Over ten years my brother and I went through a set of experiments (stop and go, turn, communicate) while probing the memory. We uncovered where the variables were, how to inject calls into the game functions, and how to sync the gamestate across the network, so we can fly the story missions together.
My favorite finding is that the camera lives in entity slot 0x3D, which is possibly a "3D" reference by the original developers.
You can play it at https://fireflyk64.github.io/dosbox in browser. If you own Wing Commander, drag in the installer since no game files are hosted. If you don't, the page will load the original DOS/3Dfx version of Vega Strike, before I open sourced it. I upscaled and redid DOS Vega Strike art using AI, but it now has multiplayer and a similar feel.
I'll be in the lobby for the next few hours if anyone wants to fly together.
Disclosure: I also used AI for the final step to help compile for the browser and port our TCP networking stack to WebRTC with voice and solve a few lingering bugs.
[–] spiritplumber 2 days ago
guess what me and kuprin who met on the privateer remake forum are a couple, and i got citizenship <3
miss you!
[–] n0th3rwcf4n2026 1 day ago
Anyways just wanted to say I appreciated all the work you did and thought it was cool to randomly run across you here!
[–] spiritplumber 13 hours ago
what i DID do is a bunch of accurate wing commander 1 and privateer ships for Space Engineers, just yoink them on the steam workshop :)
[–] frikk 3 days ago
[–] daniel_rh 3 days ago
However, that original WC-only 8+ years of figuring out how the data segment was organized and how to call original functions was all by-hand hacking. It was indeed like cutting through a dark forest with no guide.
[–] cadr 3 days ago