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

...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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.