New Videos Show Fan Project Development Tests

We thought about updating the demo to use a new video to when you launch from the Lexington. It never got beyond the concept stages however. Still It was kind of a fun experiment.

Development video - basic iridescence testing via open GL

Video Shows Off Ultra Ultrawide Gameplay in WC4 Remastered

Here's a really cool video of WC4 Remastered running at an impressive ultrawide 32:9 aspect ratio. We've known for a few years that the game would at least support 21:9, but this is a nice confirmation that the even wider 5120x1440 resolution will work. The example clip below might not scale up in the embedded version, so I'd recommend popping it out to a full YouTube screen for the entire effect. Also be sure it's running at at least 1440p so you can enjoy the game's beautiful graphics. If you haven't gotten a chance to give the updated WC4 Fan Remake for a spin yet, grab the demo here (900 meg exe).

Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is probably the greatest example of the medium, with Hollywood budgets, real sets and an outstanding cast including Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, John Rhys-Davies and Tom Wilson; and unlike many other FMV titles, each benefits from outstanding direction; which leads to excellent performances worthy of any movie. https://wcrespace.com

Ultra wide is supported.

And the Winner Is...

We've been collecting votes for the last several weeks, and the winners of our annual Fan Project of the Year contest have become pretty clear!

The first is Mac's Lore! And to be fair, it's not just lore videos that he makes. There's a variety of cool wallpapers, animations and other fun shorts that he's put together that all add up to a complete package.

Fan Project Vote Under Way

• Challenge Coins - ZOmegaZ’s successful 2021 crowdfunding campaign resulted in these beautiful trinkets in 2022! He took fan feedback to balance the sizes of the ships in the design and the results turned out great.
• elend’s Physical Models - elend is a master craftsman and his recently completed Dralthi model is high professional grade art. It belongs in a museum!
• Emulation Technology - Whether getting DOS games to run on Linux, Mac WC games running on PC or Xbox games going on PCs, this has been another great year of technological advancement in emulation.
• Gemini Sector RPG - One of the longest running and consistently playing fan RPGs, the Gemini Sector crew recently wrapped up a huge campaign with the TCS Majestic. They’re a great bunch to hang out with!
• Graphical Novel Project - EmuMusicFan’s graphical novel project has branched out into a variety of artistic creations from sketches to comics to shorts. He does a great job capturing the Kilrathi spirit!
• Klavs’ Models - Klavs was back to doing what does best, making updated versions of some of the most iconic Wing Commander craft. His models are also widely available to boost the graphical fidelity of numerous other fan projects!
• Lego Creations - Lego builders had another fine year as well! From the Avenger to the Epee to the Broadsword and more, bricklayers built some truly impressive ships in 2022.
• Mac’s Lore - Mac put together a whole bunch of fabulous lore videos that were big hits on YouTube, which helps spread the fandom far and wide! In between animating takes, he also made a ton of fantastic Wing Commander-themed wallpaper images.
• Space Sandbox Mods - This was an unexpected surprise as well! Fans have gone far beyond Minecraft to put together highly accurate and functional versions of Wing Commander ships in multiple sandbox engines such as Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers. We got not one, but two elaborate Tiger’s Claws in 2022!
• WC4 Remastered - What more needs to be said? The team released their highly anticipated demo this year in a flurry of excitement around the CIC Birthday. Throughout the year they continuously published articles talking about the project’s ongoing development and where it will take this next.

What's in a Name?

Did you know Dekker’s assault shuttle has a name? It’s called Hermes in the game files but it’s never mentioned in on screen.

Fan Project Vote Kicks Off

• Challenge Coins - ZOmegaZ’s successful 2021 crowdfunding campaign resulted in these beautiful trinkets in 2022! He took fan feedback to balance the sizes of the ships in the design and the results turned out great.
• elend’s Physical Models - elend is a master craftsman and his recently completed Dralthi model is high professional grade art. It belongs in a museum!
• Emulation Technology - Whether getting DOS games to run on Linux, Mac WC games running on PC or Xbox games going on PCs, this has been another great year of technological advancement in emulation.
• Gemini Sector RPG - One of the longest running and consistently playing fan RPGs, the Gemini Sector crew recently wrapped up a huge campaign with the TCS Majestic. They’re a great bunch to hang out with!
• Graphical Novel Project - EmuMusicFan’s graphical novel project has branched out into a variety of artistic creations from sketches to comics to shorts. He does a great job capturing the Kilrathi spirit!
• Klavs’ Models - Klavs was back to doing what does best, making updated versions of some of the most iconic Wing Commander craft. His models are also widely available to boost the graphical fidelity of numerous other fan projects!
• Lego Creations - Lego builders had another fine year as well! From the Avenger to the Epee to the Broadsword and more, bricklayers built some truly impressive ships in 2022.
• Mac’s Lore - Mac put together a whole bunch of fabulous lore videos that were big hits on YouTube, which helps spread the fandom far and wide! In between animating takes, he also made a ton of fantastic Wing Commander-themed wallpaper images.
• Space Sandbox Mods - This was an unexpected surprise as well! Fans have gone far beyond Minecraft to put together highly accurate and functional versions of Wing Commander ships in multiple sandbox engines such as Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers. We got not one, but two elaborate Tiger’s Claws in 2022!
• WC4 Remastered - What more needs to be said? The team released their highly anticipated demo this year in a flurry of excitement around the CIC Birthday. Throughout the year they continuously published articles talking about the project’s ongoing development and where it will take this next.

Happy New Year's Eve! (A Look Back at 2022)

Wow, another year has come to an end! As we chase these final few hours before 2023, here's a look back at some of the noteworthy stories of the past year.

If you can remember far back enough, the year actually began with a new official WC product release! The MT-32 Archival Edition of the WC1 soundtrack was published by The Fat Man and Team Fat. Also in early 2022, people started to receive their Malcolm McDowell autographs printed on WC3 Playstation adverts. Fan projects also started to deliver in January, including the custom WC Challenge Coins that ZOmegaZ commissioned. It was a great way to kick off the year!

WC4's In-flight Comms Get Visual Upgrade

The WC4 Remastered team has a new article on their journey to improve in-flight comms. The videos that come across your VDU in flight are far smaller and more compressed than the game's regular FMV, so getting these tiny clips to look good is an extra challenge. So, ODVS has incorporated several technologies to try to bring them up to modern standards. Check out the new video below to see how they look!

Aside from the miniscule resolution of the source material, another major problem is compression. In order to fit all those thousands of frames onto the game’s CD-ROMs, they were quite heavily compressed using mid-90s techniques. The unfortunate side-effect for us is that they’re blocky even for their tiny resolution. Lots of chunky pixels and harsh right angles are baked into the image – which our AI models and routines then try to maintain when upscaling. To combat this, I added a CRT-scanline-style effect over the top and some intentional digital-corruption-looking effects. I hope you’ll agree they’re an effective way of making the ugly compression artefacts from the original material look more like they should occur natually in-game. We can consider it headcanon that these glitches are a side-effect of whatever future-tech Confed and its contemporaries use to send signals across the vasts of space.

Watch New Interview With WC4 Remastered Team

A few days after the release of their demo in August, we had a nice little chat with the team about the project and it's future.

The project is a fan attempt to allow owners of Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom to enjoy a more modern experience by loading the files from the original game into a new engine, complete with specially created, high definition assets.

WC4 Remastered Trailer Now in German

Here's a little something for German-speaking Wingnuts, courtesy of MrCoffeeee:

Sights and Sounds Abound in WC4 Remastered Demo

With nearly a thousand players now on the flight roster, the buzz continues for the WC4 Remastered playable demo. First up, ODVS has made another video that further compares the original music to FilmCompos3r's updated tracks. Give it a listen below:

Here I present a comparison of the original "Mission 1" music from Wing Commander IV with the reorchestrated version created for us by our resident composer Greg "FilmCompos3r" Nicolett.

Listen to the Enhanced Battle Music Coming in WC4 Fan Remake

Although the WC4 Fan Remake team just released the Remastered Demo, they're not slowing down at all. ODVS has published a new article at WCRespace.com about their resident musician, Greg “FilmCompos3r” Nicolett. You can read all about how he got started with Wing Commander, what his inspirations are for the remastered tracks and some thoughts on the future here. There's also a new video showing off the new battle music below!

Our resident Composer-In-Chief, Greg "FilmCompos3r" Nicolett, isn't just bringing the original score of Wing Commander IV up to modern snuff for our project. He's also extending it and improving on it where the technical limitations of 1996's audio technology fell short of George Oldziey's original vision for the game's soundtrack.

Here's a prime example: the game's original battle music was only 45 seconds long - which could get grating and repetitive during extended dogfights. As well as reorchestrating the music to bring the quality up to modern standards, FilmCompos3r added new varitations which allowed him to double the loop's duration and add variety.

Enthusiastic Response for WC4 Remastered Demo

It’s been nearly a week since the demo for WC4 Remastered was released, and the game has been a big hit so far! Hundreds of fans have fired it up and the feedback is very positive. Players have been posting their recorded sessions online and word has spread to other news sites such as DSO and PC Gamer. If you haven’t yet tried it out, the WC4 Fan Remake team has posted helpful instructions on how to get things running. There’s even a tutorial on loading to a Steam Deck! Grab the main installer for yourself right here (900 Meg exe).

WC4 Fan Remake Launches Full-Featured Website

It's not every day that fans open a new Wing Commander website, so we're very excited today to unveil the new site for the fan remake WC4 Remastered! Pedro and DefianceIndustries have been doing the ground work to get the game's engine and core assets together for a while now, and efforts have recently been kicked into higher gear with the addition of ODVS' talents on video enhancement and 2D art. Now everything they've been working on has been collected in one central hub. The site is nicely appointed with subsections for background info, project status, media and more. They also have an elaborate links page, which is a wonderful throwback to old webpage days. Everything even works well on mobile devices. Visit for yourself at WCRespace.com!

I'm proud and excited to release WCRespace.com to the web! This is the official website for the Wing Commander IV Fan Remake project. Pedro, Defiance and I have been working away on this for a few months and it's finally ready for public release. Check it out for more information on the project, lastest news, media previews and screenshots. We're planning to update the news section periodically with updates on the progess of the project and post new videos and media when they're ready.

Machine Learning Advances Could Lead to Enhancement Pack 4.0

We're leaning into a new week with a couple of amazing new test clips from ODVS. He's not intending to reinvent the wheel each month, but there have been even better AI techniques discovered that further improve the quality of his enhanced video. Due to the exciting potential of this upgrade, he's made another WC4 example to gather feedback and see if he should release a new iteration of his footage overhaul.

I wasn't planning on posting anything again so soon - but then I got my hands on a new AI model!

So in the vein of returning to remasters past, here's a new version of the Vagabond comparison video. The new AI model does a far better job of adding detail without creating the nasty over-defined edges (in previous WC4 remasters, I've always toned the detail recovery down a bit because it had a tendency to screw up curves and shapes such as shoulders, uniform elements etc.).

I'll keep experimenting with this, but there may be a WC4 HD Video Pack V4.0 on the horizon if I find it improves other scenes. Enjoy!

Since I am now using a few new methods, I thought it might be interesting to re-do one one of the sequences I've done before so you can get an idea of the minor improvements that are creeping in. I figured I might as well go big or go home, so here's the entire WC3 intro again. :D

Red is always an issue when dealing with video image compression. Due to various technical reasons to do with the way the colour space is handled, red objects generally get around half the resolution of other colours - which is why the credits and the glyphs on the emperor's throne still look blocky. They're so very pixelated in the original footage that they appear to be geometric shapes and the AI actually tries to maintain it.

I think the improvements on the Kilrathi and Human characters are quite evident, though. As always, YouTube's compression is incredibly aggressive and knocks out a degree of detail from the remastered footage, but whaddayagonnado?

In-Game WC4 Cockpit Upgrade Previewed

Here's another nifty teaser for the WC4 Fan Remake fan project. We saw DefianceIndustries' immersive Hellcat cockpit a couple months back, and now Pedro has integrated it into game for the first time. It demonstrates a neat effect with the game's familiar HUD being projected in front of the cockpit glass. There appear to be some nice lighting effects as well. The team cautions that there's still a lot of work to go, but things already look promising!

First in-game shot of the cockpit. Still early days

WC4 Fan Update Teased

WC modder Pedro - of Unknown Enemy and WCP OpenGL fame - has released an image that shows off some of the ships for his WC4 remaster project. The effort has been hinted at for some time, but as more high quality assets are completed by DefianceIndustries, the project as a whole becomes more feasible. After some extensive planning, Pedro is ready to soon get started on the programming side. He's using the Usagi engine due to its modularity and ability to recreate the feel of the game. Despite their popularity, WC3/4 have historically had fewer directly associated fan projects than Prophecy/Secret Ops. It's great to see the whole breadth of the series getting attention these days!

Defiance has been passing me models for the WCIV remake. Not too much to report, I spent most of my time getting the engine ready for a new project but it's about time to start.

I was hoping to more closely match the lighting with Blender before showing another shot but I've been pretty busy. Still the exporter can at least import the hundred or so lights Defiance set up on bluepoint station, and the materials come through correctly without setup. Texture resolution on bluepoint is a bit low, not using particularly high res textures yet as not to burst the bandwidth limit on the git rep.

Flight Decks Get Major Makeover

...I've been busy. Firstly doing work for Pedro's WC4 remaster project. I've sent over some fighters but for the first mission we also needed Bluepoint/Orlando. It still needs some details but it's coming along nicely.

The next item is something of a pet project. The Yorktown vs. The Lexington type carriers. In WC4 the Concordia-class fleet carrier is supposed to be a larger and different ship (even though the model is a redress of the Yorktown). The stats state that the Concordia is 80M longer than the Yorktown but also carries double the number of fighters. In the franchise, it's not really an issue as the only time we see the Yorktown (TCS Victory) is in the FMV movies you never see them side by side. But I wanted to do both models and make them contemporaries, but give them a certain level of visual distinctness, while trying to keep them as close to the FMV and in-game shots as I can get.

So in order to achieve this here goes:

The Lexington is a blockier design the conning tower (bridge) isn't as swept and while the overall lines are the same, the Concordia has fewer nautical lines about it. Additionally, the Concordia has a lot of additional exterior trussing and fewer windows. The blockier shape is required for (in my mind anyway) the additional fighter storage and crew requirements. The Yorktown by comparison is a smoother shape, the look is slightly more "aerodynamic" and the trussing and hull framing are assumed to be internal. Additionally the Yorktown three decks visible between the upper and lower armor panels.

Hangar Decks - while we see a number of different interiors, the hangar decks differ significantly in the details. The Yorktown for instance is roughly 3 decks tall but has two entrances on the flight deck (visible to me at least), the staircase leading down from the ready room, and the doorway onto the flight deck from the briefing room (where we see ol' Blair come out and slap on his helmet - incidentally I haven't added that particular detail yet) The Concordia by contrast has a simpler layout. It's roughly 3 decks tall as well by my reckoning, but only has a single entrance onto the flight deck, the interior stairs leading down from the ready room. (my own second set of fighter cubicles aft not withstanding) the Concordia layout is actually simpler.

Yorktown:

Concordia:

Ok this is maybe a bit nerdy even for me, but I wanted to create two models that when you see them side by side you can easily point and say "oh that's a Concordia" by looking at the ship not the paint job. :)