So I was messing around in Photoshop, and came up with a (quick) design for the targeting computer that fuses the current (TIE Fighter-XWA-style) view with the original layout in X-Wing itself (where this design seems to be loosely based on the scans of shuttle Tyderium in ROTJ).

[i]I'm not necessarily suggesting that this should be implemented, but rather just posting it to show what an attempt to merge these might look like.
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In this case, the bar graphs from the original are used to represent the hull, shields, system, and speed of the target, along with labels to show the actual value, and aligned in boxes that roughly correspond to the original.

Note that in this example, the scale on the axis of SPD would need to be modified depending on the max speed of the targeted craft - i.e. a TIE fighter can't go faster than 150, and by my reckoning, the Missile Boat using SLAMs is the fastest possible craft max speed (I measured somewhere north of 432+), so this value would be based on the max of whatever that particular craft is.

I really like it!
I would make some modifications, though:
Speed axis should go from 0 to MaxSpeed, where MaxSpeed is the top speed that ship could reach by diverting all power to engines.
On the vertical axes, I would leave it from 0 to 100, since no other ships in the game, other than the player's, ever goes past 100.
For custom missions or game modes where we allow the AI to surpass 100% shields, I would just recolor the overflow, or make it have another bar immediately next to it for values 100 to 200. That would make better use of the screen space.
I think the part where you wrote "Sienar TIE/LN" needs to house, instead, the other information like current order and ETA.
I just fear that this will look two crowded or unreadable at these font sizes.

About this.

I would like to ask: how much of the current work done on XWVM may apply to the sequels? I feel excited at the idea of your laying the ground and have a good chunk of the job already done when it is time to move to Tie Fighter and, eventually, X-Wing Alliance.

Keep up the great work!

Much in the same way that all LucasArts graphic adventures used different versions of SCUMM, that were similar but incompatible between each other, we could say that the X-wing series uses different versions of the same flight engine (except for XW Alliance).

I think TIE Fighter was an evolution of X-wing, not a restart. The engine seems to be almost the same, only improved in every dimension.
I am firmly convinced that XWVM will at some point being able to run both X-wing and TIE Fighter campaigns, and because of that, I have been using definitions and structures (that weren't fully used until XvT) already for X-wing. So our version of X-Wing is already much closer to TIE Fighter than the original X-Wing ever was.
We are doing a lot of groundwork here first. Once that is done and X-wing is fully supported, I truly think supporting the first playable TIE Fighter missions will be a matter of a few months.

I would imagine that getting the artificial intelligence just right is going to one of the harder things about TIE Fighter, since there are so many more ships and fighters?

Yes. Getting the AI right will be the hardest thing. Especially when some stuff like AI orders and other mission parameters aren't totally documented.

This is beautiful. I grew up on X-Wing and Tie Fighter as well. Seeing this mod in development is a dream. Are there ways for fans to help the project in any way besides just spreading the word?

Another question: I realize the purpose of this mod is to revamp and update the original game. In the future, is there any room to add different flight mechanics like drift (see "House of the Dying Sun") or slide (see "Tachyon")? I always thought those were nice mechanics for space sim/space combat games.

Excellent work! This is amazing!

I sincerely wouldn't add them, these are star wars games and you don't see ships doing that in Star Wars, probably some weak side thrusters like in "Elite: Dangerous" would explain a few manouvers of the Falcon but you never see fighters slide like you see in the new Battlestar Galactica for example.

Once the demo is out, and if we aren't shut down for whatever reason, we will request extra help from willing hands to make models and the rest of the missing pieces to complete the game.

About extra flight modes, they really don't belong to the X-Wing series.
The fact is that X-wing is as much a space sim as Star Wars is science fiction. Very little.
X-wing is World War II planes in space. Ships move like in atmoshpere, forward, and without sliding or spining in place. All in all, newtonian physics don't really apply to Star Wars games.

If we ever reach the point to enable mod support, I am pretty sure someone will mod in newtonian physics in X-wing, though.

I completely understand. It was just a thought. I appreciate your work on this and I look forward to the demo!

(Wing Commander III as well as WCSaga: The Darkest Dawn features something like this for the Arrow and the Excalibur. Both games feature flight physics similar to those of the X-Wing games.)

Just a thought. Would it be possible if the blue holograms on your targeting computer turn red or something when u get them locked on target and in firing range? And if not locked on they turn back to blue. Not sure if that would look right though and might get annoying looking after awhile but it would let you know if you have a good shot or not. Kind of like the cross hair targeting system.

I remember that episode, it doesn't seem to me like sliding he has a bit of inertia for a moment then accelerates back after turning really fast (probably by cutting the throttle like in XvT), you could probably pull off something similar in E:D with the flight assist still on, it's basically like manouvers ace pilots are seen to pull off in old movies about WWI and WWII, it's not really sliding.
Sliding would change the balance of the game too dramatically, Tachyon and House of The Dying Sun are built arounf it, X-wing and its sequels are not.
Even Freespace 2 Open supports sliding technically but it's disabled in the retail campaign for exactly the same reason.

PS: What's cringey about Rebels?

Yeah, but the difference is that the missions they were in were designed around them presumably since they were in the "retail package" already (though with Chris Roberts you may never know, there are some design choices in WC3 that somehow make me think he was never a particularly good game designer in the first place), in X-wing and its sequels there was never such a feature and implementing it in the same way might lead to weird situation that have nothing to do with the lore of the games.

This is off topic, but I've always found Wing Commander III to be a terrible, terrible game, and the direction the series took after Privateer was, in my opinion, the death of it. How much was Chris Roberts' fault and how much was that of others I can't say, but as someone who really enjoys Wing Commander II and Privateer but hates Wing Commander III and Privateer 2, I have a very hard time understanding how existing fans of the series could enjoy the new movie-heavy paradigm.