I'll post some of the stuff that is under development here once in a while.

April 28th 2009

This post does not show so much game stuff, but rather a bit on the programming of the game for anyone interested.

Making a game is not all fun programming and making ship combat systems. There are also lots of tedious jobs, like the one I'm doing right now.
I'm currently adding starships to the game, so far there are 3 civillian ships and the federation oberth class. This is the pain I have to go trough to add the miranda class:

1) I have to make up the base stats for the ship, like hull strength, armor, number of component slots, crew, deuterium capacity and usage, etc.. This is pretty ok since I got most of the details worked out (but they might need some tweaking later on), all the stats are under "hulls" on the trekwar wiki.

2) I have to create the hull class object, which is just an extension of the general Hull object:
public class FederationMiranda extends HullClass {

public FederationMiranda() {
super("Miranda class", "A lightly armed destoyer", "fed_16x16.png", "fed_miranda.png",
60, 25, 1250, 260, 230, 40, 10, false, 180, 5);

addFaction(Galaxy.federation);
addTechRequirement(TechnologyGenerator.BIO_TECH2, TechnologyGenerator.CONSTRUCTION_TECH2,
TechnologyGenerator.ENERGY_TECH2, TechnologyGenerator.PROPULSION_TECH2,
TechnologyGenerator.COMPUTER_TECH2, TechnologyGenerator.WEAPON_TECH2);
}
}
The code above defines the Miranda class hull, which images it uses, which stats it has, who can use it and what techs are needed to build it.

3) Now I need to create 2 small images, one of 45x45 pixels which is shown on the list of starships in the starsystem menu, and a 120x91 ship image which is used in the ship info window.
For images I usually just go to the memory alpha startrek wikipedia

4) I've already made all the schematic images that the game uses, these images are just a picture of a ship schematic with some boxes on where users can fit components to customize the ship. example: http://www.trekwar.org/images/screenshots/trekwar_shipdesigner_boomship.png

5) Since the slots on the ship are just 1 big image, I have to manually map the coordinates of each box into the game. So I just use the mouse cursor in photoshop and copy the x,y coordinates into the game:
federation_miranda.setSlotMapPoint(0, new Point(289, 462));
federation_miranda.setSlotMapPoint(1, new Point(335, 343));
federation_miranda.setSlotMapPoint(2, new Point(325, 243));
federation_miranda.setSlotMapPoint(3, new Point(297, 159));
federation_miranda.setSlotMapPoint(4, new Point(334, 92));
etc...



This might not seem so bad, but there are over 300 slots that needs to be mapped up, and editing images also takes some time.

Next post will probably have some more news and/or screenshots

I can't remember if I gave you the link or not, klogd, but Dadedz has already worked out stats for all the ships in Supremacy. (I think there will be something like 450 ships in the game, including minor race designs, aliens, entities, and monsters) I know you're a rival project to Supremacy, but the whole point of the BOTF2 Project is to be a shared resource for related games. You're welcome to use Dafedz's stats if you want just while you get your game up and running. You can always change the stats how you want later on. Just let Dafedz know you want to use them before you do so he knows about you. He might even be able to help you if you encounter any problems etc. a future time.

BOTF2 Ship Stats (Empires Only)

Good Evening,

I was also wondering if I may use dafedz' database for a Space Empires IV mod I am working on?

Regards,

GB

georigaboy would you like a host for your mod? goto star-trek-mods.com and pm me there.

Thanks for the tip, had a look at them, but I think the balancing for trekwar will be too different for me to use those numbers:

• Trekwar tries to only use canon ships, and therefor has fewer ships
• Ships per default have NO weapons, sensors or shields. This is added by the user in the shipdesigner.
• Since there is no trade/diplomacy faction bases bonuses are distributed differently.
• Hull Stats are already made, but of course needs to be adjusted during the alpha testing.

Georgiaboy, you're welcome to use Dafedz's database - just PM Dafedz to let him know of your intentions as I told klogd to do.

Dafedz might be willing to help you develop a new stats system klogd, if you ask him. And even if he's too busy to do so, he would likely be willing to at least give you advice on how to go about it. Just send him a PM. Dafedz is a really nice guy and is always willing to help people.

Maybe I can trick him into alpha testing this summer

...He also reads the forums whenever he pops up online. Somehow I think you just made it harder to trick him into doing it just by saying that.

The mod will not be finished for some time, as I am awaiting word from several people. I am 99% certain the Easter Update for Supremacy will be out. Between that and BoTF (would love a B5/Star Trek/Star Wars mod), it may be a while...

Thanks for the offer!

GB

Sis I read that correctly, turn based 4x mmo that free.

NERDGASM

Sorry had to be said.

Great Lord D

Just to make a little thing clear..
the game is NOT a browser based game. It´s just jigalypuff trying to confuse you


In other news... Seems people want localization in the game.. I guess this is the german crowd (16% of all the visits to trekwar.org was from Germany, only beaten by the US with 30%).

So when I get back home from Fedcon (Excellent convention) I´ll add language support.


To my german visitors I can only say.
Vielen dank vor die besuch und interessen, Ich bin genau in Bonn deutchland und habe nach Fedcon gewesen. Das war viel spaß. Mein Deutch sind nicht sehr gut, so ich mussen ihre hilfe haben zu trekwar übersetzen.

If you are German, I do apologise for misusing your language. My German teacher was never impressed

sounds like a job for Malle

grüße...!

I know it a server game, can we have the bajoran wormhole please?

Plans of Dominion Domination of Gamma Quadrant at least.

Great Lord D

Wormholes will of course be implemented.. It will be up to the person making/hosting the game if the map should contain them, and how many.

Woot.

So any minor races to conquer and so forth?

Great Lord D

Only Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian and dominion will be present at first. The game is primarily about strategy and teamwork, so the diplomacy part will not be as big a part of the game as say BOTF/Supremacy..

I might add minor races as a way to gain specific techs/ship hulls/starship components/buildings later on. But it will not be in the alpha, beta or the first release (1.0)

So Breen frigates and so forth for the Dominion lol.

Great Lord D

Well, since you make your own ship classes by using base hulls, each faction has to have at least 4-5 base hulls, to keep thing interesting.

So the Dominion did get the Breen Warship

List of hulls:
http://www.trekwar.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Hull

Need to think of the composition of fleet.

Grand Fleet equals 1000 ships, each grand fleet split into ten smaller fleets.

with 50 fighters, 30 breen warships,, 15 Jemhadar battle cruisers and 5 Jemhadar battleships.

That should be enough firepower.

Then depending on the map try to have at least 5 full Grand fleets in play at all time, three on the front and two for defense and consolidtaion.

Great Lord D

For botf? i have one half done

Booya, do you need help with web design? Yes I am proverbial master of all trades. I can post some ideas off any current screenshots you got.

A working minimap added today

Ooh...this is exactly the sort of thing that I always imagined Nemitor's Allegiance game would eventually have evolved to have.

I notice that you've got Hydrogen (Deuterium?) labelled as a resource at the top of the screen. Have you considered including Nebulae on the map? Nebula's could potentially be a source of Hydrogen (Deuterium) that players could harvest, or even perform research on. Ignore me if Nebulae have already been implemented, but there aren't any shown on the map. It would be cool if single Nebula's covered more than one sector.

I also noticed you've got a little problem with capitalization. For instance, in the right-most box box, you've got Owner capitalized, but Faction is not. All of the stats under that are lowercase, and then "Currently Building" has a capitalized "Currently" but a lowercase "Building".

I hope you don't think this is nitpicking, but what exactly do you mean by "Fertility" as well? If you mean the rate at which a system is growing in population, it might be easier to understand if you change Fertility to "Growth Rate"; Fertility could just as easily refer to food production or something else, so that little change might clear some potential future confusion. If you prefer to keep Fertility though, you might instead want to consider changing the number into a percentage as that would match up better as a description.

If you need access to any icons as you develop Trekwar, we can help with those as as well. Zeleni has just produced a number of emblems for the empires and minor races, which i'm uploading to our Sharepoint site at this very moment for him. These emblems include one for the Federation, which might make a nice alternative to your current fleet indicator. You can find the insignia, once i've finished uploading them, in the Sharepoint Ingame PNG Images Insignia folder. (Sharepoint's url's are incompatible with the url tags of the forums for some reason so I can't give you a direct link)

Keep up the good work klogd, you've definitely whet my appetite with this update. Matress wants more!

Edit - the images are now up on Sharepoint. I also created two new folders - Interface and Map Objects. The images they contain might be useful for you.

Yeah, You will get Deuterium by 1) Owning a system with a Gas Giant (and possibly structures to harvest or increase the yield).. 2) outfitting a ship (usually a freighter) with bussard collectors + deuterium tanks. The nebula is just not added to the map by the code that generates a galaxy


Yeah, the capitalization is pretty random at the moment those kinds of finishing touches will be done later (just some changes in the language file).


All 'Fertility' references has now been renamed 'Growth rate' in the language file and will be visible on next screenshot .)


Currently I'm not so very concerned with the images used, but hopefully when the project gets closer to beta the community will be more involved and hopefull help out a bit with graphics


Do you use images from BOTF? aren't those copyrighted?
Not that I'm one to talk as all my tech images are copyrighted paramout/cbs and lifted off memory alpha

Some of them are from BOTF, but they're only stop-gap images until we can replace them with our own stuff. We've never proclaimed that we made these images and we've posted usage info/licences on the site to show that none of the content may be used for commercial purposes, so it's unlikely to be a problem. And the Deuterium image for example isn't from BOTF, so you've got no concerns at all with images like that one.

...

I spoke with Nemitor the night-before-last on MSN. He says he's too busy at the moment to continue development on Allegiance and his team has unfortunately fallen apart. He hasn't given up just yet, but it looks like Trekwar might end up having no competition. But don't let that be an excuse to start slacking.

If you want me to have a look at the language file for you, I don't mind doing that. I've got plenty of free time at the mo. I only speaka de Eeenglish though, so don't expect translations.

Hehe, Im currently adding lots of stuff and changing the language file, but I would appreciate any help when I release the language files, code and graphics.

But you get to see the language file in alpha testing if you can't wait that long

Is that an invitation?

I renamed the resource icon image files that are on Sharepoint if they are from BOTF, so people know where they're from. Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to use them or not. If the image file has been acquired from BOTF, the image is now named filename (botf).

I could make it an order if you want?

I'd do it either way. Just ask Nemitor about how much I pester him for Allegiance.

...So of course i'll help Alphatest Trekwar for you.