First of All...

Mike, Mattress... Thank you So Much for working on Supremacy. Ive been waiting about 10 years since BOTF for a Sequel. Im thankfull its in the hands of devoted Trek Fans. You guys deserve a medal or nobel peace prize.

The only thing Im standing by for on Supremacy is The AI. I can live without the tactical battles... would love to have it but I can play the game without it. I was wondering how far along is the AI? Can it be our Christmas Present?

If you guys need help with it... Im planning on taking some C# classes soon ... and could help once I mastered the language.

Hehe no one has ever said that before. Thanks!

I have no idea how far along the AI is since i'm not a programmer. I'm just a guy that has learned to use the editor and am working closely with Dafedz to improve the ingame database - the buildings, the ships, descriptions, images, and so on. You'd be surprised just how much work was needed on that, though.

As i've said in a couple of recent threads, Mike was working towards a christmas deadline for the AI, but things have changed since then. There have been setbacks, breakthroughs, feature additions, installation requirement changes, and personal life stuff going on. Since Mike hasn't mentioned how the AI is going in quite a long while, it can only mean it's still a long way off, or he's wrapping a present for us. Fingers crossed it's the second one.

As for helping with the programming, send Mike a PM anyway. He's helped other people on the forums learn to code. I'm sure he wouldn't mind helping you learn. He's always happy to get a bit of help with programming the game.

We have also got a demo of the combat system available, although it is currently a separate, stand-alone, and very early version. You can find it in the downloads combat system demo section of the Star-trek-games Portal. You will need to sign up separately and sign in to the portal though before the download section will show up. We haven't yet figured out how to bridge all of our forums so members only need a single account to access all of the different forums and subdomains that we have, so unfortunately people need to sign up separately to each one.

I was wondering to what extent there is collaboration between the BotE team and Supremacy development?
I seem to recall reading that the BotE code was going to become open source (assume that this means anyone has access to it). If this is the case and I'm not dreaming it all up surly the development of the AI could be dramatically increased by using BotE's AI as a base line starting point.
I know the 2 games have many differences but presumably the AI's won't be too different???
Not being a programmer myself I don't know if what I'm suggesting is workable or utter nonsense, you decide

well the source is kind-of-open, i.e. if you want to contribute code-wise you get the link. and mike said he could possibly do that, so ...

I think The AI completion date is probably past Christmas... due to the economy and Mike's full time job.

It'll take me a long while to learn coding, so its going to be a while before Im of any use . Im doing the Supremacy website... trying to improve it... so Im learning Flash now... thats going to take me a week or two .... but hopefully by the end of the month I can have a better looking Supremacy website ... with a Flash Intro .

I cannot wait for Supremacy... and neither can the people at STGU ... This is and will be the best Star Trek Game Ever made! Thanks Mike and Mattress !

Probably. I've been pretty busy at work--we've had to let some people go, so we're all a bit overworked. If I have any vacation time left around Christmas, I'll take some time off to work on Supremacy, but there's no telling how long it's going to take. So far several of my ideas regarding AI have been a bit "over aggressive", meaning they are just too computationally intensive given the complexity of the game. I have to start thinking simpler .

Hey Jean, long time now see!

If you're looking for work, could you have a look at the download links on the Supremacy website? We've had some complaints that the .Net download links are out of date. Supremacy needs .Net 3.5 SP1 now. Mike is going to be releasing a game update soon as well (I finally finished my buildings and minor races update ) so you might want to grab the download link for the updated game version once he releases it too.

Sadly, no, the AI is still all in the theoretical stage at the moment. I do have some code written, but I'm probably going to scrap all of it and start over. I have this annoying tendency to be overly thorough, which means when I try to come up with AI algorithms, I keep wanting to make them too complicated. I have a hard time deciding what's okay to approximate. The other issue is time--unlike most other parts of the game, AI isn't something I can just sit and work on for a couple hours whenever I have some free time. I really need long stretches of uninterrupted time so I can get myself back in focus and thoroughly explore the problems.

On the upside, I had some cool ideas at work this week for how the Colony AI can determine what to build, and I'm going to work on it this weekend .

I don't exactly know how many hours per day SirP worked on the AI but he managed to do it from scratch in 4 months. But I think he really worked a lot of if not all hours on weekend at it.

No Jean, BOTE and Supremacy are written in completely different programming languages, and they are completely different games. Some of the concepts might be interchangeable, but the code itself would still need to be rewritten in the language that Supremacy uses, and even then it would still need to be tailored to the game, so Mike might be better off making his own code anyways.

The best way to think of it is like translating one language directly into another via a dictionary without having any real knowledge of the other language. The words might be right, but that doesn't mean the sentence structure or grammar is correct. Without getting those correct, what you've written might make as much sense to a computer as gobbledygook - which they're even worse than humans at understanding.

Aside from that, I like to see his cool ideas also .