FROM: Rear Admiral Tolwyn, CINCWEAPONSDIVISION
DATE: 2006.24.12

The Wing Commander Saga team wishes all of you a merry Christmas.

As a little present, we would like to give you a sneak peak "behind the scenes" of what makes Saga tick. Saga utilizes Theora for its cuscenes. We've provided some information about Theora for those of you unfamiliar with it. 

Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies' VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3's lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., H.264, Xvid and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

While VP3 is patented technology, On2 has irrevocably given royalty-free license of the VP3 patents to everyone, letting anyone use Theora and other VP3-derived codecs for any purpose.

In the Ogg multimedia framework, Theora provides a video layer, while Vorbis usually acts as the audio layer.

Theora is named for Theora Jones, Edison Carter's Controller on the Max Headroom television program.

One of our goals in creating Wing Commander Saga is to help players feel like a tiny part of a much larger fleet. Combat will take place on both a small- and large-scale basis. Capital ship battles and torpedo strikes will make prominent appearances throughout the game. We've included two small video clips to give a feeling of what they will be like.

01 | 02

- Tolwyn