Hi All,

I was wondering if somebody could explain what the game plan is of the consortium is?
I came across this site as i'm a big fan of botf, its such a playable game.

I see there are two games at different stages of development Supremacy and Birth of Empires but what is the difference between them?
I understand the issue of the licencing so i can see the need of a change of name but aren't they fundmentally the same game?
If they are it seems ther are being developed as two projects, instead of one with two content package one star trek and one not star trek.

Please could someone please enlighten me?
I would like to help development in one or another if i can.

Also where does star trek universe fit into all this as that seems the start of a clone of the two above?

Hey penfold, welcome to the forums!

To understand the reasoning behind the two games, you have to know the history of the forums. Without going into a long monologue where I basically demonstrate how long i've been on the forums though, the two games are basically the result of two separate teams producing two separate games based on the same premise at the same time, who then became aware of each other and decided to work collaboratively to improve each others chances of success.

BotE has been around the longest, and was initially developed exclusively in German; the translations have been a more recent addition. BotE was developed exclusively to be a successor to BotF. BotE was also developed with input from German fans and players - English input and feedback has only been since our forums became aware BotE existed. You could therefore arguably say it has been developed with a smaller user base. BotE is NOT a Trek game though; all Trek references have been removed due to ongoing fears over copyright issues. That said, the only real difference is in the race images and names. Everything roughly still follows Trek to some degree.

Supremacy on the other hand started off as a university project, and not as a BotF successor. It ballooned and morphed from there. It has been developed almost exclusively through these forums, and, arguably, because of its English-speaking development, has always had a larger player base from which to draw feedback. Supremacy is currently built very much with Trek in mind. It's a highly moddable game though and could easily be modded to cover any other scfi series you can think of.

The BOTF2 consortium developed as a way of supporting the two games. And we have in fact diversified - we are supporting other games too, such as the online games Trekwar and Star Trek: Allegiance. (Allegiance is currently not under active development, however) There are also other games such as Star Trek: New Beginnings (But we haven't heard any info from Jigalypuff on that game in a looong time either), and we will be supporting the development of other games that forum members may decide to develop in future. Several forum members have said they would be interested in developing their own projects.

The consortium basically works to pool resources; any resource produced by the team - 2D artwork, sound effects, music, 3D models, texts/databases/translations, anything - is free to use by any of the projects we work with, as long as credit is given for the work. This has a number of uses, as it reduces the amount of work needed to produce any one game, it increases the potential outlets for our artists to display their work, has created a network of contacts in a wide range of artistic fields through which to draw resources, and we've got a large userbase that is willing to both test and provide feedback on anything we produce.

...

As for which game is best, there is no answer to this. Supremacy and BotE may have similarities, but they also have differences. Each game has its own unique feature sets - some of which may not have been implemented yet, especially in Supremacy's case. BotE for example has a reactive galactic trading market, whilst Supremacy has a built in auto-updater and great support for high resolution displays and Windows 7.

Your best bet is to try both games and see what you like best. And if there's anything you like or dislike, tell us! Updates for both game are under development, and feeding back to us helps us to produce updates that actually improve gameplay and add useful features or change the things that are broken.

So these forums need YOU to download and playtest the games, and then to provide feedback. If you're looking for other work then your best place is to start Here.

...Same goes for the other 4776 members.

Welcome penfold_99
We like it when someone shows up and gets uncle Mat to
tell us the story again.

kenneth

The name "Consortium" btw. was a funny idea by Mike to call the baby. I find it very fitting.

@MoE:

You should put your post into a new FAQ section of this forum. I think you explained it very good, nothing to add.

Thanks for the welcome Matress_of_evil and clearing up my confusion.
Hopefully i can provide a new set of eyes and push this project along. I could help provide the music recordings / scorces as im involved with a classical music project (soon to launch).

I do have a few follow up questions



Have there been any dicussion about combining these projects into one project with two feature packs? as if there is a future IP issue with sumpremacy the game can be still be released as BoE.



Who are the The BOTF2 consortium? Are they members here?
Who owns the code of the games and what licence will they be released under?

If its open source is the code avaliable to be downloaded and developed? Is there an community project management in place to simulate interest?



I got supermacy working on windows 7 but it broke after the updater ran. I was trying to find out the current version number could find it on this site but couldn't



Is there a trak or ticketing system in place? it would help development instead of posting in a forum.



The one thing i found with this site is the amount of out of date/not up to date information on here. If a project is not in active development should it be culled or archived from the site?

Well, we share pretty much everything with each other, that's the point of having sharepoint aka http://www.botf2.com in the first place . Most if not all BotE sounds and music was made by Contributors initially working for Mike's project alone here (before we appeared on the scene), for example Kenneth's great work with all the sounds and Eric James' complete music set. Originally Eric made and named the music like "Federation theme" or "Romulan theme" which then became bote-wise "Coalition theme" and "Rotharian theme". You see, it's all a question of taking what's there and labeling it as needed.

Code-wise Mike helped us out on various occasions and we both have our full code open for the public on codeplex.com (supremacy.codeplex.com and bote.codeplex.com) so both projects are open-source.

The reason why a code-wise merging was never attempted was the different programming languages used in both projects, BotE is C++, Supremacy C# and .NET. Though they are similar, they are not the same. Besides both projects have different approaches to certain things which is a good thing so there's no need to combine code forces. Again besides, Mike is the only one who can safely appear on gamespot.com as an inofficial trek fan game since he is from the US/UK, their copyright is "better" than ours here in continental europe. I've already explained all that in depth here: http://star-trek-games.com/index.php?op ... Itemid=108 . You can read it through.

If Supremacy ever gets IP troubles which I heavily doubt then we can of course sit together and sort out whom we have to mail again for permission to use certain graphics that were originally only lent to BotE alone (I mailed a lot of artists around the web and would have to do that again, sort of).


The BotF2 Consortium is a fun entity . All 3 projects on botf2.com belong to it. You bring me to an idea, I could link bote.codeplex.com on botf2.com wiki so people can get to the code from there.

Well on codeplex there are trackers. But forums (at least as far as bote is concerned) are more often frequented. May change though if more coders appear on the scene there on codeplex helping us.

Well we're a lenient and kinda "old" crowd here so projects that seem dead to outsiders will be kept as long as the project lead doesn't say otherwise himself.


So if you wanna help with music that'll be cool. Just ask Kenneth or Mike, they can set up a sharepoint account for you in case you got a file to add. As far as music, 3D models and stuff is concerned, sharepoint is our place of living and of course to show it around here, this thread viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1169&p=57426#p57426 .

Just to add to what Malvoisin has written our user AndrewJT is a professional composer of game and film music. He has and is composing some additional music for the games. The music we have is located here on our sharepoint. We would love to have an even greater variety of music to choose from. It gets so tired if you hear the same music loop and loop. Whatever music we are free to use. I had to go to US military bands to get most of what I have uploaded. They do not restrict use on anything you can download from their sites. We hope to have as much ready for the demo of our game at the August Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas as we can. Look for us in the vender area and in a panel talk about fan game development.

Matress can best answer the other questions.

He already was anyways Kenneth, you posted whilst he typed this post.

Yes, there has been talk of this, but it just isn't technically possible as Mal said. The games are written in different programming languages so they just aren't compatible.

There are other issues too. Having separate games is actually a good thing, because it forces them to find unique selling points to stand out from the crowd. It also gives players more choice. Of course there will always be questions over copyright and legalities, but we on the Supremacy team have been as careful as we can to minimise any infractions where we can. We've made everything ourselves where possible, even if it is technically a copy of original IP. And we've not developed in secret. We have tried to contact Atari and Paramount and so on over the years. Quite simply, they've forgotten about BotF or aren't worried because we're a small, fan-based, not-for-profit team that does not intend to infringe on any of their current money-making products. Plus, as Mal said, American copyright law is different to German copyright law, and is much more robust, but at the same time is more relaxed. Supremacy is being developed in America because that's where Mike is, even if the majority of the content contributors, including myself, are from the UK.

The BOTF2 Consortium is basically everyone on the forums. If you use the forums to advertise your game(s), if you actively participate in playtesting or developing content that may be used in a game, or simply provide feedback, then you're a part of it. The BOTF2 Consortium is really just a fancy name that we've chosen for ourselves. We're a loose group of people that are simply working to support each other.

Ownership of the code will always ultimately lie with the original creator of the individual games, but we generally insist that code is released under open-source licences. Supremacy for instance has a Codeplex Site where the source code is kept so that anyone can download it. Same goes for BotE.

...Err...already answered lol. As for community project management, we use Codeplex for code and Sharepoint for the general storage and sharing of files. (Music, artwork, models, text, etc etc)

This is a known issue with the updater, rather than it being an issue with Windows 7. The next update should solve the issue. Unfortunately that won't be until August when Mike (The programmer) and Kenneth (Our resident 3D modeller) attend the Trek Convention in Vegas.

In the mean time, the fix for Windows 7 issues is already displayed in the Known Issues thread. For reference though, here's the info you need:


For reference, the current (Released) game version is 0.4.3427.36588. This information is displayed in the Supremacy download post.

Yes, we do, but it's rarely used and is mainly reserved for major issues. It's also game-specific, since it's on the Codeplex sites, plus you also need a Codeplex account to post new items. We basically just use the forums as our main ticketing place as it's open to everyone and MUCH more frequently viewed and posted in.

The information that we have on the forums is as up to date as we have. About 80% of the forum updating is done by me though, so if you find anything that you know is out of date, please let me know. As a forum admin I can change just about anything.

As Mal said, "dead" projects only seem dead to outsiders - to those of us that have been here longer, they're simply works-in-undefined-progress . Allegiance is on hold whilst Nemitor_Atimen is studying in uni and working. Allegiance will be worked on in future, it just isn't in active development at the moment. For that reason, it hasn't been culled. Plus Nemitor is a forum admin, knows computers inside out, and can access the backend of the forums, so he's a great asset to the team, even if he's rarely here in person.

I'll make an info post about Allegiance to make it more obvious about what is happening.

just to add, UK copyright is much more similar with regards what counts in our case of IP laws to US copyrights, at least more so than to German or continental european copyright laws in that respect.

I have had a look st supremacy on codeplex. I see ticket issues postings have dried up. Hopefully this is something i can quickly change.



I was think this was to most likely reason.



It might be worth doing a audit on the user generated content and have user sign a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA) like the one here
http://cakefoundation.org/pages/cla this would allow content to be used in an Botf2 projects without the future need to get permission for any new project.




Glad i have been able to prompt some new thinking.




Ok, so what do i need to use/have to do the following
Get a very latest copy of the source code and compile it so i can test it and post some tickets and hopefully post some fixes. I'm not the greatest coder but i can read code pretty well so will hopefully spead up development.

What is the lastest version of supremacy is mine is stuck on 0.3427.36588 as the update says it has updated but i dont see and files download and it restarts with the same version number?



Shouldn't efforts be training of to the best of the bunch so they get to 100% complete? I see that supremacy is on 20% is that correct?
Whats the roadmap?



I will keep you posted as im not a musician myself but will be a sudo classical music record label, will be have access to musician and composers. Some could be willing to record or score and already scored as suitable piece of music and be willing to offer it for inclusion free to raise there profile.

Though a good idea with CLA, there's a rather big problem: When I was scouring the web for potential contributors to our game, I pretty much found many high-level artists that worked on dozens of well-known cinema movies like the Terminator series or War of the Worlds where Aaron Sims was working on or Tim Appleby from Mass Effect, all of them willing to share parts of all of their personal portfolio art (their un-sold showcase stuff) with us on a confidential basis but I doubt they wanna put them under a license for just about everyone (or some CSF foundation for that matter), the same with many other a-bit-lesser-known artists I mailed to, so the only chance would be to do the asking project-wise and even that is not a 100% sure all of them agree again.

Good stuff is rare to find, especially pictures of alien characters. It isn't a big surprise that though Supremacy features self-made 3D ship models, it doesn't really have self-drawn models of race characters but takes pictures from real actors from the shows. With a self-made content, you got no TV shows so you have to rely to pros who know their stuff or learn to use Z-Brush and do hours, days, weeks and months nothing else but drawing heads. And even then you just don't have that interesting diverse amount of different styles coming from these different artists just because you got over 50 of them doing personal-flavored work. I think one cannot top that alone, not nearly a bit to be honest.
I was glad so many wanted to help me. There were not many alternatives, in fact I was pretty much running out of artists when I finished all the graphics we needed, it was a close call but it was exactly enough to satisfy all graphical needs .

With music that could be another thing, there weren't that many different artists involved than with BotE graphics (I believe we got way more than 50 different artists).


Well, since projects on hold are not binding any forces, we can just let them stay. They do not hurt anyone so to speak .

Supremacy is 20% complete since the site went up 3 years ago . Mike just hasn't got around changing figures there, I assume he just looked over it the whole time .

I don't know if there's an exact roadmap for Supremacy. BotE has a "rough" one, but that one is located internally in our german forums.


About the music, alright. Just shoot once you got something.

The last game update was in May 2009 - about 10 months ago. A drying up of posts is to be expected since the issues have already been identified. Come the August update, we'll be posting again.

If I speak to anyone about producing content, then I always mention that the content would be open to use by any of our projects. I've never had anyone raise any problems with this so far, so I haven't thought to get anything in writing. We've always been very informal about stuff like this as we're a fan-based project. I guess by not doing it we're just making more work for ourselves. I'll ask for written permissions in future.

You're encountering the infinite update loop problem. The game IS downloading a file, but the file is 0kb in size - so at the same time it's essentially downloading nothing. And because it's downloading nothing, it thinks it needs to download the "update" again when the game reloads.

Did you try my fix? If you did, then load up the game, then click on options, then go on the updater tab. Find the option to check for updates and DESELECT it. The game will then stop performing updates. Unfortunately, this will stop the game EVER performing updates (Unless you re-enable the option), so you'll miss out on any legitimate updates. But we're not planning any until August, and we'll post a news item as soon as we release it anyways, so as long as you frequent the forums, you'll know when to re-enable the updater, or we'll provide a link so you can download a separate, fixed, and updated copy of the game.

The percentages are only an estimation. The truth is that we have no idea how far along the game is. We may come up with new features we want to add over time, and new features mean more time. We use the term "feature creep" to state this.

Feature creep is actually a problem that Supremacy has been plagued with for a long time. We've got so many ideas that Supremacy will never be complete. And that's why Supremacy has been at the 20% stae for three years as Mal pointed out.

And that leads onto your next question...
...There isn't one. Which is why the feature creep. We've come to realise that recently and Mike is now working on one. I'm not sure when he's going to release the road map though. It won't be very detailed either. We've err...got some secret features for the game. You might notice that i've been teasing people all over the forums about it hehe...

You'll might also be interested to note that Nemitor posted an update in response to my Allegiance update post Here.

Thanks for all your answers, hopefully i haven't asked the same old newbie questions.

So how many active developers are there working on the source code?

What do i need to have/use to be able to download the source and compile it and begin testing? i would like to be able to do more than just post errors i would like to be able to identify where the issue is.

codeplex shows team members (the ones working on the code), although in case of BotE, two additional contributors CBot and TrommlBomml are not members there (yet) since they have been taking a break for a while.

Downloading source code is pretty easy at codeplex. For BotE you need to have Visual Studio 2008 and MFC 8 (which isn't included in Express version but in standard version of Visual Studio 2008). Then you can load, modify and compile botf2.sln solution file. For uploading your changes mail to Sir Pustekuchen over at codeplex.com, he can set you up an account there.

Thanks for that, do i need the same to help out on Supremacy?

Since Supremacy is coded in C#, I assume you need Visual Studio .NET, but I'm not quite familiar with the differences there. Maybe there are cheaper alternatives as coding environment, I don't know. MFC 8 is - I think - not needed there .

I think Mal's right, because Mike has sent me pre-release game versions before now and I needed to install special programs before they could run. I'm pretty sure the Visual Studio thing was one them.

Programming is gobbledygook to me though, although I can dabble a bit if it's xml-related, so you're going to have to ask Mike if you want specific info.