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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

I remember playing and enjoying Wing Commander (and possibly Wing Commander II) back in the day. But just a few short years later, X-Wing came out and blew Wing Commander out of the water. True 3D (flat shaded, but still infinitely better than sprites), and of course, set in the Star Wars universe :) Followed shortly afterwards by Tie Fighter, which introduced Gouraud shading IIRC.

Then X-Wing vs Tie Fighter came out, it was the first to use a 3D accelerator so the graphics were better, but it wasn't that good compared with the previous one. The series kind of recovered a bit with X-Wing Alliance (back to a mission- and story-driven campaign, and with much better art). And then it stopped.

TLDR: I miss X-Wing and Tie Fighter and wish there were new games like that with 2018 technology :(

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Check out Freespace Open http://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Source_Code_Project_ind.... The engine for Freespace and Freespace 2 was open sourced and has been under continuous development for ~20 years. They've remade the rendering engine about 3 times to keep up with AAA titles. All of the ships have been re-modeled and textured to look great. You can play the original campaigns with the updated engine and graphics but there are also about a dozen fully voice-acted campaigns made by fans, some of which like Blue Planet and Silent Threat Reborn are utterly amazing. For $4 on GoG, it's hard to beat the shear number of hours of (really impressive) play time you'll get with the community improvements.

I went looking for youtube videos showing the current status of the game and unfortunately most of them are from when the 2014 models were released. You need to dive into the forums for the most recent models (they are supposedly in the process of packaging a 2018 model pack though). This video is using the most recent engine and models combined with some models from the Blue Planet player made mission pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wABQXJx7xFo

Blue Planet, especially War in Heaven, is absolutely amazing. Excellent storyline, great missions, great voice acting, and a devastatingly emotional experience. It's a pinnacle of gaming for me.

You even have mods for Wing Commander and Star Wars, though they are unfinished. http://scp.indiegames.us/mods.php

I thought Wing Commander Saga was complete, no? http://www.wcsaga.com/

It features a prologue of 5 missions and a full 50 mission campaign. That's on par with regular WC games, I would say.

I don't know that the X-Wing series really "blew Wing Commander out of the water," though. The two series ran concurrently and were constantly one-upping each other. Wing Commander III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander_III%3A_Heart_of...) came out the same year as TIE Fighter, but sported SVGA graphics, full-motion video segments between sequences and actual name actors playing the various characters. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter brought multiplayer to that series in 1997, but Wing Commander had gotten there three years earlier with 1994's Armada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Armada).

(None of which is to say that the X-Wing games weren't innovative and great, of course. Just that Origin gave them spirited and worthy competition.)

Both series were consistent, huge sellers for their respective publishers, so it's not like one drove the other into the ground. If anything, they both fell at the same hurdle, never really making the jump into the 3D-game marketplace that the newly emerging GPUs of the late '90s made possible.

I always found it wryly amusing that Wing Commander III had bigger name actors in it than the Wing Commander movie did.

I have very fond memories of Armada, alongside Microsoft's Allegiance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(video_game)).

Oh man!!! I was one of the beta testers for Allegiance, and I loved it, but I never heard of MS actually releasing it. Thank you for the link!

Allegiance is the one game I keep coming back to after 18 years.

I was very pleased to see Microsoft redo the license so the community could put it up on Steam.

X-Wing was the future in terms of using 3D, but it was there too soon. Wing Commander (not to mention WCII) looked better than X-Wing IMO because the ships had more geometric complexity.

One thing that did bug me about WCII was the lack of feelies; I still have the ship identification posters from WC I, and making the manual in the format of an on-ship magazine worked great.

I got the WC II special edition, which had roughly 15 3.5" floppies in it, and until I opened the box, I assumed much of the weight was from feelies, but instead it was a single cardboard keyboard reference card / install instructions.

Wing Command III really brought the two together. If you played it in VGA instead of SVGA mode, you'd get the smooth/speed and even texture feel of WC2. SVGA mode gave you really cool detail at a lower framerate, unless you had like a DX2/100 PC.

WC4 was really the blow out engine .. so much smoother and they removed the cockpit view entirely for a much more functional HUD. The story was also much more complex.

Prophecy was the first game with actual 3D acceleration, with extra effects if you used Glide/3Dfx. The story wasn't as good, but the graphics were nice, even though the actual flying/shooting felt a little more arcade like (you could ram and bounce off of ships).

I think I still have some of the old CDs .. might need to fire them up in Doxbox or wine.

I actually have my WC I/II floppies and all expansions, but I suspect that if I found hardware to hook up a floppy drive to my machine, they would no longer work (such are the vagaries of magnetic media). I have WC 3 and 4 and Prophecy, but I don't think the prophecy DLC I purchased once upon a time will work anymore...

There is a guy that is updating XWing game to use modern 3d acceleration with detailed 3d models and FX. https://youtu.be/TLrqtmKazpI Also, try Star lancer. I think that is the most modern game that follows the lineage of XWing and Wing Commander, and had a decent history.

Yeah, I started with X-Wing and Wing Commander always looked like a step back regarding the actual game mechanics and graphics style, too.

Shooting at enemies was more fun in X-Wing and TIE Fighter because everything seemed to move faster (except the laser bolts, see next point) and you had to aim with much greater lead, one of the most important skill elements. The production values of X-Wing and TIE Fighter were incredible, whereas the style of Wing Commander felt generic (I and II) or like Starship Troopers (III).

But just a few short years later, X-Wing came out and blew Wing Commander out of the water.

I think they mostly flew by each other and then went into separate directions and ended up not competing all that directly. X-Wing came out between the releases of WC2 and WC3. X-Wing continued down the 'space combat simulator in the Star Wars universe' path, Wing Commander became 'movie/adventure game with some space flying stuff'. WC3 had two hours of video, Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and only got crazier from there.

Tie Fighter collectors edition (Updating to 640x480 iirc, also including enough missions to last like months of gameplay) was a mainstay for me for years.

X wing vs tie fighter was much later (1997 to tie fighters 94). It was both inferior gameplay IMO and a bit graphically behind, being not really much better than tie fighter while other things had gotten much better (descent and quake and mechwarrior 2 all better imo while half life and unreal werent released much after XWvTF)

There's dozens of current free-to-play games out there with that sort of technology, plus others like Elite Dangerous that even do it in VR.

But has any of them really captured the feeling of the originals, in your opinion? Not to mention not being set in the Star Wars universe... I have a similar problem with FPS, after playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, I haven't been able to enjoy any other FPS :( They're good, they're OK, but they're not quite ET.

None of them ever will if you've already played a Wing Commander-style game. You can only have that "first" moment once.

There's good news though. Hopefully none of them will force me to change CDs every few minutes.

Wing Commander was great because it was one of the first of its kind and it worked on very modest hardware, it didn't have extravagant system demands.

I've played recent games that follow the Wing Commander template almost exactly but they feel dull and repetitive because the original was dull and repetitive.

One adaptation that actually adds on the original is the new X-Com series. They took out a lot of the fussy useless work, like allocating ammunition per soldier (even per pocket!) and refocused the game on the good elements from the original, like the turn-based combat system.

I'm sure you could do the same with Wing Commander but you'd have to throw out a lot of garbage and work hard to polish, refine, and improve on the original flight mechanics.

W:ET was great. Real teamwork emerged in multiplayer, which is hard to find. Is anyone still running servers?

edit: yes!

https://www.gametracker.com/search/et/3000/?

Client download here (Win/Mac/Linux!):

https://www.splashdamage.com/content/download-wolfenstein-en...

Maybe it'll feel dated. But it was really a wonderful online multiplayer game. I thought I was done with gaming as I was bored of single player. This game turned me on to online.

I absolutely loved it, especially the vast array of maps. To once again defend Minas Tirith from the Nazis...

There is also ET: Legacy, an open source implementation of the game: https://www.etlegacy.com/

But I don't really know if it's any good.

Edit: looking at it I now realise that the game already was released as open source, the ET Legacy project is based on it and fixes bugs and stuff :)

The only modern game I’ve played that has strong teamwork elements is Battlefield 1. When you’re on a squad that works together it makes all the difference. If your team has multiple such squads you’re unstoppable. Great game.

Agreed! Bring back the X-Wing franchise! The X-Wing VR video clip in the Disney app in the Oculus store makes me think an X-Wing game could be the blockbuster that brings so many people into the VR fold that it becomes mainstream. A bit like the early X-Wing games were a reason for people to buy PCs :)

The Kickstarter is done, but these guys have an interesting premise in the works:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/impellerstudios/starfig...

Thanks, I was going to post about Starfighter! My name will be in the credits, can't wait to see it. Loving the attention to details the devs are bringing to the table here.

We're really getting spoilt for choice between Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen and the likes.

Can we really include Star Citizen in that list? I'm one of the original Kickstarter backers, and I still don't have a playable game yet.

I'll grant that I'm amazed by its ability to make a six core Haswell E, 32 GB, NVME 1080TI system feel sluggishly old, however I have been able to go flying at least a few times. The first time I tried a planetary approach was pretty amazing.

I should add that I got to meet Chris Roberts when he was in Melbourne a few years ago. I thought that was pretty cool, as I absolutely loved WC and Freelancer way back; very nice guy also. So after that and my backing level I'm not really capable of being objective on SC. :)

Elite Dangerous is miles ahead of it in overall completeness though.

I think that's arguable. I'm also an original backer, and I've spent at least 50+ hours playing Star Citizen in some form or another.

Sure, it's not the complete experience, and there's no real single player story yet, and the vision has evolved and changed and the scope has gotten somewhat ridiculous..

But so far everything I've seen has convinced me that it's ok to keep waiting, and I'm excited to see what it eventually/hopefully becomes.

In the meantime, I've got plenty of other things to keep me busy.. :-)

It looks nice, but they mention "REALISTIC SPACE COMBAT", but the in-game footage looks like the ships have a maximum velocity, rather than a maximum acceleration. How could it be considered realistic? It's more like WW2 dogfighting.

If it turns out as good as it looks, I may have to figure out how to install windows on my machine...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/impellerstudios/starfig...

huh. I might be interested in backing that. I feel like there's a big void in space sims. The last one I really liked was Strike Suit Zero. That game was awesome, but it also got INSANELY difficult. The last four or five missions I could only beat on easy and they were still insane. The music and story were really good though. It felt like being inside the new Battlestar Galactica series, although much more colourful .. and the music wasn't quite as good.

There was an indie Starfox type game I saw a few years back on Kickstarter but it never got the funding it needed. All the other stuff out there is really MMO which I'm not really into. Give me a single player set of campaigns with a beginning and an end.

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