We have a sample of 8 Star Wars movies to date. 6 have had male leads. To bring gender parity to the force, they would still need to lead another 4 with women. Even if they did choose the leads at random, they would have a 25% chance of choosing two women in successive films. It's not an...

From the Wing Commander: The Price of Freedom novelisation by William R. Forstchen and Ben Ohlander, excerpt provided with the boxed version of WC4: These three lines are loaded with detail about the perceived value of pilots, gunners and academy training. Incidentally, this is the pilot you...

It's easy to assume that a low-performance craft is obsolete, but in our own 21st century this is rare. Police forces buy up-to-date production cars. They do not drive Formula 1 racing cars or Main Battle Tanks, because neither type of vehicle would help police do their job 99.9% of the time...

I'm fine with space shooters that ignore Newton, but rolling just makes no sense. Please make A and D YAW (or give me the choice if some of the airplane pilots out there expect ROLL). I'd quite like to see this, but only if implemented with great care to maintain pacing. I like FTL, but it...

I'm in favor of detailed communications, as long is they're actually useful. This means that: You need few wingmen (my own preference is to only ever have one.) Adding more wingmen will usually reduce the tactical benefit of stopping to issue orders to any one of them. The AI needs to be...

I agree with most of the existing comments here, especially Kaunisto on mission length and Mancubus on scripting and mission size. I used to admire games that integrated storyline into the gameplay (and WC2 was an innovator here), but these days I just want to see flight simulators where the...

That style makes me picture an entire 3rd Edition GURPS Wing Commander sourcebook, right down to the rough paper, comprehensive index and spine that cracks in half the third time you open it. (Yes, I know about the Wing Commander RPG, but for me there's something special about the formatting of...

That sounds like SWC used what TVTropes calls Mad Libs Dialog. For the Sega CD version, the lines are so fluid that I think Quarto is correct, they must have recorded separate versions of every line for every number. I hope someone does manage to decode the files so we can find out how many...

Apart from the base damage, the Wing Commander 1 & 2 Ultimate Strategy Guide (Pix has a scanned PDF) contains these sentences on page 45 ("Using Your Ship's Guns"): Like most strategy guides, this was a third party publication, although they seem to have received a decent amount of cooperation...

The same story appears about Interplay and the making of Battle Chess. See this page, "5. A Duck". Is it reasonable to assume that this story is plausible in most game development companies? There are a few cockpit oddities in the WC1 file titled "PILOTANM.VGA". Here's what this file...

Are you familiar with MobyGames, where that archive came from? It's like IMDB for computer games. As with all user-editable sites it contains some errors and in-jokes, but it's pretty good. Your own developer page is at http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,111/. Most of...

No, the file contents aren't readily available for cutting/pasting, unless someone has figured out the format. Here's what I did to get all the characters: (1) Create a duplicate of WC.EXE (for Wing Commander 1) or WC2.EXE (for Wing Commander 2). I called mine "WCFONT.EXE". (2) Open your...

The fonts in WC1, WC2 and Academy are stored in files called FONTS.FNT. No one appears to have deciphered this format, although it's probably feasible. The existing damage reports display arbitrary text with the cockpit font, so it's easy to hex-edit the executable to display an alphabet with...

Logical thinking, but the EGA graphics aren't on the floppy disks. They're handled in a way that is right at the intersection of clever and aggravating. Back up your Wing Commander directory before experimenting with the steps that follow - it will delete files that you can only recover if you...

I can imagine a third-party observer (who would need Arisian-level powers of predicting all possible outcomes) concluding that the Kilrathi victory is less damaging because, while being enslaving mass murderers, they don't destroy two entire planets. The Kilrathi bombardment as described in the...

Thank you for your detailed answers to our weird questions. Some 3D Studio files survive from that era. I have not worked with them myself, but there's a dump of them here: http://download.wcnews.com/files/priv1/wc3d.zip. Despite being stored in the "priv1" directory, it contains files from...

There are actually 4 heads - helmet, hat, long hair and short hair. See the three different head sequences below. Looking at the data files with WCNAV (they're in SCRAMBLE.VGA), there's a sequence of pictures single headless running figure, and then 4 different heads...

Oh yes, we still discuss the WC1 and WC2 graphics a lot around here. I can't speak for anyone else, but I remain fascinated by the combination of art and programming involved in getting the most out of low resolution, limited palettes, limited memory and synthesised audio. For example, see...

No, it's not weird, and it may be because you're noting a limitation in the regular WC1 explosion. The WC1 explosion (on the left) only has 6 cels. The game stretches this by displaying each cel for multiple frames - 1, 2, 3, 3, 4 and 6 frames respectively, for a total of 19. The cels are...

Nice video. It's good to see a reminder about how the PC version of a game could change radically on different systems and configurations. While my computer ran VGA/MCGA just fine, I spent many hours seeing how well different games handled EGA. I'd like to extend a dishonorable mention to...