My Kilrathi ain’t so good

The Wing Commander community is not the size it once was; as such we want to make this remaster as accessible to everyone as possible. In the future this will mean options like text to audio, settings for colour blindness etc. – but as an absolute first pass, we want to support as many languages as possible.

We looked it up in the archives.

While the full game supported French and German, the demo is missing many of the strings for these languages (and of course we have brand new menu options etc.) and we have no intention at stopping at just those original supported languages. Therefore we’ve called on our talented multi-lingual community to do some translation work for us.

L.I.F. has provided us with the French translations of the game, and our very own maestro MrCoffeeee has provided us with German translations. Maintaining these two languages going forward should not be too challenging as we can load the original string files. However, for the demo, they needed just as much work as all the other languages. So thank you, guys!

EmuMusicFan has graciously provided us with full Chinese translations (in addition to helping us test the game’s compatibility with older laptops).

Defiance Industries is hopeful about adding support for Spanish (although with the amount of work he has to do I’ve no idea how he’ll find the time).

So thank you to everyone in the community for helping us bring this additional support, and if you can contribute additional language support please reach out to us. We’d particularly love to add Ukranian if there are any speakers in the community.

Finally, I have been adding the Japanese support. Now, I would describe my Japanese as functional rather than natural. As such I’ve enlisted the aid of my Japanese teacher – this is a work in progress but should hopefully be ready in time for release. This is especially exciting for me as there were no Japanese releases of Wing Commander IV: not PC, not PSX.
It was supposedly sold, like Wing Commander Prophecy, by EA express in English language but with a fully Japanese manual, but there was no Japanese language version of the game.

Or, you can fly the stick with a little style

One other feature that came on recently which should also make the game more accessible is custom control mappings, as seen in the Japanese shot.

Honestly we’d hoped to leave this feature out of the demo, have it wait for the full game, and save us some time. Making mappable controls is time consuming and dull work (probably why Wing Commander titles never had this ability). But when it came time to expose advanced HOTAS functions it became clear hardware manufacturers don’t even try and maintain consistency with their axis mappings. There was no way we were going to support HOTAS/ pedals without custom mappings.

Most inputs can be mapped, you can assign buttons which toggle their behaviour to both axes and buttons, and have the option of inverting any axes.

Now, this feature won’t be exhaustive for the demo. A few less-frequently used keyboard commands are still not exposed to the player – but hopefully this should allow everyone to fly with the control set that makes them comfortable. And if you want to fly with aerial controls with yaw and roll switched be our guest you crazy people 🙂