Landing Pad Supports Kilrathi Takeover

AAN has revealed more pictures of his miniature painted Dralthi model, and this time the ship has a cool planetside dock to land on. It sounds like there was actually quite a lot of attention to detail put towards construction of this Kilrathi platform. The whole scene also gives off a very Lords of the Sky vibe - where's the Dolosians? You can let AAN know what you think at the CIC Forums or see about 3D printing your own miniatures at the Dream Foundry.
Kilrathi landing pad (resin building from Critical Mass games with printed roof) with Dralthi MkIV (upscaled version by Dreamfoundry). The printed roof is from Dave Graffam Paper terrain, I simply added the Kilrathi symbol with Photoshop and faded it in. It was then printed, laminated and glued to a sheet of plasticard. After that some weathering here and there and a matt varnish.

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Strategically Select the Sector's Ships

In honor of the rerelease of Wing Commander Armada, we're asking about your favorite fighter from the game. There are ten to choose from from both the Confed and Kilrathi sides! Unlike previous polls, this one isn't just asking about which is the best to fly. As sector commander, players in Armada are charged with the responsibility of mining raw materials and strategically allocating resources to shipyards in order to assemble their fleet. Seasoned veterans make the best use of each type, but when all things are considered, which do you deem the best: the cheap and nimble light fighters? Well-balanced medium attack craft? Or expensive heavy bombers? Just like in Armada, the choice is yours!
Also take a moment and appreciate the game's cockpits as well! Armada was the first game to feature the invisible dashboard HUDs. Many players hit 'F1' as soon as they launched into space to turn the cockpit off, but there's so much rich detail to see in these shots.
The last poll aspected about everyone's favorite hangout from Privateer. New Detroit was credited with having the best atmosphere, but Oxford wasn't far behind. Predictably, special places like New Constantinople, Perry Naval Base and the Steltek Carrier also fared well. Among the more common locales, the Agricultural worlds were neck and neck with Pleasure Planets! See the full results below.

New WC Editing Resource Comes Online

delMar has recently gotten into the exciting WC modification discussions at the CIC Forums where Wingnuts from all over are digging into what makes the first couple Wing Commanders tick. He's decided to help contribute by building a set of web apps to allow modification to Wing Commander 1&2. WCWorkShop.net has been set up as the future home of these tools, but there's already quite a bit of data that's been collected and posted to see. Check it out for yourself here, or visit the CIC Forums to join the conversation!
I finally was able to publish the current state of my editor, which is called WC-Workshop. I'm looking forward to your feedback, both about the application itself and about some newly discovered resource data. Please note, that neither the application nor the data are complete. There's still lots of information on the forum which I have not yet been able to display.

System and Wing names are now displayed as they are contained in the MODULE.000 file which I started to integrate today. Also, Nav-Points are already displayed in the tree, but do not yet display detailed information. I just did not find the time today...

The UI will improve over time, right now the data is displayed more or less according to where it belongs technically. I definitely will re-arrange it and not only that, some data won't be even editable in the editor (eg the number of missions per series is stored somewhere, iirc), it will just be calculated upon resource file generation.

Next update will deal with detailed information about nav points. As already mentioned earlier, I have lots more of information already decoded than I can display at the moment.

Prototype Dralthi Cockpit Looks Great

Here's a peek at the absolutely badass Dralthi IV cockpit that Howard Day recently put together. The plan is to integrate this with the Academy mods that HCl has been experimenting with for Wing Commander Academy. It bears a very strong resemblance to the Dralthi II layouts that we see in Secret Missions 2 (pictured first after the quote below), but it also packs in some really great asymmetrical features. On the programming front, HCl has managed to make some good progress recently on the Dralthi importation, but he's also encountered some complex glitches. If anyone can overcome them though, he can!
I finally managed to do some more work on the WCA Dralthi. Basically, I managed to implement the stats and do the necessary tweaks to account for the "higher-resolution" mode being used (which, as a side effect, ends up making the ship look larger than it should). Reducing the bitmap size parameter on the ship file (and adjusting the hit radius somewhat) seemed to do the trick, and the ship seems now to have the correct size in-game. Oddly enough however, the ship on-destruction explosion is still smaller than the ship sprite, even though the ship was scaled down. Not only that, but the explosion size seems to *decrease* as the ship radius *increases*. Strange...

I'll look into the ship stats chunk again and double check things, maybe there's one parameter in there that I should be editing and i'm not (although there are not many unknown values in there at this point). Still, I wonder if i didn't hit a WC2 bug, it certainly feels like one... I would expect the explosion radius to increase as the ship radius increases, not the opposite. Well, I guess it should be possible to work around this, either via EXE hacking or simply by importing higher-resolution explosion sprites to match.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can start coding the various regions for Howie's cockpit :D

Escapist Pans FMV Wing Commanders

Escapist Magazine has continued its serial review of the Wing Commander series available on GOG. Wing Commander 3 and 4 are both covered in the latest article, and boy, the author did not like them! In regards to descriptions such as "awkward 2D ship animations and anemic audio utterly fail to generate any sense of excitement," Delance comments: "I wonder if he even properly played Wing Commander III at all, considering that the game is in full 3D and has (like all Wing Commander games) a great soundtrack. Oh well." [The 2D mention has since been fixed.] The author notes that he skipped FMV games such as WC3&4 back in the '90s, so there appears to be some lack of context. General consensus at 'neutral' sites like PC Gamer is that the WC games have aged pretty well, and the WC series is one of the few out there that stands out with good performances and production values. They'll be profiling Armada next, and unless they can get some good multiplayer games going, we could be in for another bloodbath!
I'm picking on the graphics in part because, as mentioned, Wing Commander 3 tries very hard to be a movie and, being from 1994, that means live-action FMVs and lots of them. As you might expect, it's awful in every possible way: The dialog is worse than a George Lucas first draft and it manages to make a reasonably talented cast that includes Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Jason Bernard and Malcolm McDowell look like an overly-earnest drama class. The only one who really sells it is Ginger Lynn (yes, that Ginger Lynn) who plays a sex-kitten technical chief who Blair - he finally gets a name in this one - has the option to romance.

WC Saga Source Code Available

Anyone with an interest in modding or game development in general will want to take a closer look at this. FekLeyrTarg noticed that Wing Commander Saga's source code is now available for download. The game was built on top of a heavily modified Freespace 2 engine that contains extensions and modifications contributed by the Freespace community at large. You can grab the source code from the project forums. Perhaps the OSX and Linux ports that were promised will yet materialize. Someone has already stepped up and begun translating the game to German.

Happy Thanksgiving

The CIC would like to wish our American visitors a Happy Thanksgiving and a good day to Wingnuts around the world! The CIC staff is mostly laying low Thursday, but we would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone about Wing Commander Pilgrim Truth. After the WC Movie novelization and Pilgrim Stars books were released in 1999, the conclusion to the trilogy was never published. Fans were held in limbo until just a couple years ago when author Peter Telep graciously helped us post the entire story online! It can be read directly on the web here at the CIC or downloaded as a mobi (Kindle) or epub (other)!
When I was first hired to adapt the Wing Commander screenplay into a novel, I was thrilled and frightened out of my mind. I knew there was a huge fan base, and I knew that some well-respected novels had already been written and published. I also realized after reading the screenplay that Chris Roberts was making changes to his own universe, and I was wary of how fans might react to those... so what did I do? I went straight to those same fans and asked for help. The guys at WCNews and others provided me lots of great research, insight, and suggestions for what I could do with the book, and between them, the screenplay, and my own imagination, I think we created something that bridged the gap between the film universe and the known and beloved WC universe of the games and previous novels. It was no easy task, trust me. Despite the film's reception, I was quite proud of how the books were received and am still getting fan mail to this day asking for that unpublished final novel, Pilgrim Truth. That it's been ten years and fans are still hungry for more WC is a testament to the quality of the work that's been produced over the years, and I can only tip my hat to every other artisan who came before me and helped pave the way. I'm very proud to be associated with Wing Commander and truly loved the experience! ...

-Peter Telep (August, 2009)

Workhorse Faldari Gets the Scooby Treatment

ScoobyDoo has put together a new fighter, and once again it comes from the ranks of Tri-System ships that are underrepresented in the universe of fan modeling. This one's based on the Faldari, and after closer inspection, it might appear to be different from the heavy fighter that many of us flew in Privateer 2. That's because - in addition to the civilian Faldari Mk II - there was also a Military CIS Faldari that sported sleeker lines and engine nacelles! There's also a new center-mounted gun added to Scooby's version that gives the ship a little bit of a Banshee vibe. He's arranged some neat side-by-side shots below to show how some of the detailed elements were built up on the new vessel compared with the original.
The Faldari is a mid-range heavy fighter available on the private market in the Tri-System. It is a civilian version of the military's ML2B Faldari-class Medium Fighter. The design was followed by the ML3A Faldari MK II, a significantly cost-reduced design.

One of the Tri-System's most well known pilots, Lerissa du Voille, flies the Faldari. Other noted Faldari pilots include Louissa Phillips, daughter of Hendri Phillips, and Melissa Banks, on again off again girlfriend of Vel Ricaud. Less reputable mercenaries frequently fly Faldari: four of the fighters defended The Buckaroo Boys, a murderous band.

The Faldari entered service before 2786. Notable Faldari include F902_466J (2786) and I552_235G (classified).

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