Iv been lurking on and off these forums since they were first set up and the project was a single one. I had a brak for abaout 2/3 years and I have come back and see this has a lot of potential after looking at the alpha? Though it seems rather dead with no updates for 2 years? Is it still being worked on?

Yes, the game is still being worked on. I've actually answered this exact same question several times over the last few weeks!

We plan to do a release later this year. I can't be more exact than that at the moment. We've posted lots of image and video updates recently though to prove the game is still being worked on. Just look at any of the threads that have been posted in recently. We also have a Youtube channel and a Facebook page.

I'm excited to hear that

So what needs to be done before we can officially call it alpha?

From what I've gleaned from the threads, the two major missing components are:

Combat engine
AI


Not saying those are anything short of major obstacles but is that the focus of current development or am I missing something else?

Right now it is more about getting diplomacy and espionage up and running.

Alpha stage begins when all features are complete, and it is the time when we will be refining features and game mechanics. Ideally, there should be no major changes after hitting Alpha stage--it should be mostly tweaking and balancing. When we are happy with the game, we will freeze the feature set and enter the penultimate Beta stage. The Beta stage involves getting as many people testing as possible so we can find and eliminate whatever bugs remain. No new development happens in Beta--it's just bug fixes. The final stage is the Release Candidate (RC) stage, which is the last chance to fix bugs before release, and the point at which we will be perfecting our deployment strategy (creating and testing a proper installer, making sure the update service works properly, etc.). Then we release.

We will likely ship some extras with the game (e.g. some "official" mods). Those will probably be developed on the side during Beta stage and finished by the RC stage. The game's RC stage will serve as the Beta stage for extras.

Wow I can't believe you guys are still developing this Mod! I thought this was dead & buried long time ago until I found this forum. I wish I had some programming skills to help you guys out.

BOTF is easily my favorite 4x game & I always go back to it after being disappointed by modern day 4x games like Sins of Solar Empire, Galactic Civs...etc these games are ok but are missing elements that make BOTF a classic, things like the playable races, ship designs, background story, Borg random events you name it. Although The game had massive issues with the famous memory leak & other undesirable elements yet many people still play it! Myself included!

In regards to the combat system, I found an amazing Star Trek mod for Nexus: Jupiter Incident. If you ever need inspiration for your design look at this:

Gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOoedZ8qR9I

If ST:Supremacy had this engine for combat I would cream in my pants.

Welcome to the forums. That really is a great battle video. Awesome ship graphics and graphics in general. The old game didn't show shields like that. My one thought is that such a long battle keeps others (in a multi-player game) waiting a long time for a turn that includes a sector battle. It would be fine if it was just you against the computer though. One idea that has been batted around here was a game of Tetris that comes on (where you left off) while you are waiting. I dubbed it Trektris (complete with sounds like a photon torpedo when a row(s) is complete and vanishes) etc.

Ooh I like Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. I've never managed to get past the level where you have to sneak up on the Gorg station though. I've tried walkthrough guides but no matter what I do I always get captured and destroyed before I can get close enough to the station.

Anyways, what do you mean you thought we were dead and buried? We've been going strong for seven years now lol. And there were three other projects that i'm aware of before us (Although they all died). Did you know about us when we were still a part of ArmadaFleetCommand.com or something? We split from them due to server problems - and their server imploded two hours after we split from them - literally. AFC rebuilt itself in the aftermath, and if you haven't visited them recently...DO SO NOW. The guys over there are still working on patching the game, and whilst the memory leak still hasn't been fixed, many, many other problems have been fixed. There's now even a multi-installer that lets you simultaneously install and switch between every BOTF mod in existence. And they recently managed to modify the energy screen so it can display significantly more buildings than it used to. You'll need to sign up to their forums (Or try to remember your password lol) to access the downloads.

Welcome to the forums, and sorry if it sounds like i'm sending you away.

I have not kept up to date over the past few years on developments. And I do mean years

I'll definitely keep a close eye on new updates from now on. I'd be happy with a mod that just simply makes BOTF original stable with really big battles & maybe a few ship texture upgrades.

Heading over to AFC right now...

The battles could be much shorter I agree & you could even use the same turn based approach as the original but just keep the eye candy

Ha I like the trektris idea but I imagine not everyone would like that. If it were me waiting during combat I would just alt+tab & start browsing the net ( Hopefully the game would not crash )

I like tetris, so trektris would be a cool feature in multiplayer games
I also wouldn't mind if the battles were long, because we all like to see st ships in action.
The viedo that Killerp posted is awesome. I like the part in the beginning when the warbirds are approaching the fed station and in the distance you can see flashes of light, which are fed ships coming out of warp. It would be cool if that kind of detail would be implemented in supremacy (intercepting ships warping out into battle scene at the beginning of the battle). I also like that other romulan ship in the video.

Actually, the flashes you see are the ships raising their shields.

[/end nitpick]

Mattress, you're coming up on 7777 posts!

It's over 9000!

...Oh...wait...not yet.

Well yeah, didn't you lose quite a few with a server crash? Imagine anything near 10,000 posts! whew!

Actually, I lost a boatload of posts before you even joined the forums. We used to have a whole forum section dedicated to the development of Gavin's game (The original BOTF2, or at least our version of it, since there are at least two other BOTF2 projects that I am aware of that died before ours came into being). It included the very first post I ever made on these forums. Jig intentionally deleted all the posts because they were no longer relevant. I never did know how many posts I lost.

Most forum software doesn't actually remove the counts from users when the posts are deleted. In fact it is possible to edit that part of the database to give people whatever value you want without the matching posts to go with them. Now that being said there are some case where that might not be true and my assumption is based on other sites I have seen and run, so it might not be true here. Server resets would however cause lost post counts because the database is frozen (backed up) prior to maintenance or a crash and will be reset to the backup state. Again just my experience and it might not be true here in this case.

Generally when a new post is made it goes to the user table in the database and does this: "userName_PostCount = userName_PostCount + 1". It just incrments the value by one, it doesn't actually count the number of posts.

I remember those days... such a long time ago. I was so excited for the game, my first post was right when Gavin promised to release a demo that day. It never came...





I wish we had a backup, it may no longer be relevant, but there's probably a lot of good info in there. Then again, the Allegiance forums are hidden, since that's dead too. So many games die before being completed...

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Actually, phpBB3 does. Most other software I know of does too. It's trivial for the message delete function to simply look up the post's author and decrement their count by one. If the software didn't do so it would be incredibly easy for someone to simply post a message, delete it, post, delete, post, delete, etc. etc. etc until they have a thousand posts.



It's standard when you're going to update the server to first put the forum in maintenance mode or take it completely offline. This stops users from being able to do pretty much anything, therefore you don't have any randomly missing posts. Crashes of course may result in some corruption, but you probably won't lose too much if you make good backups.

Well since many commercial games often die before completion, it's a miracle if any fan game ever gets completed.

True. Matress and Skeeter keep bugging me every few months to release the most current build of Allegiance (since it was functional and pretty fun), but I was not happy with it. No where near done, too much hacked together code, bad graphics, no advanced features, etc. etc. etc.

Re: Post Count

Hrrrm so it does (tested it), weird I must have had it disabled or something on the version I was running (actually both). And yeah deleting post counts would be simple too. Regardless I'm pretty sure the count isn't actually linked to posts but rather just incremented or decremented as you said (though its possible I'm wrong again).

Anyways back on topic:

How many BoTF2 projects were/are there?

Hi there everyone, first post - w00t! A-hem. Sorry, now that that's out of my system: I've been lurking on this board for a while and downloaded the latest supremacy build in the summer. I've played around with it a few times but found it hard to get enthusiastic about it because of the lack of any AI to play against, and as there were references to there being a working build released "later in the year" I decided to hold off sinking too much time into it.

Well, it's virtually 2012 and no release, so I decided rather than sit on my hands I should step forward and try and offer something to the project instead. I'm conscious that a large number of threads are very dated now so wanted to jump into this one as a current one than post in a thread that was last posted in two years ago!

I've read through the "how you can help" thread and I can offer play testing (natch), text proofing/checking (the current build is riddled with mistakes), voice acting (am a trained actor with a news reader British accent - good Cardassian and Romulan ) and writing skills as I write creatively for a hobby. I'm a big strategy game fan and have played tons of 4X games, including BOTF to death, so I also feel comfortable suggesting and commenting constructively on gameplay features and balance etc.

I don't know how much help you need in any of these areas so if the project still needs assistance then could someone reply and let me know how to do so? Thanks!

Greetings Illuminatiprimus and we're glad your days of lurking are over! So generous to offer all your talent. I am guessing that since it is close to Christmas, the forums are a little quieter than usual. People with family, etc.

As you might have guessed, Matress and Kenneth_of_Borg direct a lot of assignments. mstrobel is the programmer and has executive say over most of the project although he encourages free creative work. They should be along with comment shortly.

Thanks Captain Bashir. Not sure if talent is the right word, I have skills but I'll let others decide how great they are

Yes, a big supremacy welcome Illuminatiprimus. I am currently working on the Cardassian intro video. Next is the Dominion. If you want please try your hand at writing and or voice acting. You could take a look at the intro videos so far.

http://www.botf2.star-trek-games.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4121&p=64640#p64640

Great - will post in that thread. Looking forward to pitching in

If I remember correctly:

"BotF2"
Supremacy
BotE
Trek War
Allegiance
New Beginnings

Though I might be missing one or two.

Those are the current ones, but I also know of two other projects that died before Gavin's game even came into being. There was one being made by a French guy that I think Jig knows a little about. It apparently collapsed after major development team in-fighting. The other one I only know about because someone mentioned it once a long long time ago.

Anyways, welcome to the forums, Illuminatiprimus. One of the problems with the way we work is that we're frequently editing old posts with the latest info. That's just the way we do things. This unfortunately means that people don't always notice updates though, and also means the post dates are totally unreliable. I do try to leave notes within the posts when I update them to say when the last update was though.

We do try to post updates in new threads too though. We also have a Facebook page you might be interested in because we're frequently posting updates in there. The most recent update on there was four days ago, where Kenneth mentioned the Cardassian intro video will be completed soon. Check Out The Page

Random question: How far till the alpha

Hopefully soon cause I'm getting tired of asking that. Hopefully some time next year, cause it's bel.. what...almost 3 years since the last update.