I'm back after a very long absence. I had to change username (Colione) because I can't remember the password to my old one and my email also changed. Jig reset it for me, but it still doesn't work... o well.

Anyway, so much has changed it's gonna take weeks to catch up!

Welcome back

Ooh Colione, I was wondering if you'd died or summat! What's going on with the Quadrant? It's seems to have been down for a while now...

Anyways, yes the forums have changed a LOT since you were last here. Try having a look at the themes (You can set them in your profile) - you don't just have to stick with the horrible existing one. I'd recommend Acidtech, but people in general are pushing more for SFCentar because it's more scifi.

A lot of the old guys have disappeared - SonOfMogh is on his 16th spiritual slaughtering Jem'Hadar, CVN-65 hasn't been around since hurricane Katrina hit (Which is worrying as he moved to America to further his studies at the time ), Captain_Billy_Bacon hasn't been around in a few months but is still around on MSN, and TrekBoyChris hasn't been around in about a year because his parents are making him study all the time.

I don't know how long its' been since you were last here, so I don't know where to begin about the project changes though. If you have any questions though, fire away.

Matress! Your still here? lol

When I left there was only one game... I think lol

Now it's so confusing around here... As far as The Quadrant goes, I haven't really been active over there either and haven't talked to Scatter in forever. I stopped writting after the new baby came...

So give me a quick run down on what in the world is going on around here!!

For the sake of brevity I will just describe the history of the 2 successors and will leave the descriptions of the other projects to those who know more about them. For one thing, the original BOTF II was dropped and the German project for the game kinda became an international one and was named (or renamed) Birth of the Empires. Later on, MStrobel introduced his own project for a BOTF sequel that is called Supremacy. Since that time, Supremacy has made a lot of progress and it was decided that BOTE was in need of a complete overhall to remove any and all things Trek to avoid copyright issues and the job of coming up with the races and story for that overhall has fallen to me. The tentative release date for the first version of the new original BOTE is set for mid December.

You can find more on the new BOTE here: http://botfii.armadafleetcommand.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2092

Welcome back!

Also, my project (which I can't remember if it was announced before you left) ain't dead yet. (although it's close ).

nem, don't shock us with such remarks

as for fox's history lesson, yes, in basic principles, it's right. The introduction of the 2 new botf successors was a bit more complicated but that doesn't matter really.
anyway, in the last four months we had a thousand new members due to our new recent releases but it toned down a bit this month since nem is rebuilding our website to a better(-looking) new standard plus bote for example is changing its official content to something new.

anyway, have a look at http://www.botf2.com , it's a new resource share site for all our projects. you'll find tons of new 3d models, game screenshots and music for the games on there. We had quite an upsurge in contribution activity in the past months, above all due to inexhaustible commitment from people like Kenneth_of_Borg, who was collecting and assimilating quite a bunch of good 3d modelers and so forth.

have a look around and try the games (when available for download ). definitely worth it.

Yeah, i'm still here, Colione - and i'm more powerful than ever! I'm one of the forum admin now!

I'm also the only Commodore rank on the forums...but that's err...coz of my post count...

Well the other guys have already given descriptions of the games, but overall, what basically happened is:

Gavins project collapsed because Gavin himself disappeared.

Jigalypuff stepped in and announced he was going to make his own game to fill the void. We're still not sure that Gavin actually made anything in the first place anyway.

Mstrobel came along, and announced he was making a scifi turn-based strategy game (But NOT Trek) as a project for his computer studies. A lot of people got interested, and since then he's completely rebuilt the game from the ground up to be a BOTF successor. We are currently working on increasing the game content - buildings, ships, etc. and that was the main bulk of the last four or five updates. Three of those most recent updates have been during the last two days lol. The demo is available From Here.

General_Nemitor (Now Nemitor_Atimen) then appeared on the forums. He decided he wanted to make his own game, but this one would be a browser-based game. There have been a few closed alpha tests - i'm one of the testing team - but Nem has completely rewritten a lot of the code since then, and the project has been on the backburner since he had to set up an online store.

We then slowly became conscious that a rival BOTF2 project called Birth of the Empires (BotE) existed. This project was a German one, but had been in development for considerably longer than ours - in fact they had a working demo way before any of our projects even existed. They had a different community concept however and for most of those two years the community had no input on the direction of the game. That has since changed, as now BotE has its' own German Forums. The developers speak English though, and they have now joined our community; we are sharing files, help, workload, and ideas with them to speed up development for all.

Jigalypuff then announced that he would be scrapping his BOTF project because the interest in the other projects was so high. He is now working to build a different game - in fact, it wil be a completely different genre. He hasn't told much about it, but it sounds like it will be in a similar vein to the Bridge Commander games. He's released a few screenshots and has been begging for models of Cardassians - not their ships, but Cardassian people. It's definitely going to be interesting...

To help the different projects, the community are making files that *may* be useful for the different games. We are hosting all these files on a Sharepoint Server. This means that anyone can download and view the files, but also ensure that only those people with an account can add/edit/delete any files. If you want an account you'll need to ask Mstrobel for one. Click the link if you want to see what we have so far. All the files are in the shared files folder on the left.

You can also see that we have new forums. The old forums Still Exist purely as a backup, but no new posts go there now. The new forums have only been up for a month or two, and they aren't yet complete - features like the downloads section and online info are still yet to be added. We're also trying to sort out the horrible default theme. Nemitor is the guy in charge of doing all that, but he's been too busy lately to make any forum updates. Those will be coming in the future.

That was useful for me too history man.

Ahh... History... One of the few courses I have heard that you should never sleep through... Not that I have ever done that in any of my classes... Seriously... I haven't...

Well there was that one time in art history class... But that was it. Seriously...

Heh, I forgot I was once a General. Nice history.

I miss the old days.

General?

Nemitor's original name was General_Nemitor, not Nemitor_Atimen. Jigalypuff changed it for him a few months ago.

Few months ago? Hah, I wish it was only that long ago. It's more like 1 1/2 years

Really? Jeez I've spent too long on these forums.

Hah, me too. Doesnt seem like its been almost three years.

It definitely doesn't feel like I have been a member of the forums for almost 2 years... Of course I wasn't exactly an active member for all that time so that has something to do with how fast time went by I guess...

Hold on just a sec... While I was surfing the forums I came across a post in which I mentioned that I had been gone for a while... Only thing is that the post was made around two years ago. By any chance was the joined date reset when the new forums were created or old ones crashed?

No, the join date is still fully functional.