It's Nomination Time Again

Incredibly, this year is already winding down and a new one is nearly upon us! That means it's also time for our fifteenth annual Wing Commander Web Site/Fan Project of the Year awards. The CIC doesn't rely on original content to keep the news page full - it's the daily activities of thousands of Wingnuts, dozens of active projects and a network of other dedicated websites that keeps everything going. In order to help recognize the efforts of a few of these hard working fans, our tradition is to take nominations and then vote on the people and places who've done the most for Wing Commander over the past year. Now's the time to send your nominations to news@wcnews.com. They'll be collected and voting will begin shortly. To help give you some ideas, here's a summary of all the prior winners.

TacOps Game Manager Still In Development

I'm only days away from finishing my PhD finally IRL. My plan has secretly always been to spend some more time on TacOps development this summer.

I can't recall how much I mentioned last fall when I last worked on it, but I am about 1/4 of the way through the scenario editing abilities. I plan to finish that off this summer, so you guys can start running your own games.

I'll probably stay fairly quiet in the short term, but then announce when the next major Phase update happens.

Kiowan Krell Gets Its Fifteen Minutes of Fame

The Krell is the Kiowan pirate clan’s heaviest fighter. While the Krell’s gull wing design is imposing, it is easily the lowest quality pirate heavy fighter in the Tri-System. Facing Ashearers or Tacons, the Krell comes in a distant fourth. Because of this, it is more rarely dispatched on traditional missions than the fighters of the other groups… but it is more common on patrols.

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This is another remake of a really old model of mine ('04) based on the Krell. I know the wings aren't rotated nearly enough, but back then I just had one picture to go off of I think. Anyways I like them this way anyways. 2 mass drivers, 2 particles, 1 stormfire (which I can switch out for a dust cannon if needed to). I really liked how well the gun/engine hull smoothly connects to the wings.

Nomination Period Closing Soon

The year will soon be coming to an end, and our annual Fan Project & Web Site of the Year contests are about to kick off. Submit your nominations within the next few days to help pick who will be on the ballot! Although a couple sites have gone dark over the last decade, it's always invigorating to peruse this list and be reminded of all the great things Wingnuts are doing. These are far from the only endeavors that Wing Commander fans are engaged in though, and we're looking forward to highlighting more soon!

It's Nomination Time Again

Another exciting year is blazing by, so it's time for us to start winding down 2012! This includes our annual Fan Project & Web Site of the Year contests! Wingnuts have a chance to nominate their favorites before the voting gets going. Please send in submissions here! There's a very rich history of past winners out there, and it's exciting to think about who will be added next. Check out the results from past years here:

TacOps Getting Game Manager Tools

Avacar reports that development continues on Wing Commander TacOps Online. Most of the play mechanics are nearly complete, so the project's schedule has been adjusted in order to get a suite of tools in place that will help game masters run their own campaigns. WCTOO is an electronic version of a popular fan made tabletop WC game. Curious Wingnuts can see the latest digital build here.

This brings us to Phase 6. Throw out all my old timelines and schedules; I've lost track of what was supposed to get done during the Alpha Phase 6. This is the new plan:

1. Create a new overlay which allows "game managers" to edit ship stats on the fly, add new ships, delete ships, etc.
2. Update the "game" database to include more information about who runs a game, who has permission like a manager for a game, etc.
3. Update the user table to enable reverse game lookups, i.e. have games you're members of listed for you.
4. Rebuild the front area to no longer be like the old WCTO page, but instead better reflect the fact that this is a dynamic site with updating games. Add features like "your games" "watch games" "create games" etc.
5. Call for suggestions on the UI from users (all those ideas i've told you to hold on "until the future") and try to implement them.

Can You Name Them All?

Basic TacOps Game Coding Almost Complete

More improvements have been made to the TacOps Online engine. Secondary weapon systems such as flak and missiles are pretty well integrated with the game now, but the biggest news is that almost all of the original Tactical Operations tabletop rules have now been coded into the software-based game. Once this milestone is complete, Avacar will move into making the game master tools so that fans can easily start up their own adventures.

Ask and you shall receive; I've tentatively coded in a UI improvement to the combat phase to reflect this. I'll let you guys tell me if this is obvious. (You'll only see a difference if you're making an opportunity shot).

While on the topic, we're getting very very close to finishing my goals for Phase 5 (which is "all rules coded, if not 100% debugged). Once we move onto phase 6, I'm going to initially work on an in-game editor for 'game-runners' to allow on-the-fly editing of ships, and eventually a set of game-building tools. While working on this, I also hope to have Phase 6 include UI improvements/bug fixes. This will be when you guys can suggest things like the above, ways to make field reports better, etc. Start generally thinking on it, although we may be a month or so out from when I really dive into it.

Well, I resolved the issue involving firing flak and missiles at the same time. This lead to the discovery of a generally broken IR missile (at least for a cap ship, I don't think we've seen issues firing them on fighters). Unfortunately I can't actually get my missile locked on beta to fire this phase without rewinding a few full turns. Not only that, while it claims that scratch just got a "new" lock on Beta this time around, I can see in the database that that lock is bogus.

Kamekh Ni'lakh, Ki'ha Rakra Terran'ra

The latest game of Wing Commander TacOps Online is under way, and the pilots of the Confederation and Empire are dogfighting in a dense asteroid field. So far they're working through line-of-site, friend-or-foe and capship flak issues. There's also some neat new features such as "stacks" of asteroids and fighters occupying the same hexagon now constantly rotating through object icons. You can follow the latest progress at the CIC Forums or see the game(s) in action here. Watch out for those rocks!

Well the asteroid collision damage was broken. I've just fixed it. I had to refactor the entire damage-dealing path in the code, splitting it into a version for weapon-based damage and straight number damage. This means that, should I have made a mistake, all damage sources could now be broken. (More likely, we see everything still working, and the asteroid fields now doing damage). I suspect this may have inadvertently also fixed the flak fields, but I'm not sure.

Bonus question: Where does this post's headline come from!?

But Wait, There's More!

Wingnuts not only have Saga and Standoff to choose from for fan mods. Over the years, several other fan projects were also completed. Make sure to also check out Unknown Enemy. Unknown Enemy is a fan mod of Secret Ops that takes place during the Nephilim Conflict.

Resident Rocket Scientist, eddieb, continues to work on Flight Commander, a moddable Wing Commander-inspired space combat simulator. There are a number of ongoing Flight Commander projects.

Avacar continues to work on Wing Commander TacOps. Gamers should be sure to drop by their forum as new games recently started. Interested users should download the manual from the TacOps website.

There's also ASCII Sector. It started out as a Privateer-inspired game but has moved beyond those aspects. It uses ASCII as a base for gamers to travel through a world still clearly inspired by its Wing Commander roots.

TacOps Pilots Prepare for Combat

Don't forget to sign up for the next test games of Wing Commander TacOps! Two games are about to begin - one a small dogfight in the asteroids and the other a larger scale capship battle. This is an opportunity to both assist in the development of the online version of the game as well as learn how to play in a mock engagement. Read the rules and sign up at the CIC Forums here.

Two New TacOps Games Accepting Players

With capital ships now feature-complete, it is time to announce 2 new test games. Meanwhile, I believe Game 5 will continue pointing out some of the limitations of the large-format maps which I haven't worked around, and Game 6 will continue to be used by me alone for Cap ship testing. Both games are going to follow a few basic rules, but they will be fundamentally different. Here are the commonalities and rough instructions for posting:

You may apply to both games. When applying (via post below) please list your preference if you can only get into 1 game. The games will both be player-limited, and I will try to sort it out so that the most people can get into their 1st choice. If we are short on pilots, I will happily allow people into both games, on a first-applied, first-served basis. Since the game doesn't understand 'teams' yet, both games will be split Terran/Kilrathi. You will be playing on the race-appropriate team with other human pilot teammates. For simplicity, both games will have all pilots set at 'Normal' pilot skill, to eliminate this variable from the testing.

Game 7: Collisions and Line of Sight: This will be a 3 on 3 dogfight in an asteroid field. I will also be dropping in a transport or cap ship in the center. This will be on a very small map, so avoid boosting off the edge! (20x20 squares)

Your mission:

1. Smash into asteroids at high speeds
2. Confirm asteroids provide LOS block
3. Confirm Capships provide LOS block
4. Defeat opposing race

Rules/Instructions:

1. Each player may choose one medium and one light fighter from their respective race.
2. Please specify your race/team, and your 2 ships in your post below. If you are willing to fly either race, specify 4 ships (2 each side) but also list your preference, in case I can accommodate it.

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Game 8: Carrier Battle: This will be a 4 on 4 battle. Each side is allowed 1 carrier, 1 destroyer, and 1 Cruiser (or Corvette). Additionally, each side may field up to 5 bombers, 5 heavy fighters, 5 medium fighters and 10 light fighters.

Your Mission:

1. Find flaws in Capship movement and combat
2. Fire capship weapons
3. Test flak fields (fly into them if you have to)
4. Find flaws with fighter/capship interactions (inappropriate weapon targeting, etc.)
5. Destroy the enemy Carrier (worth 5 points, +3 points for destroying the Destroyer, +2 for the Cruiser)

Rules/Instructions:

1. I will hand out the 6 cap ships on a first-come-first post basis.
2. No one may pilot more than 1 cap ship
3. Cap ships pilots may not also pilot bombers
4. Each player may pilot 16 points worth of ships. For this purpose, all cap ships will count as 8 points.
5. Please list your preferred race and ship set. Unlike Game 7, you may not list for both sides, so pick carefully, on a first-come-first served basis.
6. When listing your ships, please take into account what has already been posted for your side, such that you do not exceed the team limits. Incorrect posts will result in either me assigning arbitrary ships to you, or worse, forfeiture of play if we have too many applicants.

In summary:

* Post to join
* List preferred game if applying to both
* Game 7: List preferred side, and ships
* Game 8: List side, ships, and be careful not to exceed already claimed team limits by other players
Check back here frequently!

Barring further announcement below, everyone has 1 week to apply. Deadline closes Sunday, March 4th at the last midnight globally. Both games will start at some announced point after that, likely within the following week.

Good Luck Pilots!

Fighter Tokens See Battle on the Table

Progress continues to be made on Wing Commander TacOps Online. Avacar has implemented numerous bug fixes in the last several weeks and has big plans about the next phase of the game's development. After an upcoming flurry of coding is complete, the idea is to launch another beta test game that involves capital ships and their escorts. Meanwhile, capi has mocked up the current game using his counter tokens. A few of the shots below are a bit hard to see, but it's cool to see them in play.

I intend to throw a full day or two's labour at this to finish off the End Phase Engine aspect of Flak Fire (a.k.a flak fire as a point defense). Once that is done, I'll launch Game 7, and possibly a Game 8. One of these games will be a medium-scale battle with 3 Capital-class ships and their fighter escorts. I'll launch another game at that same time if I feel we haven't sufficiently tested LOS or collisions yet. That second game would mostly likely be a true 'beta tester' game in that I'd only put 1-2 people in, and have them just run around smashing themselves into asteroids and trying to shoot past asteroids.

Congratulations Award Winners!

The votes have been tallied, and we now have the winners of our 2011 Fan Project & Web Site of the Year awards! Many great nominees received a ton of votes, which speaks to how many great undertakings were pursued over the past year. Although only a few can win, we're still amazed at all the constant fan activity. Without further delay, here's the winners:

The 2011 Fan Project of the Year is the OpenGL Patch for Prophecy & Secret Ops! Pedro and Popsicle Pete's recent updates to the program include new graphical assets, support for the WCP demo and compatibility with the Enhancement Pack that enables high resolution, multiplayer and DVD movie playback. These tweaks take an already beautiful game and make it gorgeous!

We have a tie for second place! WC TacOps Online and Standoff take runner up. WCTOO completed almost all of the game coding over the last year, which required a major programming commitment and time consuming testing. Standoff received hardware compatibility improvements and multiple fan enhancements, which continue to ensure one of the most popular fan mods around stays fresh.

The 2011 Web Site of the Year is Shotglass'! The site's grand opening was just last year, but it's run by a lifelong Wingnut who's dedicated to sharing WC news with fellow fans. Wing Commander's always been very big in Germany, so Shtoglass serves an important need. Check out an English translation here.

The web runner up is WC Saga! Many fans pointed to the home of the Saga mod as a source of frequent updates and information on the game's development. Reports on the game's beta test and behind the scenes features should continue to keep fans on edge until it's released.

Congratulations to the winners! And here's to a great year ahead! Thanks to all for voting.

Wing Commander Armada Taken to the Tabletop

capi3101's latest role-playing project is an exciting "pen and paper" translation of Wing Commander Armada! The setup is fun and easy: players can use any Wing Commander sector for their battle. Gameplay pieces are comprised of capi's printable WC tokens and several dice. The rules have been summarized at the wikia WCRPG page here, and a printable rules PDF is also available at the CIC Forums. Give it a try and let everyone know what you think!

One of the big problems with creating all those counter sheets is that I really didn't have any specific pnp games in mind when I did them. True, I was pretty sure I could use some of them with TacOps (and later WCRPG), but the vast majority of them would be sitting unused for who knows how long. So, I decided since no games yet existed that would take advantage of those counters, I should probably make a few. And a pnp adaptation of Armada seemed like a good place to start.

I'm happy to announce that I completed the first draft of Wing Commander Armada: PNP this afternoon. The rules are currently online at the WCRPG wiki, at http://wcrpg.wikia.com/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Armada_PNP. The game is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the original (at least in my humble opinion). Of the counter sheets, it only requires the logo sheet (used as "Production Points" and "Claim Tokens") and the Armada Strategic sheet. I will probably need to work up some custom maps at some point; right now the rules suggest using the maps available from CIC.

The game is a first draft and it has yet to really be playtested at all (though I did do a pretty thorough check of the combat system while drafting the long combat example), so I'd definitely appreciate some help on that front. Anyone who has any comments, questions, concerns, complaints, etc. regarding the game may reply to this thread.

I hope y'all like it, share and enjoy, and so forth...

TacOps Pulls Out The Big Guns

Continuing with my roll-out of new features, I am happy to announce that line-of-sight has now been coded. I haven't had a chance to do any testing whatsoever of this algorithm, but at least it isn't giving any immediate run-time errors.

Obviously, putting in the line-of-sight code has ramifications for all gun target acquisition and ranging. In this up-coming combat phase, if any of you feel like you should be able to target someone and cannot anymore, point this out immediately and do not submit your order. Also, as it is currently coded, there is nothing actually telling you that you're blocked by line-of-sight, you simply won't have the target listed as an option on your drop down in the command window.

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I should mention that we're 'getting close'. Flak fire is the 2nd last game rule/feature yet to be coded. After that, only friendly fire remains before we have a 'game rule-complete' version of WCTOO.

When that happens, I'm going to kick us into Phase 6. This is a redefinition of all the timelines out there, and I'll publish updates to the appropriate threads when we get closer. Phase 6 will focus on a lot of the user interface requests/suggestions, as well as start work on the much-needed administrator tools (leading up to the eventual map editor).

New RPG Counters Come From Exotic Sources

Here's capi's latest batch of role-playing counter tokens, and these have a bit of a twist. The first two sheets below are squadron emblems borrowed from the Wing Commander Customizable Card Game. This is a fun idea! Some 104 different symbols are displayed here to spice up any tabletop game. The next pair of images are full of craft from Wing Commander Standoff, which allows for scenarios based off the scenes in the popular fan mod. Finally, a sheet of Black Lance/Border Worlds counters have been put together, and some improvements to the Prophecy card have been made. All of the tokens made so far have also been organized at the WCRPG Wikia page here.

I have completed the squadron emblem sheet set. The set consists of two sheets, one for Confederation emblems and the other for Kilrathi emblems (with one carry-over from the Confederation page). There are five copies of all Confederation emblems and four of all Kilrathi emblems; considering there are 47 unique Confederation emblems and 57 unique Kilrathi emblems...well, this enables 104-player games (of which I'm pretty sure none exist). If someone needs more tokens for their own use, they can simply prepare multiple copies of the sheet (or just use more than one squadron emblem). Even if you're not interested in pnp games, this is a collection of one of the more unique portions of the CCG; I'm not sure if it's ever been gathered together in one place like this. Debating as to whether or not I want to post up the entire emblem set or not as a separate set of downloads...

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I decided to take the route where people could recreate any single mission from Standoff in pnp (perhaps using TacOps rules; it wouldn't require much rules tweaking at all - torpedo rules, maybe). That, of course, required the availability of a metric tonne of some Kilrathi craft, which in turn ultimately led to the decision to A) make this a two-sheet set, and B) make it dependent upon the ordnance sheet. I also went ahead and used silhouettes created from the in-game models, made possible thanks to Quarto's most excellent ship viewer modification (only exception to this is the Shoklar, which I only realized was missing last night; I wanted to get this done, however, so I just went with the Armada model). It's interesting to compare the silhouettes from this set to their originals, personally. Of course, this set includes the unique craft whose only appearance has been in Standoff, the reason why I created the set in the first place.

Avoid the 'Roids!

Asteroid collision is now coded. There may be some changes, based on response from Ironduke over in the core coding thread. Additionally, this in no way reflects any line-of-sight code.... i.e. you can definitely still shoot through/past asteroids without any problems.

That said, if you try to fly through one, as per the rules, some dice will be rolled and you'll potentially smash into an asteroid. Also: it really hurts. This work also laid down some of the initial groundwork for flak processing (although not for flak firing).

All of you: pay close attention to ship movement and any anomalies. Teaching it to smash into asteroids involved putting in all the hooks for collisions. The following algorithms were indirectly affected by these changes, and may no longer work (to whatever extent they once did) so look out carefully for bugs in these areas:

1. All ship movement, especially when they're on the same square as anything
2. All missile movement
3. The missile 'chase' algorithm
4. Movement listings in the 'field reports'
5. The ship damage algorithm was extended to do 'raw' damage type; this may have impacted how ships receive damage, but I don't think it will. Watch for shots getting through shields unfairly.

So, who will be the guinea pig to smash into an asteroid? (I have a few other features finally on the books; when they're all in place, I'll probably spawn more ships for this purpose, or start a smaller, new game).

Ship Building Has Never Been So Easy

Over the past few weeks I've been busy creating a set of silhouettes of the various craft in the WC universe, ala the ships in the WC2 guide. My intent in doing so was to use these silhouettes to create sets of "generic" wargame counters that could be used in any p-n-p Wing Commander project (such as TacOps or the Wing Commander Role-Playing Game I'm currently developing). I'm just about finished with the creation of the silhouettes at this point (I'm missing the fighters from WC Arena; to my knowledge that's all) and would like to go ahead and share the silhouettes with the community.

TacOps Battles Light Up Rocky Space

If you look carefully, you'll also noticed one unannounced surprise: Asteroids. For now, they are just for show. If I find time, and if the game is running particularly smoothly, I may start experimenting with Line-of-Sight or Collision, so check back here for such an announcement. For now though, you should be able to just fly over them without any impact on gameplay at all. (Consequently, this is the first time I use the indicator icon for them; I find it is a bit dark, so I may have to lighten it up).