15 Things You Never Knew About LucasArts' X-WING!

the x-wing franchise launched over 25 years ago and the series is still regarded is one of the best combat space Sims ever made it spans four games in total x-wing TIE fighter x-wing vs. TIE fighter and x-wing Alliance TIE fighter especially is highly regarded by critics and fans alike over the past several years the team has been hard at work at making an engine that could revive this old game by bringing it up to modern standards of graphics sound and modern inputs due to the nature of replicating something you start to learn all kinds of things about how the original worked PR 15 things you probably didn't know about the original Lucas arts classic x-wing first a few things you probably didn't know this game has had several releases the original game came on floppy diskettes and had two expansions also on floppy diskettes the expansions were Imperial pursuit which added a new tour of duty which for some reason was mostly about grain we received your grain human score and b-wing which added a new Starfighter new training missions for it and another new tour of duty later these three releases were combined into one product called x-wing collector's edition which came out on cd-rom included the game and both expansions and added voice over to the briefings bonus fact they got the original voice actor the plate Admiral Ackbar Erik bars Fallujah to reprise the iconic role you will draw on the assault by launching a new Pepito's at the breakers and lastly the game was released as part of a collection called x-wing collectors series which used the x-wing vs. TIE fighters graphical engine and ran in Windows going forward I'm going to refer to these games by the year they were released so x-wing 93 for the floppy x-wing 94 for the CD version and x-wing 98 for the Windows version all set okay let's begin x-wing had to pre-release demos the one most people are familiar with is the cutscene demo which just plays the intro cutscene but there was another earlier one which is more interesting this demo was basically a slideshow of the alpha version of x-wing and there are some interesting and rare details of how the game looked early in development check out this x-wing cockpit notice anything strange about it the game artists took screenshots of the original films and recreated them for the game here is one example from Empire Strikes Back pretty well done all in all if you asked me can figure out which shots from the film's these pictures were based on [Music] [Music] x-wings game engine is based on the engine from Lawrence Holland's previous title secret weapons of the Luftwaffe lovingly nicknamed swaddle this game lets you fly both sides of World War 2 originally x-wing was going to let you choose to fly on either side of the Galactic Civil War two just like swaddle did the concept was shelf 20 versus TIE fighter there are many elements from swaddle that persist in the x-wing series like the interactive in-game map the info bar at the bottom the time compression which would come back and TIE fighter also of note the use of historical missions tours of duty combat performance tracking multiple internal cockpit views and even a version of the film room called gun camp also the landing gear and flaps liver function and animation has a lot in common with the x-wings s-foils the game features several Easter eggs first freighter is with names that if you reversed them reveal a hidden message in the first mission of the first campaign you destroy a bunch of freighters which if we reverse their names you find out they're named after different video game companies like Sierra origin and microprose there are other examples throughout the campaign can you find them there are easter eggs in the concourse too for example if you run the game on December 25th you will find Santa Claus can you find Yoda Chewbacca et Elvis you may find Marilyn Monroe standing over the classic event another small Easter egg in the concourse involves music first a little side rant back before mp3 files in CD audio video games used music format known as MIDI which is basically just synthesized music and sound LucasArts pioneered and patented technology they called amuse which lets games dynamically generate in transition musical cues based on what was happening in the game this was most famously done in monkey island too but x-wing and TIE fighter both used this technology you can see it in use in the Concours if you mouse over the three hangers the music modifies itself based on where the mouse's for example over the training grounds door you get a jaunty tune but mousing over the dangerous campaign you hear the Imperial March it's seamless and barely noticeable and for a bonus fact a peripheral called the roland mt-32 was considered the creme de la creme of midi playback devices of the era and x-wing had special score files specifically composed to take advantage of this devices format however this war files only exists in XP 93 so playing the original floppy version of the game is probably closest to the musical experience the original developers probably intended if you want to learn more about the FT 32 LGR 8-bit Keys have both made great videos about it links below ok that was a long one moving on as I just explained the music in the game came from composed MIDI tracks and in some cases the game cuts the MIDI tracks short because a cutscene is over but sometimes the music composed was longer so there is some unused musical data in the game to be found by dedicated fans as for audiophiles the game has two characters that give audible mission briefings general de donna if an admiral ackbar the freighter akbar does the tour of duty briefing range and de Donna does the historical mission real yes once you complete a tour mission it can be replayed as historical so the mission files understandably have jus audio file has one crab bar one for tadhana what is interesting is that there are dual voice files for every single mission even for missions that can only be found in the historical missions so there are files for a cloud to brief you on missions that in-game Akbar can simply never brief you on is unharmed but to will be able to help cover the evacuation another bonus fact de Donna is voiced by Clive Ravel the man who voiced the Emperor in the Empire Strikes Back I'm not talking about the special edition the original you know when the Emperor had chimpanzee eyes seriously you can look it up that's real but not here to give you facts about Star Wars films so back to x1 when you complete tour of duty missions ribbons get placed under uniform when you complete an entire tour you get a medal I mean you're don't play a Wookiee after all it's a neat way to track your progress through the game at a glance by looking at your uniform the original game had three tours of duty and the expansions added two more for a total of five however the game art assets included ribbons for a non-existent six tour and room for non-existent sixths medal maybe they planned for another tour but never got around to it what's really interesting about this is that these exists in both the DAWs and Windows versions of x-wing that means that some artists had to reproduce these six tour ribbons knowing full well that they were never used and probably were never going to be used as by this time the franchise had moved on from x-wing and to other games and no new expansions were planned during gameplay if your ship gets damaged instruments can get destroyed during development apparently that was work done to add damaged sprites not just in the instruments but to the rest of the cockpit interior and to the Starfighter itself as you look around from the inside for some reason this feature was never completed but the external damage code can still be activated allowing me to show it to you it's a shame this was never implemented these look really great [Music] in swaddle you could click elements on the briefing map and a plate would pop up to tell you what that icon was like city or a squadron stuff like that this features somehow made it into x-wing so if you pause the briefing by hitting stop and mouse over ships you see the ships target ID card even though this was preserved through all versions of x-wing all the way from das to Windows it serves absolutely no purpose that I can think of but it makes me wonder why did they implement it maybe they planned on some kind of tactical planning from the briefing screen who knows in one mission historical a winged six you inspect containers and you're surprised to discover there are tie fighters hidden inside them and they launch and attack you but if you look closely at the briefing map there are two red pixels that give away the surprise this is because underneath the container icon is a TIE fighter icon that's sticking out a little bit out the sides this is probably an oversight as hiding specific icons from the briefing map isn't particularly difficult to do at the end of two or four you know after all the grain you're awarded a medal called the shield of Yavin however the cutscene shows you getting the Karelian cross which is the same medal you get for two one what makes this bug even worse is that it persists through all versions of x-wing all the way from das to 98 which means that because 98 has remastered graphics someone remastered the cutscene and because of a bug the game never shows it to you whoops whoops whoops a the culmination of the original game the third tour and in the climactic battle at the death star which has two missions the first mission as of clearing the area in preparation for the trench run assault and the second mission well it's the famous trench run however both missions take place on the same map but to hide the trench from the first mission the game just spawns you about 40 kilometers away now if you look closely at the horizon you can just barely see the trench in the distance but it's there so if you fly towards it for long enough you can reach it and you're actually spawned right on the same line as the exhaust port so if you fly straight at the trench you end up right at the exhaust port yeah you can shoot it with a proton torpedo but it doesn't start a chain reaction and the depth of your arm doesn't explode [Music] you many new players find the training ground maze to be the most tedious part of the game you don't have to do it but if you do you get flight badges and a promotion which perfectionists like me want to have on their uniform but there is a way around this a logic bug that lets you skip training levels to do it enter the maze and instead of going through the first gate double back and go through one or all of the gates of the previous platform and then go through the starting gate as you would normally this bypasses the level entirely do this seven more times and you have your badge and for a bonus fact the training grounds become hardest at level 11 so if you have no trouble passing that level you can continue advancing levels virtually forever but there is a maximum level limit that if you reach it the level indicator bugs out and rolls backwards this is an illusion though only to display is bug and the game continues tracking your real Evelynn the background and will show it to you on the debrief but that number also has a limit can you find out what it is might take you a while [Music] one of the releases I didn't mention earlier was that there was a Macintosh port of x-wing it featured new cutscenes new concourse graphics and an updated graphical engine running at a higher resolution this release was the basis for x-wing 98 and featured the same cutscene and concourse graphics however the x-wing 98 release is much maligned by some fans for several reasons the concourse while higher resolution doesn't look as vibrant and is generally a poor fitting style for Star Wars x-wing 98 also gutted the previously discussed medium you system and replaced it with non interactive repetitive Redbook audio tracks the 3d model is imported from x-wing vs. TIE fighter were not ideal just look at this Star Destroyer and this lambda Class shuttle I easily prefer the DOS versions they also removed Mouse flight support removed the launch and landing cutscenes and removed the pilot select feature all-in-all the x-wing 98 was a gutted version of the game and I cannot recommend it to anyone okay that was a bit of a side rant but I had to get that out of my system x-wing was made by a small team of passionate artists and programmers the missions themselves were primarily designed and written by two people who are also the game's lead testers to David's David Maxwell and David Westman David Maxwell was a tester on swaddle and David Westman stayed and made missions all the way up to x-wing Alliance throughout the x-wing mission files they left traces of who made which mission apparently Maxwell in the early missions just numbered them sequentially as evidenced by all these missions with his name on it and a number the game's lead developer Lawrence or Larry Holland made the frigate prime missions as those are named Larry 1 Larry - and Larry three tours four and five had coated into the file names what Tauron mission number it was which crafted the player was flying if it was an A or B selectable mission and another letter at the end to denote who made it w-4 Westman m4x well so did I miss anything if I did let me know in the comments I might one day make another video like this for TIE fighter but it'll be a long time from now hard to tell anyway if you want to learn more about x-wing virtual machine you can find more information on mod DD Facebook our discord and on my twitch channel links below so if you get a chance drop your socks grab a joystick and check out this old classic masterpiece and remember the force will be with you always [Music] you it's best-selling 2013 book grain brain the surprising truth about wheat carbs and sugars your brain silent killers so we ain't goin nowhere till we get some grain

Channel: Ras Talon

Views: 200,175

Rating: 4.8772564 out of 5

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Id: hA1-u5YhFNs

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/xendelaar]

Played x wing many times in the past and I didn't know it ran this smooth