Wing Commander Academy

Wing Commander Academy is essentially Wing Commander II with the freedom for the player to create his or her own missions and hone their piloting skills. Unfortunately it comes with very little storyline or background information. A small ‘bonus’ is the introduction of the Confederation Wraith and the Kilrathi Jrathek – experimental fighters which are later used in the special operations of Wing Commander Armada.

Wing Commander Academy is currently (since 27^th August 2013) available from gog.com. Extensive background information for Wing Commander Academy is available at the CIC. Note that this game is not related to the animated series of the same name in the sense that the two are set in different periods and locations of the Wing Commander universe.

Manual

The Academy manual is available as a PDF, thanks to Sheppard.

Music

Mad Hatter has converted the MIDI from the title and credits sequence and simulator room from Wing Commander Academy. Most of the other MIDIs in the game are the same as those in Wing Commander II.

For the CIC’s 25th birthday party, FekLeyrTarg rendered the Academy-specific MIDIs using a Roland SC-55 sound font.

Speech

Academy uses some of the speech from Wing Commander II for Kilrathi communications. For Confederation communications, copy the contents of this comm pack or copy and rename the following speech files from Wing Commander II into your Academy directory:

Miscellaneous

Have fun fiddling with the ships from Wing Commander II and Wing Commander Academy with Mario “HCl” Brito’s Ship Editor. In 2013, HCl also worked with Howard Day in hacking Academy to fly a Hellcat fighter – the cockpit based on the display from Wing Commander III and the sprites based on the model from Wing Commander IV – using the older sprite-based engine of Academy. You can follow their journey at the CIC forums and try the Hellcat fighter for yourself.