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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer

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Privateer! I absolutely loved that game - I must have racked hundreds of hours on it as a kid!

I liked WC:Prophecy a lot too, but the trade aspect of Privateer was what really got me hooked. Also, the sheer size of the Privateer universe was mind boggling at the time. That and the graphics almost seemed like witchcraft given PC capabilities of the day.

Indeed. Though revisiting it I find it's brutally difficult without a small deadzone joystick and careful choices early on. Like stay in Troy, Meson blasters, afterburners, run away from most fights, scout don't patrol, etc.

Also lack of in flight saves and close asteroid spawning makes it tough even with the best ship and shields.

I mean, half the fun was that you had to run away. There were some fights you were not going to win.

Lack of saves really enhanced the risk aspect of those fights too. Something lost in a lot of games today IMO.

If you remembered the advice given in the original wing commander that the safest speed to traverse asteroid fields is 250, they were far more survivable :)

That is the magic number. My frustration was that enemies so often appeared in them, and could not be escaped. One bad asteroid collision and the weakest enemies were only a few lucky shots away from destroying my ship.

My friend and I would team up. He would fly with the joystick and operate trigger weapons. I would run the missiles and other keyboard systems. We'd also track system to system trading with notes, etc. Much debate on which missions to choose. Those were good times. We'd play for literally days, leaving only for food (we were old enough that we were independent enough to get away with this but young enough to have nothing else to do).

Wing Commander II was just amazing. Had a long, fairly well thought out story with meaningful twists, emotional moments, tension and accompanies by a great soundtrack.

I will see you in heaven.

Some remastered bits of soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD6YpHD5O0&list=PLFB7GcAB-z...

> Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization.

Surely Elite and Elite II deserve more of the credit there?

Elite and Elite II, played them both, however I give the nod to the Wing Commander series and specifically Privateer for one simple reason. They did not making flying difficult let alone everyone's badge of honor in Elite in making your first successful docking with the rotating stations.

Still my favorite space game ever had to be Starflight though Starflight II came close. Not the same play style but early games on computers during that time were such a marvel for how much they did with so little

Starflight

Starflight! Probably the first video game I ever got day-and-night absorbed by. Still one of my all-time favorite games. Not even Star Control 2 had a universe that felt as large as Starflight - and it came on 2 360k floppy disks!

I feel that Special Operations 2, with the Morningstar and the plot around Jazz, was probably the high point for WC2.

The ending was certainly cathartic after everything that had happened from the beginning until that point.

Oddly, I feel like Prophecy may have had the best fleshed-out flight system, but I wasn't a huge fan of the story. WC4 had the second best ending, though! Only behind SO2 in terms of relieving you of the frustration.

Privateer is definitely an interesting game, and it's really weird that they never really tried to follow that model again. Privateer 2 is best not brought up, and by the time any theoretical P3 could have been in development Origin was already dead.

Privateer was a lot of fun. I remember playing it and the sequel. I'd be interested to see more behind-the-scenes of Privateer 2. It also had FMV and (from what I recall) had this sort of campy sci-fi TV movie feel. Great game, although I'm hesitant to look at it without the lens of nostalgia.

Well Chris Roberts is back with Star Citizen , 500 million dollars for an eternal beta of nostalgia.

I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series... It totally captivated me as a kid, but I sure as heck didn't know who was responsible for its creation. It just sort of existed as a different realm without much thought of the behind-the-scenes

> I... did not know Chris Roberts was behind the WC series

His name was on the cover of the box haha.

But yeah him being the showrunner was one of the primary reasons the original Star Citizen scam^W kickstarter went so well. The space sim genre/community was so dead back then that at that point we would've thrown money at anything.

> Privateer was a lot of fun.

You'd probably be interested in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (2019). It's extremely Privateer-influenced.

The first game, Rebel galaxy, is also highly entertaining, though much less Privateery.

I remember Privateer 2, with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander show.

I loved Privateer. I found an iOS game called Galaxy on Fire which is basically in the same spirit and it took me back.

I wonder how many people remember Privateer 2 with all the cut scenes with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander TV series?

I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.

dosbox has a setting to lock the clock rate at a chosen rate for those older games that are timing dependent like that.

the clock rate isn't quite enough--because more enemies do cause it to advance the program counter more... really you do want to measure how long the frame took and sleep the interim

That's what the turbo button was for.

It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and src/cpu/wc_net.cpp

the way you run it is... run a retail copy of WC.EXE with the branch of dosbox3d then do wcnet startserver <port> on one machine and wcnet connect <ip addr> <port> then both machines just run wing commander as normal. and the first one can start the first mission and the other connects in and gets to play as spirit. You can play through the whole campaign this way

Now I almost regret never having really played WC back then. Suddenly having the ability to play a round or two in co-op sounds pretty amazing and it's the first time I've seen DOSBox used to augment a running program by peek- and poking around in its address space. I feel like this almost deserves its own post.

Hi! Long time no see! Looks like you're still kicking a lot of ass :D :D :D

Both WC 1 and 2 depended on processor speed, but WCII had a slowdown feature (I believe it was Ctrl-+ and Ctrl--) that allowed you slow it down.

I got so good at WC1 by playing on a 286 and then being able to speed up my reflexes on a 486. I could read every bitmap.

Just for your information there is Privateer Gemini Gold (a perfect remake) free to download:

http://privateer.sourceforge.net/

Based on the VegaStrike Engine (a really cool game by itself):

https://www.vega-strike.org/

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