Hey Zeleni. The image is a composite of photos but also with original drawing. I had to edit out people and work the underbrush and cliff wall around the bunker. I liked the substantial look to the concrete bunker. I also had to draw the interior image with a little borrowed from halls in Captain Archer's Enterprise (although about 1/2 was redone). There are a LOT of original pixels placed by yours truly to produce that image. It was my first offering to the project because I have never cared for the bunker in the original game (a jungle gym over a rabbit hole in the ground). In fact there are other images from BOTF I look forward to seeing replaced.

Having said that, I do like BOTF's research images but of course they also have to be replaced. As Matress said, I am working with Lightwave. I enclose an idea for the Energy Research graphic I am glad to take suggestions for improvement. It is a rework of the two above enhanced by new things I have learned about using Lightwave.

I suppose it could also be reworked into some kind of planetary defense platform.

Hey Bashir, your research station is awesome, great work indeed, i will place station as special building for one of minor races.

I know Bunkers were learning expirience for you but next time use only CGI's in photoshop or cgi textures for lightwave meshes. All images in Supremacy must be CGI.

Keep up the good work and one thing more I am a big fan of art work from old BOTF and i think science images from old botf are great, i don't see any reason why we should remove them. It's better for us to concetrate on missing images.

Thanks, I've been told we run a risk of legal action by using BOTF's material. Let me know if I am wasting my time. Actually my set of Supremacy images at home will probably be different than others because for me there are some drawings that really need replacing.

CB

There *is* a risk of legal action if we use any materials from BOTF. That said, BOTF is an old game. The company that made it no longer exists, the original source code for the game has been lost, the licence to make Trek games has long since passed onto other companies, the company that now owns BOTF (Atari) has all but forgotten that is does own BOTF, Supremacy is a fan-made, free to everyone game (Ie not for profit) and Supremacy has no other official existing or under-development commercial Trek games of even a vaguely similar genre to compete with. On top of that, Supremacy has been under development for a couple of years now, and we've always been open about our intended use of the files; we've always acknowledged their original source and have never claimed we made them. And we've never once been contacted in an official capacity about our use of the files. So whilst there is a risk that Atari or someone else may take legal action for our use of those files, the reality is that this risk is tiny. And the fewer files were use, the smaller that risk becomes.

We plan to keep a few of the best BOTF images for the time being, but only as a stop-gap measure until we can find something better to replace them with. We've always stated this fact, and we intend to stick to it. That doesn't stop people from modding their own games to re-include them should they want to though.

You crack me up, ice.

So here I go again with another attempt at artwork. These are for the propulsion Tech icon. I tried to match the background at the point it appears in the program. Unfortunately I discovered it scales differently than the image in the background folder. Pick your favorite anyone. They are completely CGI.

Enjoy... Or maybe not.

Coming right up. The first image is changed. If you look at diagrams of the warp cores, the top one is the "Matter reactant injector" and the bottom one is the "Antimatter reaction injector." The middle bulge is the dilithium housing, the white part is a "Pressure Vessel Toroid" and the bands around the PVTs are "Phase Adjustment Coils."

CB

Nice!

I do have one thing to mention though, and that's the fact that you've gone for a TNG-style Warp reactor. In the shows, the Phase Adjustment Coils as you call them were blue when turned on. Now since this is an image about propulsion, technically it would make more sense if they were shown turned on. I imagine it might make the image look a bit better as well, because the whiteness makes it look a bit washed out and ghostly, like the brightness of the white parts only has been set too high.

Here's an image from Ex-Astris-Scientia showing the coils turned on on the left, and turned off on the right. I reuploaded it to imageshack because EAS have an extremely annoying hotlinking ban.



Also notice the central chamber has "arms" that go out to the Nacelles, and these have an orange, rather than a blue glow. Your image doesn't have these arms, so you might also want to consider adding them.

Another suggestion, since you've had difficulty in getting the background to match up with the games background Nebula image, you might want to think about adding a background chart of something showing Warp power requirements or the like. Here's an image that might be useful to you:



Incidentally, the reason why you couldn't match up the background image is because the Nebula scales based on the current resolution of the game - in fact the whole game itself does. If you set the game to a higher resolution, the game will spread out the individual sections of the user interface so that all of the available screen space is used; the interface is scaleable based on resolution. The background image will stretches to fill the screen again. The opposite is true with lower resolutions too, and the various parts of the user interface with shrink and squeeze to fit in better. Resolutions below 1024x768 are too small for the game to effectively fit everything in though. Mike mentioned in the past that he would consider making a "lite" version of the interface for people with netbooks etc though, but only if there was enough demand for such a feature.

Putting the Nebula background in an image would therefore only look correct for a specific resolution. Anything other than that and the image just wouldn't fit correctly. So your best bet is either to make it transparent, or to use a background image like my Warp power requirements diagram idea.

I actually do have a blue colored effect in the coils but the exterior lightwave lighting keeps washing it out. It was a pretty cool one with a rippled effect. You can barely see it in the top one. It has been only slightly frustrating and I will get it adjusted right since you bring it up. I debated adding the orange power transfer conduits but eventually thought it might make the image too busy. I'll mess with it though. In fact in the original image, the green background polygon may imply the orange power conduits although not quite. That might be my answer. Put them in the background polygon image. BTW your Infranview program was a big help in this and I will probably use it to just make the background clear so that the programs background image comes through. It's just that it doesn't look good on the website. I redid my Avatar and as you can see it comes out black background instead of clear.

I looked at the old image a lot and it is basically three Federation-like warp coils with less detail. Perhaps they were trying to generalize them. The problem is that other than an episode about the Romulans and an engine room powered by a quantum singularity, I am not sure I have seen other power generation units. So I felt safe with sticking close to the original BOTF image. I decided against 3 warp coils because it was too much like the Federation subatomic simulators, and instead went with enlargements of warp core parts. I chose to make them somewhat different than the Next Generation Enterprise to avoid too obvious a Federation look (at least no more so than the original image).

Here is a question though. In the original image the center warp core was shorter, making it larger in the scene (Again, looks like one of the Federation subatomic simulators). Should I just go with shorter so that the core is more prominent in the image?

CB

Having green lines coming off of the Warp core to show the "arms" could certainly be the way to go. It would suggest that the core is under construction/being designed, which would also fit in with the theme. And the Warp core was always the most prominent part of an engine room, no matter which show you base the design on. So yes, I think making it fatter and shorter would be the best way to display it in the image.

By the wya, I just did a quick Google for images of alien Warp cores. I didn't find any, so I don't think there's any harm in basing your design on Federation ones.

It should not hurt to just look at it.

Just to be on the safe side, if you did do scans, attach the images in a PM to Captain Bashir, rather than post them on the forums. The publishers can't say anything about us illegally reproducing their work then because it isn't being publically displayed.

The Captain displays his email address in the email box under every post he makes. Just hover your mouse over the box and the email address will display. Alternatively if you click the email button, it will launch whatever email program is set as the default on your computer, which is most likely Outlook or Outlook Express. Whilst I don't know about other programs, if you've not set up Outlook before, click on cancel when the program asks you to set up your account and the Captain's email address will appear in the "to" box of the email window.

I think this is closer. Check it out within the program. Fits right in and the background is transparent unless the web site changes my upload . I hope you all like it.

that looks really good .

Yeah, good work Captain! I'll upload the image to Sharepoint. Got any more images in the works?

Thanks everyone. I do have more in the works. I'm working on the Tech images because they are the most prominent possibility for this project being legally "tripped up" and I DO NOT want to see that happen. I am getting faster and faster with the software and just had a breakthrough idea this morning. The next two weeks should be pretty productive. There may also be one more refinement of the propulsion image that occurred to me.

Hey, I just noticed everyone's image / color change, mine included. What's up? Like the logo.

CB

C.Bashir i will tell you what are my impressions on your last image and where you can improve it in my opinion.



On this image i like texturing, metal looks solid and shiny and coils looks excellent, really i like texturing but there are few things that can be easely improved. What it looks wrong for me is position of objects and their number on sheet, green wire constructions dominate over sheet and give feeling of overcrowded place, for my taste to much objects in one place. That's why when it comes to position of objects on sheet i like this image more:



In this image position and number of objects are excellent, green wire constructions give nice touch of sci-fi only problem is texture (coil) which looks like is washed out. So my advice for perfect image is combination of two images. Image one: textured objects + Image two: number and position of objetc. All this is of course my humble opinion.

I'll work something up for you to look at. Very good suggestions.
Bashir

The reason why your name has changed colour is because i've added you as one of the Supremacy staff members, Captain. I gave the Supremacy staff group a blue colour to help differentiate it a bit, so all staff members that are set as part of the Supremacy staff group now have blue names.

As for the logo, I didn't realise it would change people's avatars, and it certainly wasn't intentional. You can change it if you want, but if you have problems doing so then let me know and i'll double-check i've got all the settings right. I created the Supremacy logo based on the one that Mike added to the Supremacy download post. Shrinking it down to the 150x200 pixel limit caused problems with the transparencies though, so I manually edited it. I uploaded 10 different versions before I decided to just cut out the Star Trek bit and upload what was left.

Anyways, if you also go to the bottom of the main forum overview, you'll see three groups listed:



...It'll look *something* like that, but i'm one of only people people who use the Acidtech forum theme so unless you're one of those seven people, it'll likely look a bit different. But if you click the Supremacy staff link, you'll see your name is listed along with the other staff members.



*Edit - how come red smudges but blue doesn't in .jpgs?

@bashir- i am looking forward

@matress- you did nice job with supremacy logo

Thanks Zeleni, but you might not say that when you see some of the 10 versions.

Here's an animation of all the different versions.

Matress. I figured it out after the post. Found your PM (as you probably know). Maybe I'll combine the new avatar with my old one. I like the new one for now. At first I thought the new avatar was a gag like the one you told me about. How did you make its background match the web site color?

I notices something interesting this morning. The display at the bottom had names listed for "Users browsing this forum" and one of the "registered users" was "Google(bot)." Is this a username someone selected or does the web site know when Google is calaloging content for web searches? (If so I wonder how it became a registered user?)

Ok so just now I saw "MSN (bot)" Perhaps this happens all the time.

Here are 5 modifications to select from.

Some more nitpickings for you Cap.


Page 10
The paragraph about other stellar bodies is not justified on the right side.

Page 17
"special structures." -> "special structures".

A "bot" is the forum name for website search spiders; they're essentially the electronic "fingers" that search websites, such as Google, use to catalogue the internet. Every couple of hours the bots access the forums and make a record of any changes that have occurred since the last time they were on the forums. They then report this information back to their home site, adding any information they've collected to their search database. Without the bots, the internet wouldn't know our forums existed. In fact, it would be impossible to maintain an accurate, up-to-date search system without them, and websites such as Google simply wouldn't exist.

Incidentally, the admin control panel tells me that there are 50 bots registered on the site.

To make the background colour of an image the same as that of the forum, I simply set the colour as transparent. .jpg images can't handle transparencies, but .gif (Both animated and non-animated ones) and .png files can handle transparencies. Whether you're able to view the transparencies also depends on your browser, although as time goes by that becomes less of an issue. Internet Explorer 5 and early versions of Firefox had trouble displaying transparencies, but that's no longer an issue. Our original forums, before we split from Armadafleetcommand, incidentally never used to be able to display transparencies natively anyways. We updated to a more recent version of PHPBB when we migrated, and one of the new features of the udate was the ability to handle transparencies.

...God this makes me sound old...

...

Of the five images, i'd actually ask for a combination of number one and two - sorry about asking you to make yet another image.

I like the green line diagram of the first image, as it's easier to see the arms and recognise them for what they are; the green line diagrams of the other images just display the arms as horizontal lines, and in that position the arms could just as easily be the separation between two deck levels as part of the Warp drive.

I prefer the layout of the physical structures of the second image though, mainly because the unpowered Warp core is slightly more prominent. Incidentally, the green line diagrams of both the first and the second image are a different colour to the green lines in the third, fourth, and fifth images. I like the shade used in the first image as it is slightly darker and more like the BOTF version.

Hey MOE. I'm not actually sure which core you see as the "active" one. Would that be the one with the blue glow around the dilithium chamber or the orange/yellow glow? I took a guess. Here's the image. I am also adding an image for Biotech.

Interesting about the bots.
CB