents.These updates are thanks to John "Captain Johnny" Guentzel, who provided several CD image archives of material used by the Wing Commander Prophecy development team!

2008.066 (March 6, 2008)

Free Trader Pressed Into Service

Howard Day's hung up the green paint brush for the time being and slammed out an amazing Free Trader transport. The first three shots represent the preliminary stage with firm model configuration and temporary textures. Howard's already done with this ship, and the last three images show off his final design. You can check out a few more pictures and provide feedback at Crius.

K'rakh Drish'kai Rai H'ra!

It's Howard Day Day here today. For fans who liked his previous Kilrathi Audio Test, here's two (5.4 meg wav) more (4.3 meg wav).

2007.065 (March 6, 2007)

What's Up With... Standoff?

There's no "official" news about the Wing Commander: Standoff mod... but Quarto was recently good enough to update the forums with some interesting details about Episode 4:On the winning path, you have 3 Sabre missions, and 2 Rapier missions. Apart from those, you also have 2 missions where you choose between Crossbow, Sabre and Rapier, and 1 mission where you choose between Sabre and Rapier. Of course, that includes all the alternate missions (in particular, the two Crossbow/Sabre/Rapier missions are alterates of each other, so you'll only get to play one of them) - alltogether, without playing alternate missions, you'll fly 6 times on the winning path, with 4-5 opportunities to fly a Sabre, 3-4 opportunities to fly a Rapier, and 1 opportunity to fly a Crossbow.

LOAF Can See Your Face

Eager to show your Wing Commander spirit through a populer Web 2.0 portal? Then you're in luck... because Zor Prime has started a Wing Commander Facebook group!

2006.065 (March 6, 2006)

New Nexus Mod Gets A Name

Exarch continues to impress Wing Commander fans with fancy vessels for his Nexus mod, Wing Commander Apocalypse. His latest conversions are the Fralthi II and Midway classes. The Kilrathi cruiser is pretty much just a straight import with some bump mapping, but the megacarrier is sporting a great new high resolution finish. Exarch has written a basic story outline, but the plan is for this to be a multiplayer skirmish pack first.

Battle Real Wingnuts Today

Many people are anxious awaiting news on HCl's Prophecy Multiplayer project, but the wait doesn't have to be quite so long for everyone. One of the classic holy grails of the Wing Commander community was to get Wing Commander Armada working online. HCl finally achieved this major milestone last year. While you're waiting to blast eachother in the Vision Engine, now's a great time to practice against live opponents in the original Wing Commander multiplayer game.

2005.065 (March 6, 2005)

Get Your Privateer Remake 1.0 Now

As promised by the Privateer Remake team yesterday, the big version 1.0 release is now finished and available for download! I could tell you all about it, but the team behind the project are probably the best ones to do that:We are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the Wing CommanderPrivateer Remake.

Celebrate Remake Release With Some Music

To celebrate the afore mentioned Privateer Remake release, Hellcat has released a little song. I'm not exactly sure if this music is from the project or if it's completely new, but you can download the mp3 here, and join in the release celebrations in this thread.

2004.066 (March 6, 2004)

Mark Hamill Interview Revisited

It was many years ago (or 1998) when Mark Hamill held an interview on AOL Live. The interview is primarily about Star Wars, but WC gets a look in several times. It's a good read if you missed it at the time, and if you never read WCHS you probably did. You can find the interview transcript here.

Academy Introduction - Part Deux

We're now looking at our options for hosting Academy and hopefully we'll be ready to announce something in the next few days. Meanwhile, here is the second version of the Academy introduction as used in episodes 2-5. The animation is identical to the first introduction, but the music is the same as the ending music. You can download the 8.

2003.065 (March 6, 2003)

Privateer 2 Concept Art

It's not very often that we hear from people who worked on Privateer 2 (at least people credited for it), but Jan Brockmann sent us this note:Hi,I found something that be may be of interest for you. While working for EA Germany (from 1995-2001), I've spend nearly 3 month (in late '96) in Manchester working on the German localization of Privateer 2 - The Darkening. On my very last day in the office I was able to get my hands on a large page containing 4 pieces of conceptional artwork and every team member signed it for me. I thought I lost this page years ago, but I was wrong.

Freelancer Being Received Well

All indications are that Freelancer is being received better than its predecessor, Starlancer. It sold out yesterday in the stores in my area, and the reviews so far have been pretty positive. Here's hoping it gets a few more people into the space sim genre. GameSpot gave it an 8.

Announcing Wing Commander Echo War!!

Shaggy over at Crius.net has announced his interest in making a new Secret Ops mod. The only problem is that he sucks at textures, but he's gone ahead and made the story. For all of you interested in Fan Projects, we recommend first reading The CIC Guide To Making Your Very Own Fan Project.

WCPolaroids: Hawk (5/7)

The perfect shot for the Black Widows Squadron recruiting poster.

2002.065 (March 6, 2002)

WING COMMANDER TV SHOW!

CIC Emergency newsbrief! Chris Roberts' production company, Point of No Return Films, has opened their web site -- and it confirms that a Wing Commander TV series is in development!The PNR films site can be found at http://www.pnrfilms.

2001.065 (March 6, 2001)

To Earth... and Beyond!

Westwood has officially announced their new MMP space game -- the one Origin cancelled Privateer Online in favor of. Read about Earth and Beyond in this article at AVault. You can now read about E&B at the official site here -- if you've got a nice enough system, you can also apply for the demo. (Thanks WildFire).

Very Mice, HoTT

I'll just let him say it: "Hello, here I am with another piece of Fan-art. This is another Disney-WC-related fan-art, based on "The Rescuers" movies. My logic for this was that all of the heros are rodents, mainly mice. And since the Kilrathi are feline, it's only logical that rodents would fight against them.

Exeter, Stage Left

The Wing Commander Model Development Forum has posted a 3D model of the Wing Commander 1 era Exeter class Destroyer. Also newly posted are cosmetically improved versions of the Drayman and the Diligent. The WCMDF is looking for a new webmaster/host -- contact Kruer if interested.