Well done. It doesn't exactly get easier from here, but the Hornet missions are uniquely tedious...

I hope I'm not sidetracking the people doing the important ship and mission editing when I point out these obscure engine features. However, this hasn't stopped me from learning how to edit these hotspots. They're defined in OPTIONS.V00 (which also contains the graphics). I'm afraid I'm not...

Yes, I should have tried that. If rename a SHIP.V?? file from another ship, the affected ship vanishes. It doesn't get a blip on radar and I can't target it. (This is bad if it's the Concordia). The one time I copied over my own ship, the game crashed. Weird. I'm sure I remember doing this...

Once again, I'm wondering if the WC1 source code can provide any hints. Its MIDGAME graphics files appear to define their own text and animations. If you swap these over, you can even make SM2 cutscenes (MIDGAME.V07 to MIDGAME.V09) play during WC1 (MIDGAME.V00 to MIDGAME.V04). I was going to...

To my eyes, most games that used MCGA (320*200 pixels, 256 colors) have aged better than those that used SVGA (640*480 pixels, 256 colors). There just weren't enough colors to spread around all those pixels. In the case of WC3, this was also the early era of 3D rendering. While the WC2...

SM1 and SM2 are designed to be harder than the Vega Sector Vampaign. SM1 achieves its difficulty through vast numbers of opponents; SM2 has less enemies, but they're smarter and stronger. That is fair enough, but there are a few genuinely obnoxious missions where they give you a Hornet and...

That may well be optimal if your definition of "perfect" includes never failing a mission. Sorties If you fail Gimle, you get three additional sorties in Brimstone, and if you fail Kurasawa, you get three additional sorties in Rostov. Flying lots of sorties probably isn't itself the mark of a...

Agreed. If the writer wants me to care about the characters, keep it small. I'm far more invested when something bad happens to 1 member of the Serenity's crew than 100 redshirts on the Enterprise or 1,000 rebels on Home One. The trouble comes when the writer claims that some object is...

Maybe the artist read (or made the same assumption) as this post, which treats the 22,000 meters as a typo, and prefers 22,000 feet, which converts back to 6705.6 meters. That number has no grounding within either the game or its supporting fiction. If they don't like the 22,000 meter claim...

That alone is good news. However, if it's feasible, is there any future potential for adding subtitles? I know that's a hideous thing to ask for, much worse than deinterlacing. You'd have to detect which movie was being played, and then load up a script for that movie, complete with...

Mission scripters, please never do this. If I've bought into your plot, I'll understand that the plot-critical capship is important and scary, and I'll attack it. If my guns do some damage but not enough, I'll start using missiles - and if I find that they aren't working because I've reached...

Thank you very much. Attacking the fighters doesn't have to be a "correct" choice - I'm happy if, while I'm doing this, the simulation leads to its logical conclusion as the enemy bombers hammer the frigates on picket duty, allowing the enemy frigates to destroy my carrier. I'm not happy...

Yes. Also, Hunter's helmet and original name are "Dart". Bossman's personal name was also undecided for a while. Some of these may be found in the Wing Commander 1 Documents... PDF Page 109 "Wing Commander Wingman Pofiles", July 26, 1990: PDF Page 106 "Wing Commander SceneDirector...

Saga has some irritating aspects (unlikeable characters, repetitive waves, few enemy fighter types). However, all of those could have been minor. As others have said, the lack of player agency is a problem, and I would say it's the big one. Lack of agency is generally bad design, and it...

Comedy doesn't scale well. Classic adventure games, like the Space Quest series, demanded lots of content. Funny moments were funny because they were unusual, and they were unusual because the team created unique animations, sound effects and speech for them. As graphics and sound capabilities...

I'm not aware of any other Bhurak appearance. Every other Kilrathi ace appears multiple times, including in Venice if not already dead. The conversations imply that you should fear all surviving aces in Venice, so this is probably a bug, and may have been fixed in some versions. If you're...

My copy of the WC4 Playguide ends with a page advertising: The WCPedia scan of the WC4 Playguide ends just before this point. Does it appear in other people's copies? Being in the WC4 documentation, the advertisement should probably have mentioned that "The Darkening" was a space sim...

Yes. You should find that the "TRANSFER.EXE" and "TRANS2.EXE" programs are already present, and the Secret Missions reference cards (provided in PDF) explain how to use them. Also, you'll need WCSAV to save your wingmen from the dreaded buffer overflow bug. What GOG didn't do was provide a...

Thank you for the correction. If you do the instinctive thing and hold your breath, yes, you'll rupture your lungs. As long as you avoid that, you'll get 5 to 10 seconds of consciousnous, and after 30 seconds can probably be resuscitated without ill effects. Here, courtesy of TVTropes, is...

There was an infamous overflow bug that could kill Spirit or Angel, but it's caused by errors in the transfer utilities, not WC.EXE itself. WCSAV can fix it. All pilots can have more than 255 kills. The screenshots below didn't involve shooting down every opponent in the game, but they're...