yeah, thats what I meant. I just used "kill" to loosely - I meant, "Corrupt"

All I did was tweak some ship and weapon stats. I didn't corrupt anything, I just want to revert to the original settings.

nvm then. My Ignorance and idiocity at its height.

i still suggest ripping it off the cab file.

BLAST!! I'm truly disappointed in this game.

E6300 @ 2.8 7x400
x1900xt 256
1gb DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 1:1 with CPU

Max quality. 4x AA. 15-40 fps in battle.

The ships look great... But thats all I like.

Let’s start with what I expect from a new computer game. First, I expect it to be released without bugs. Blizzard is a perfect example. If a game has bugs, they don’t release it – even if it means missing the holiday season. As a result, every time I’ve picked up a Blizzard game it has run perfectly. This is a minimum. It’s not enough to say that it can be fixed with patches. If the game isn’t done, then a game developer has no business asking anyone to pay money for it. I resent paying money to test out their alpha product.

Beyond that absolute minimum, I expect a game that’s is at least as good as the games that came before it. Therefore, what I expected from Legacy was something that combined the best features of Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command, along with superior graphics and multiple camera angles. Instead, Legacy borrows some of the worst features of those games, and leaves out many of the good ones.

Example: Legacy borrows the concept of a square “playing fieldâ€￾ from the SFC series. Last time I looked, space didn’t have borders where ships get caught like flies in jam. Somebody should have told the Legacy programmers that computers can manipulate really, really big numbers, so it’s entirely possible to create a universe with light-years of blank space surrounding planetary systems. The architectural problem of large areas of space was solved five years ago in the FREE game Darkspace. That Legacy reverts to the SFC-type battlefield is nothing short of insane.

Example: Legacy borrows the flight simulator model of movement from SFC2, rather than the battleship model of movement from SFC3. But starships are not planes – they’re ships. (Hence the “shipâ€￾ part of the word “starship.â€￾) Unlike jet fighters and bombers, battleships can move backwards when necessary. The “starshipsâ€￾ in Legacy fly like biplanes. That may make the game easier for an 8-year old to play on a TV console, but it makes for very dull combat.

The rest of the game just isn’t up to par. There’s no excuse for the teeny tiny planets. There’s no excuse for the inability to crash into the planets. (You simply stop and drift to one side.) There’s no excuse for the “red meterâ€￾ damage for enemies, rather detailed damage displays. There’s no excuse for the lousy set of default controls. There’s no excuse for the inability to customize them. It’s simply not a valid argument to say that these things can be fixed in future releases. Maybe they can. But if the game isn’t finished, it’s doesn’t belong on the store shelf.

Eh, to each their own, I guess. I agree that the game should be finished, and Legacy is pretty much finished, but just poorly implimented. Every game has bugs, even Blizzard games (as such, there are dozens of patches for each one of their games). While they are well known for delaying games over and over again to fix bugs, Legacy was delayed itself for several months. Unfortunately, the offical Legacy forums nearly rioted. The fact that they were attempting to release the game in time for the holiday season is likely just a coinicedence as they had repeatedly said they were hoping to release it for Trek's 40th anniversary which was this year and the major source of complaints when delays were announced.

The square borders you allude to, though, are a requirement for the game. While space is indeed infinite, the game would break down if such restrictions were removed. Considering that you can simply warp out, an infinite stretch of space would make skirmishes so increadibly boring that I can't even come up with the words to accurately describe it. You'd simply fight until you take damage, and then warp a bazzilion lightyears away to repair. Enforcing borders for your ships to stay in ensures that combat WILL occur, which is the point of the game. If you want a realistic starship experience, you're best bet has (since it was announced anyways) and always will be the upcoming Star Trek MMO. Legacy would be unimaginably broken with unlimited freedom of movement, but the MMO will offer better options. But Legacy is a tactical 3d space shooter. Combat is going to be inevitable due to the restricted space for combat. Remove the restriction and a player can simply engage their warp drive and then go afk for 3 hours. And it's not like the combat areas themselves are small. They're HUGE.

I'm not sure why the verticle movement is so restrictive, however. Even console games make use of full 3-d movement. Just look at Ace Combat, for example. While I don't understand the hicups there, it's not like it's absolutely game-breaking. You can still move up and down, but you simply can't loop. Ironically enough, however, I have inverted my Starship on Legacy a few times. I agree, though, that 100% freedom of movement would have been best.

As for the inability of crashing into planets, the simple fact that there is collision detection in place certainly says that the ability for it to occur is possible in the game. Instead of forcing the ship to slide to the side, it probably would have been just as easy to instead make the ship explode. The trickiest part of that whole mess is the collision detection itself which is obviously in the game. That tells me that ships not exploding when encountering space objects means it was a gameplay decision and not a programmitic problem. Perhaps due to the nature of the game it would be too easy to collide with other objects which would prove rather frustrating to players. For example, starships have full 360 degree fields of view at once due do their sensors. However, a full 360 view like that is pretty much impossible for this type of game. Legacy is essentially a 3d shooter game with starships. As such, if you run into a wall in a third-person shooter, you don't explode. But Legacy has more to deal with since in most shooters, you're typically shooting infront of you and not to the side, behind, above, or below you and so... you're not exactly looking at where you're going.

I'm not really trying to argue, but I think people were expecting Legacy to be something different when all of the information about the game pretty much led me to expect the game I received.

And another thing... I still don't understand why this game is being compared to other Trek games. It's entirely different. Plus, the list of "good releases" as far as Trek games go is rather short. This initial release for Legacy is superior to most other initial Trek releases. And while the Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command comparisons keep coming, those programs have been out for a long while and have had their fair share of patches. While Legacy does seem to have some bugs, every user is getting different ones. There isn't a single bug that is being experienced by everyone. Speaking as a programmer, that is completely baffling and makes it very hard to squash.

You can definatly compare it to dominion wars game its exactly the same i think. Plus dominon wars had upgrades. Bug ridden game tho which is a shame.

Bridge commander is compared because we were hoping it was bridge commander like, just even better with new tech like pixel shader stuff and that. Also command personally the 4 ships was a good thing. But in reality i hate using more than 1 ship. I like to just worry about 1 ship and that ship gets all the glory instead of sharing. Hence why i play 1 v 1 skirmish games.

Duno why starfleet command is compared tho they were crap and are very different. As in 2d combat tho i think sfc 3 had 3d combat view or somit. Its starship combat is long and drawn out and in my opinion nothing like trek ship battles.

Skeet, did you see my post about needing a zipped copy of the odf directory? Think you could help me out?

Also, did anyone else not realize there has been a v1.1 patch out for Legacy since Demember 7? I swear I remember looking and not finding it before. I have no idea what it fixes, but it's at bethsoft.com.

Yes i knew of a patch its for multiplayer only. Tho it really doesnt help it much.

About odf directory. As long as you didnt mess about with the db.pak file in main dir of legacy any changes you made to the odfs wont matter as all the info from all the odf files are in db.pak file.

But if needed i think i can send some (maybe all) odf files. Depends tho cos i fiddled with em but forgot to regenerate the db.pak file so changes are included.

I can help you out if you need it mstrobel, I haven't done anything with the game files as of yet so I still have the vanilla stuff. I'll talk to ya on MSN later if you still need the files.

Already sorted mate.

alright then

The command price for ships in the campaign SKYROCKETS when you hit the TNG era. You're talking about dropping atleast 10500 points for a simple scout. The points you gain don't really scale to match the points you have to spend to keep your fleet "up to date".

I tried modifying the command point costs for my federation ships, but they don't seem to be taking. Is there anything I need to do to get them to take?

Every game is likely to have some bugs, but there's a difference between cleaning up a smattering of unexpected problems that most users never encounter (which is what Blizzard patches) or issuing updates that add features (which Blizzard also does), and releasing a program that is so buggy that it's difficult to play.

I don't agree. They're getting even more complaints now that the game is out. There's no excuse for releasing a game that not's ready to be released. Especially not the fact that people want the game to be finished. If (as if often claimed) games are an art form, this is the equivalent of a director releasing a film that lacks important scenes, merely because people want to see it.

Uhhh... and the enemy ships would meanwhile be doing what? Playing tiddlywinks? If you can warp out and repair then they can repair, too. And probably faster if they've got a base or planet nearby. And, of course, you'd only have limited spare parts. I'm sorry, but don't see how that would be a game liability. In fact, it would add strategic depth, which is something the game sorely lacks.

So, let's see, that would be like real space combat? Once again, I'm not sure that would be a liability. In any case, the design problems you're talking about were solved in Darkspace; check it out; last time I looked you can play it for free.

And that's the main problem. The design decisions are fatally flawed. The game is exactly like a vintage 1985 flight simulator -- just with fancy graphics. I just don't buy that a game -- even a console game -- needs to be playable by dummies. The trick is designing a game that is easy to play for beginners and has additional depth for repeat play. By contrast, Legacy has a highly painful initial experience and then lacks any real depth to justify the pain.

What can I say? I expect more. I expect every game company to release games that don't have major bugs, are easy to play and have depth to them. If they're going to charge money for them, then the games should be worth the money.

Just because we've been abused by other game companies isn't any reason for the abuse to continue. It's just plain wrong. Game companies have to stop doing this and deserve all the complaints that they get -- and more.

The mere fact that a variety of bugs have surfaced clinches my argument that the product wasn't ready to be released.

The variety of bugs that surfaced is just that, a variety. Short of a open public beta, there's not much you can do to find all the possible bugs. EVERY game I've encountered has issues like that somewhere; some have more while others have less. The BotF2 project doesn't have a problem with an open beta because we're not going to make any money on it. But companies have the whole "profit" issue to deal with. No profit? No company. No games. I'm not saying that Maddoc couldn't use some better QA or some sort of limited beta that is highly regulated, but considering the rainbow of bugs and the fact that they are different for every user, there's not much you can do about it until the game is released. Plus, from what I know, I've heard that the budget for the game was relatively low which further hampers the development and testing to go into the game.

I was thinking about your "infinite space" all morning. A computer is anything but infinite so creating something that is infinite in something that's definitely finite is a problem. I came up with a few possible solutions, but they break down in "realism" at some point. The only way I think you could display an accurate representation of an infinite playing field is if there is nothing else but your ships in empty space. You could add objects, but there would have to be a set amount. If you attempt to dynamically add more as the player moves further and further through your game, you've essentially included a memory leak into your game on purpose if you attempt to keep track of them all. Or, you could program a set pattern in when objects will appear, but that would make space predictable which it is anything but.

You could only keep track of a few hundred, but if the player travels a good ways and then doubles-back, there's a good chance that objects he's passed before no longer exist or exists elsewhere. But "blank space" is not a realistic solution. The universe does contain objects that you will undoubtedly come across. Plus, this is a representation of Star Trek, the Enterprise comes across a new celestial phenomenon every show. Blank space would be increadibly boring and inaccurate.

There are a few other possible solutions which only get more complicated and still lack a whole lot of "realism". While that game's solution to the problem intrigues me, there's still a limitation in it somewhere, gaurenteed.

Also, there's something else to consider. For the sake of analysis, let's say Legacy's playing field was indeed infinite. Let's say that the opposing player warps away and you intend to follow suit. If you are off by even one degree in your persuit path, it would be statistically improbable to be able to find each other again. The fact that there are three different axies that you could be off by, the game will likely end when the players quit instead of a combat solution.

But, assuming you could lay in the perfect pursuit course, you would have to persue immediately or the opposing player would have to stay put until you show up. Otherwise, you'll be in the same scenario as before: needles in a giant haystack.

I'm curious as to what this game of yours does, particularly because I've never heard of it and chances are there's a very good reason for that.

So... I'm still not sure what you mean by the whole infinite space thing. It might be unrealistic to limit the players in a box. But it'd be equally unrealistic to allow for infinite space with no celestial objects, not to mention far more boring.

http://startrek.bethsoft.com/forums/ind ... topic=4587

Read about odf changing and why it wont change, usually because all you did was odf files and not the important db.pak file stuff.

Azh:

Darkspace isn't my game; it's just a game I played for a while. It had other design limitations that led toward optimized play and ended up developing "gang up" behavior among players, which may be why it never took off. It was an multiplayer RTS with a pretty good combat model; worth looking at to see how they solved these problems.

I wasn't arguing for an infinite space model. That would be excessive. But what you could do is set boundries that it would be impractical to warp to. For example, in Darkspace it takes about 2 minutes to warp from one planetary system to the next within a cluster. Warp is about 100 times faster than traveling by the equivalent of impulse, but it is possible to "impulse" from one planet to another (but it takes about an hour.)

Similarly, it is possible to "warp" orthogonally to the cluster and I suppose you'd probably reach a barrier at some point, but it might take hours. Conceptually, movement between clusters takes place at star gates, but that's really just a place where "new" ships are purchased and spawned. I'm not sure if I'm describing it correctly, but the system worked.

I have to admit that I'm not particularly sympathetic to the problems of Bethesda's budget because I'm privy to how much it costs to hire original series actors for a game project. (I got this information while working on a story for CGW.) Suffice it to say that getting all five captains cost the equivalent of at least 5 programmer-years (and probably more).

Now, that's more than enough budget to improve quality control and add depth to a game. It might be argued that the presence of the five actors was important from a publicity viewpoint and thus worth the investment. But I don't agree. Take the analogy of moviemaking. Would you rather have a great Star Trek movie starring unknowns (or maybe "B-list" ST alumni) or a lousy Star Trek movie starring the five captains?

Obviously, the best scenario would be a great movie starring the five captains, and the very worst scenario would be a lousy Star Trek movie starring unknowns or B-list alumni, but that's not the trade-off here. My argument is that Bethesda made the wrong decisions in terms of budgeting because they forgot that they're making a GAME. It's my view that the GAME is all important and everything else is window-dressing.

Same thing with movies. I want to see a strong plot and engaging characters; not just fancy SFX and a parade of cameos.

Keph.

Map sizes like the space in a mission on klingon academy or the x2/x3 reunion games. Would have been nicer than crappy armada sized map "space". I think.

I'll have to give that a shot, then.

The one thread of hope for Legacy lies in the fact that the modding community are descending on it like a host of shoemaker elves. And it appears that Bethesda was smart enough to leave a lot of hooks for modding. The possibility exists that a much better game might emerge -- almost like an open source programming project.

In fact, when you think about it, SFC3 didn't really hit the mark until the Dom Wars mod, SFC2 hit its stride with OP (which though official was more or less a mod), and BC with the KM mod. Maybe what we're seeing here is something bigger and better than a monolithic development project from a single vendor.

Maybe the mod community will turn this turkey into an eagle. That's my hope anyway. I certainly think Legacy has possibilities as a machinima engine, especially once modders create some ultra-rich models with great damage effects. The main limitation here is an overly simplistic camera scheme. I'm hoping, though, that it will be possible to fix this by creating a "null" ship that can fly around in order to zoom and pan over the other ships. This is one case where the limited 3D in Legacy will work quite nicely.

So I guess that I'm starting to warm up a little on the game, first impression not withstanding.

Shame tho about performance problems as if you consider the gfx and a good pc like mine, you really should be getting 30+ fps in a battle with nebulas etc.

But the performance isnt there, i dont think its optimised very well for pc hardware compared to say mad doc just made it the more xbox 360 friendly instead. And we got a quick compatablity without fine tuning.

Yeah, I did wonder about that. I was getting about 6 or 7 FPS on my medium-powered card. What's frustrating about that is that what's supposed to differentiate this game is the quality of the graphics -- which then doesn't work well on one of the platforms.

I think there was rumors of not even releasing it for PC, but Bethesda decided that not enough people owned a 360 to make it worthwhile. Personally although I'm glad they did produce a PC version, it's certainly damaged Bethesda and MadDoc's reputation by doing so.

360 version out it seems, head over to official forums to see proof if need be. And mini user reviews.

Here's a portion of a review from startrek-gamers.com

They gave the PC version 71% btw

As an XBOX360 title it will be great, however this game should never have been released on the PC in its current state which makes the game look like a late beta build rather than a final build. Overall the graphics do look nice after you are forced to do some tweaking with the actual game files to get rid of MadDoc's dumbing down code, The game does shine through as possibly one of the best graphically looking game's out of the box for Star Trek for the past 10 years, but you have to alter the game files to get it to really shine.

Ultimately though this is another game which will be played once and then shelved, with useless multiplay connectivity for PC many PC gamers in the trek franchise will be wishing Activision came back. Bethesda have got to pull the stops out for their next PC Game offering to keep the playerbase alive, they have shot themselves in the foot with this one, and as for MadDoc, they should never have been allowed to develop this game.

gamerankings.co.uk who compile all reviews from across the net (like Gamespot) give the following average scores:
PC - 54%
XBOX 360 - 79% (although only two reviews so far)

3rd party utility to remap controls.

http://startrek.bethsoft.com/forums/ind ... entry95536

Considering some of the comments from developers that I've seen, I can only conclude that Bethesda had a tight timeframe that they wanted the game out in which is likely the cause of most problems with the PC version. I don't know if they were forced by CBS or what the deal is, but it's pretty clear that the XBox game is more solid and the PC game is pretty much a mirror image of it, literally in all aspects, in terms of controls and gameplay.

Considering the tight timeframe, I'm not really surprised that the XBox version is better off. Just about every Computer Science student will tell you that when finals are approaching, you quickly find which things you can cut corners on to get the final project turned in. It's unfortunate that things were rushed out. However, it's better to cut most of the corners out on the PC than the XBox. Spending about a month on a good patch will fix the majority of the PC issues while that's not so easy to do with the XBox.

If Bethesda supports Legacy, I'll be ok with it. However, if we've already seen the last patch for Legacy, I would have to concede that Bethesda probably wasn't the wisest choice in handling the Star Trek license.

I do find it strange, however, that Bethesda hired three different code shops to produce three different Star Trek games for different platforms. It appears Tactical Assault is the smoothest of the three (I just got Encounters, eh... it's ok at best) but I don't have an XBox360 to judge Legacy on.

From what i hear, 360 version has some problems too. Live is giving problems with messages about their connection when it shoudlnt i think they said. Also seems due to the way f key on pc was used for having two uses. The 360 version is a bit messed up in this regard. Also docking problems and achievments problems.

Sounds like what could have been potentially a brilliant game should have been released a few more months down the line. We can always rely on the modding community though?