Wings of Glory IBM PC MS-DOS Origin Systems 1995

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Wings of Glory

Origin Systems released Wings of Glory for IBM PC MS-DOS 5.0 in January of 1995. Wings of Glory is a cinematic WWI flight sim notable for its striking rendering engine, immaculate presentation and excellent audio. The 3D graphics and soundscape of Wings of Glory feature many subtle details, but its flight model, number of options and overall level of realism are not on par with Dynamix's Red Baron of 1990.

The presentation of Wings of Glory is akin to that of Origin Systems' own Wing Commander of 1990 and Strike Commander of 1993. Moreover, Wings of Glory employs the RealSpace engine of Strike Commander.

Wings of Glory Features

• RealSpace 3D engine (Origin Systems in-house proprietary)
• Gouraud-shaded 3D
• Texture-mapped 3D
• Sprite-based explosions
• Shaded smoke-trail effects
• 256-color VGA 320x200
• Cinematic World War I dogfighting simulator
• 40x missions some of which are branching
• Flight physics: roll, pitch, yaw, thrust, drag, lift, gravity
• Take off, climb, dive, land, bank, stall, stall revovery
• Ordnance: Vickers machine gun, rockets and bombs
• Dogfight, Stern attack, Side attack, Opposite attack, Overhead pass, strafe, glide-bomb
• 4x in-cockpit views
• 7x external views: overhead, zoomable Chase Plane, target view, panoramic, player-to-target, weapon, Lewis gun
• Toggleable cockpit interior graphics
• Autopilot (includes take off and landing)
• Navigation Map
• Time-compression & Time-burst
• 20-minute Flight Recorder (can take control of aircraft during playback)
• Built-in Mission Creator: Air Combat, Bombing Run, Random Mission, Gauntlet
• 18x aircraft (fighters and bombers), 3x zeppelins, 5x vehicles, 3x artillery
• Wingman commands: build and break formation
• A cast of 14 voiced (digitized speech) and animated characters

Wings of Glory was lead-designed by Bruce Adams, lead-programmed by Bill Baldwin, lead-drawn by Whitney Ayres, written by  Lisa Smith and composed by Laura Barrat.

 

Wings of Glory Technical

Wings of Glory was distributed on 1x CD-ROM and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via Wings of Glory Installation. The install size is 11 megs and consists of 28 files.

Wings of Glory requires an i80486DX 33 MHz CPU, 540K of free conventional memory and 6,225,920 bytes of EMS or XMS. However, a DX2 66 MHz CPU and 16 megs is recommended.

Wings of Glory sound effects supports Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster 16 whereas Wings of Glory music supports AdLib, General MIDI, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16 and Sound Blaster AWE-32 with Wave Blaster daughterboard.

Wings of Glory Maneuvers

• Roll
• Barrel roll
• Break turn
• Loop
• Split-S
• Immelmann
• Wing over
• Chandelle
• Scissors

cf.

• A-10 Tank Killer IBM PC MS-DOS Dynamix 1989
• Aces of the Pacific IBM PC MS-DOS Dynamix 1992
• Knights of the Sky IBM PC MPS Labs Microprose 1990

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