Meh I'll keep the existing news post up. It's front page so should generate traffic. Don't worry about the technical double-post.

I've updated the article with the new info. Any word on a banner image?

no word on that yet. There's only the old banner image from main portal site: http://star-trek-games.com/images/banne ... er8bit.png

It's better than nothing. Added it to the news post.

alright. could you add a "..and can be downloaded in the download section here" or something like that to the first sentence so that people know directly where they can go to to download the new release?

Personally I would've thought "Birth of the Empires 0.71 Released!" would've made it obvious...

The last paragraph already mentions that the download is available within the posted link. I've re-jigged the post to move the link up.

no, I meant to put either this link: http://star-trek-games.com/index.php?op ... nfo&id=434 or just a short "you can find it in the downloads section" hint there. Of course, it's clear with the headline in place , but it's a bit superfluous to link people to the thread here and then link them back to portal download page to actually get the game. I think it'd be better to directly link them to the downloads section in the first place. As you might have noticed I removed the older direct link (the svn.star-trek-games.com/birth/.. one) here in this thread and replaced it with a direct link to the downloads section on portal site.

The thread to discuss the release doesn't need to appear at first sentence, you could put it back again where it was before.

PS: I need to see if I can make portal articles myself, would go a bit easier for the next time I guess .

Oh, I didn't actually look at your downloads link. I thought it was stored on your German site.

Link updated.

7347 downloads in one year (since Alpha4refit release), not bad..

strangely enough only a very small fraction attends the forums...

Yeah I've played many other games which have been like that, only a small number of the players actually take the time to come to the forums to get involved.

Possibly it's also because of the missing trek content. I'm here for a long time now and I can remember that back when we were at Alpha2-4 stages, people were flocking in here and posted quite often (compared to now) which one can see when having a deeper look at BotE General chat forums. And even there I had to remove nearly as much posts as there are right now in that forum because of trek content that I could not un-trek .

Just wanted to drop in and say that I downloaded this recently. Been following the BOTF2 movement for many, many years, and this is a top notch game. Especially for an alpha.

One thing I'd like to see is combat, and possibly some influence over it. Not 3D combat or anything, but just display the ship graphics on screen (2D), and the calculations as the battle took place, that would add a whole lot of extra coolness and suspense to the game. It isn't satisfying to see a News screen with the results. The how would be good to know.

Not sure if you play Civ 4, but in the event log, it shows you the result of each round of combat. Something like that would be cool, and I imagine not too difficult to code (by avoiding the 3D graphics and manipulation of battles).

Not sure if it is your to-do list or not. One other thing, ran this in WINE, and while it ran, the font was tiny and hard to read, and it was slow to respond. Any plans to compile this using MONO instead? Might give a decent performance boost. (Also, my 6 year old computer could be to blame. )

I was reading about the game and I noticed you moved to Visual Studio 2008, but I didn't see anywhere which language you are using. I haven't had a chance to peak at the code, but just curious as to the language. Being mostly a web programmer and a linux user, not sure if I would be able to help or now, but I'm looking to get more into the compiled languages. Maybe I can lend a hand with that combat screen I mentioned.

MONO isn't possible, because BotE doesn't use C# with .NET. We are using C++ with MFC (unmanaged code). But if you are interested, you can find the whole sources at Codeplex.