Some new screenshots...

Looks very good.

I like the transparency effects of the rectangles for setting the workers in the production menue. The video (from the other thread) is great, too.

One thing that I always find myself doing is figuring out how many structures of a particular type that a planet has and how many of them they actually need in order to sustain itself.

Especially when this occurs in BotF1 and the computer AI builds 300 farms for 50 units of people. I then figure out how many I need to keep the planet going, and then pad a few more extra ones incase of sabotage that happens to get through. That way, upgrading them doesn't take the rest of the game. I know the AI will be smarter, but I'll still likely do it to determine the optimal number of buildings I'll need to keep the system churning and reduce the time spent upgrading. I still do it for the systems I colonize myself.

A thought for the production screen would be to display the amount of units "on" and how many total they are in a 10/15 type format. 10 buildings on out of 15 total type deal. Just an idea/thought. I'm not sure where you could insert that (and personally, I suck at designing UI's).

Otherwise, they look awesome and these screens are starting to encourage me to finish my ongoing projects at work so I can spend some time poking around and maybe even coding something, if needed.

Thanks for the encouragement, guys. Azhdeen, thanks for reminding me about the active/total number indicators for the production panel. I've intended to add those, but I keep forgetting.

very nice!

Wow...

I'll be honest and say I wasn't too sure about this project.

This is the BoTF 2 I see when I close my eyes and picture it. Supremacy IS BoTF2 to me now.

I would have been just as skeptical in your place, SonOfMogh. There's been more than one BotF2 project that's fallen through. That's why I try to post updates fairly frequently--so you guys can see that progress is being made.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you guys like my work so far. Hopefully, the .NET Framework 3.0 will go gold very soon. Then I can start releasing some demos .

So Microsoft are holding you back? Anger rising...

Great screenies, anyway, MStrobel. I'm inclined to agree with SOM - Supremacy is how I always imagined BOTF2. It's going to be a beautiful game.

dont be angry.

the wait is DEFINITELY worth it. You can trust me on this one.

Here we go again. It's just so much prettier without the all the images missing. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have time to work on the game any more until next weekend, so these will have to tide you over for a while.





Note: The stupid gallery recompressed my lossless PNG images with crappy JPEG encoding. Sorry for the dithering.

The dithering isn't that bad to be honest, MStrobel. Everyone can handle JPG's so they're not going to cause problems, anyway.

It's started to look really nice now, and I can see you've done as you said and included Azhdeen's suggestion of including a build progress counter and structures counter. Nice.

I love it. I really like how clean and crisp it all looks.

The next time you get the opportunity it would be really great to see the ship buliding screen. If I can think of anything to suggest I'll post, it all looks perfect at present.

I'd be only too happy to oblige, assuming of course that a shipbuilding screen actually existed at the moment . That one is probably a couple weeks away. It'll be a bit more complicated than the original BOTF, since shipyards have multiple build slots for concurrent construction.

Nice.

This week, so far, should be a light week for me. I'm looking forward to browsing through things. Hopefully, Microsoft can finialize .Net v3.

Excellent Stuff

Excellent, cheers for the response mate.

Wonderful screenshots; I would agree that Supremacy is shaping up rather beautifully. I like the crispness of the interface, and the nice touches you've added such as the transparency of the production screen bars.

I only have one very minor suggestion: on the galaxy screen, I like fact that the sector and its owner are listed so prominently. My thought is that if you were to use the word "affiliation" rather than "owner," it would simultaneously seem more true to Star Trek (does the Federation really "own" any of its systems?) and it would be clearer in cases where a system is "unclaimed," "non-aligned," or "neutral," depending on how you wanted to phrase it. That way empty systems wouldn't have a blank box under "owner," like the Canopus system did in one of your screenshots.

Keep up the great work; I can't wait to see more.

A very good point about system affiliation, LongShotSky, and I just changed it accordingly. Glad you like the screenshots. I'm just as eager to finish more as you are to see it .

Since this is the first time I've seriously looked at this game, let me start off like this: *Stands and applauds*

Amazing work mstrobel!! It keeps the familiar BOTF I -ish feel (so I'll know where everything is) while giving it a greatly refined look. One problem with sequels is that developers usually make them as a completely different game instead of capitalizing on the already good parts of the original and just reworking the bad stuff.

Again awesome work, and to quote SonOfMogh: "Supremacy IS BoTF2 to me now."

Wow, a standing ovation . I am humbled, sir. I just hope I can deliver on a game that plays as nicely as it looks.

By popular demand...

Still looks great . Just one question, what limitations are there on the number of docks a system can have?

The number of construction docks available is a property of the type of shipyard. The official numbers in the game (if I recall correctly) will be 1 slot for a Basic Shipyard, 2 slots for a Medium Shipyard, 4 slots for a Large Shipyard, and 6 slots for Advanced Fleetyards. However, it is theoretically possible to add more. I believe the hard limit would be 255, though I can't think of a good reason for someone to have more than 6.

Right, and you need one Dilithium source per constructing ship for the dock to be able to work on it right? I don't think you're going to find 255 sources of Dilithium before winning the game

Funny you should mention that, I was just now going to post a message in the staff room about the revised Dilithium system. Dafedz and I talked about it a while ago, and I reasoned that things would get messy if we had multiple build slots and tried to use Dilithium the same way it worked in BOTF. I also never really though it made sense that you need some arbitrary unit of a resource per turn of construction, regardless of what kind of ship you were building.

I proposed that we stockpile it the same way we do raw materials. That is, if you have a Dilithium Refinery that produces +1 Dilithium, then +1 gets added to the global stockpile each turn. When you have a ship under construction, some amount of Dilithium is consumed from that stockpile. All resources are pumped into construction projects in the same way. First, local build projects get priority over locally produced resources. During production, any resources that are produced on a colony are available to any active construction projects on that colony (or its shipyards). If more resources are needed, they are taken from the global stockpiles. On the other hand, if a colony produces more resources than it needs, the left overs get deposited in the global stockpiles, possibly to be used in construction projects at other colonies later in the same turn. The amount of resources consumed by a construction project each turn gets determined by the type of project. By default, it takes the industry output available and uses that to estimate how many turns it will take the project to finish building. Then, for each resource, it takes the remaining quantity required and it by the estimated number of turns left. That is the amount it will consume during that turn. The algorithm also attempts to make up for lost time--if it didn't get enough resources during the last turn, it tries to take more during the next turn in an attempt to get the project back on schedule. Lastly, no industry or shipbuilding points go to waste. If you have 1200 industry on a colony, and you only need 250 points to finish a building, then the remaining 950 points are automatically invested into the next project (and perhaps the next project after that, and so on). So, if you have 4x Automated Farms queued up, each estimating 1 turn to build, you may actually build all 4 of them in only 3 turns. Cool, huh?

So anyway... two points: dilithium gets stockpiled, and different types of ships might require different amounts of it.

Well I definately like the resource and construction map you just described. I can't see any flaws with it right now, it's simplistic and easy to understand. Industry is the amount of stuff you can get done in a turn, so it makes sense that if you have a surplus, you just invest it in the next item in the queue rather than waste it like BOTF1. And stockpiling dilithium just makes sense too.

Just a thought, is there anything information wise that you don't already have? Like building and ship stats and the like? I'd like to help with this project, but I don't have any C# or .NET skills. (yet...) Anything for a lowlife like me to help with?

Yeah, I'm getting to the point where I'd like to recruit some help. I've got some (boring/tedious) tasks that need to be done. Do you have any experience with XML? If not, don't worry, as it's not very complicated. The entire BOTF2 database needs to be entered into XML. All of the buildings, ships, etc. I can point you in the direction of a good, free XML editor. I can also include the schemas so you can validate the document (and use autocomplete to save you keystrokes ). If you're interested, drop me a PM.

The ship stats in the BOTF2 database aren't directly usable with the game, Mattress. TheWhiteRaven is helping me take the information from the ship and structure databases and enter it into the XML format that the game uses. Props to TheWhiteRaven, and to Laitainion, who also offered to help me with the XML.

I think it'll be a few months before I'm in need of random events, so you have plenty of time, Mattress.

Awesome UIs, just awesome.

For the shipbuilding, there's four special resources I noted:
Dilithium, to the rigiht Raw Material and below that Crew.
What is below Dilithium?

Duranium - its a metal alloy, i think voyager needed a few times.

Wiki says its this btw

A construction material in the Star Trek universe. Its name is based on that of the real alloy duralumin. Ut2k4 uses this as a construction material of vehicles, weapons and other objects