double click on any of the ships. then the cursors work (+ and - next to your enter button). also press z to lay better courses.

K, i found the prob i had to click and drag the window of the demo around a tiny bit before anything could work. Duno if just me or not but there u go. Also i did a quick mod to see if skyboxes could be changed, and well yeah but was annoying trying to convert a st legacy skybox to the demo, also for some reason the dds textures didnt convert very good to jpeg.



Tweaked a bit i.e brightness -20 and contrast up 50 for each side.

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Just played the strings version and its very nice with lighting and the exploding asteroids, i dont care much for the movement i.e just rolling not turning at the mo, but hope it improves. The defiants weapons OMG so nice, miles nicer than st legacy lol.

Jig, it's only running slow on MY computer - Wolfe is getting framerates more than double that. I've got an old graphics card - 128mb Radeon 9250 - which apparently isn't coping well.

Skeet, I have a few problems for the first couple of seconds as well. I have to keep double-clicking on a ship until the program responds. It runs fine then.

Jig is right about FPS, i tested about 80 ships on screen and on mine it goes down to around 30fps which isn't that great. I haven't optimised anything in a sense and due to my coding prowess or lack of it i probably do something stupid like clone each mesh twice or something.

Optimization can come later for now.

You have to select a ship before you can do anything, i'll change it so that a ship is selected before hand.

Phasers go through the ship mesh simply because a) the hitpoints aren't placed very well and more importantly b) beam end points are at the moment picked 50/50 random or nearest hitpoint, so there is a chance a hitpoint at the back of the ship gets selected. The random element was only added so i could see if it could fire at differant sections, how good or bad it looked and i haven't come up with a good system which not only selects the closest hitpoint but also checks it is in a LOS, without actually calling the LOS method which would mean cpu usage.

Regards Wolfe

how do I add more ships to the battle? how do I edit friendly and enemy xml files?

To be honest there is a likely chance that adding more ships may crash it during beam firing, though seems to only occur when you have two enemy ships:

Anyway to simply add more ships: Open the Gamestate.xml in an xml editor, change the value to the number of ships you want and then add the name of the ships you want to load, in this case 3 ships and all of them are Borg spheres, you can add any ship ie, mixed nebula and sphere, and if you want though i wouldn't recommend it you could load the Dom_BattleCruiser.xml or vulcan xml ship data but as they are not scaled and the textures don't load well i would ignore them.

<Enemy_Ships>
<value>3</value>
<name>Borg_Sphere.xml</name>
<name>Borg_Sphere.xml</name>
<name>Borg_Sphere.xml</name>
<end></end>
</Enemy_Ships>

If and this is likely to be problematic you want to add a new ship?
Simplest way is to copy the nebula.xml open it up and change this

<Ship_Model_Folder>Nebula_Cruiser</Ship_Model_Folder>
<Ship_File_Name>Nebula_Cruiser.3ds</Ship_File_Name>
<Ship_Texture_Name>empty</Ship_Texture_Name>

to say

<Ship_Model_Folder>MY_SHIP_FOLDER/Ship_Model_Folder>
<Ship_File_Name>MY_SHIP_FILE.???</Ship_File_Name>

If it is a 3DS file it should support mutliple texture load up and you won't need to specify a texture
<Ship_Texture_Name>empty</Ship_Texture_Name>

If it loads up and the ship is a 'WHITE' colour, then the textures failed to load and you'll need to tell the engine to load a texture by simply adding

<Ship_Texture_Name>
<value>3</value> // Add this line 'Case sensitive' and tell the engine how many textures to load, there is some limit and i'am not sure if it loads correctly
<t0>s512_1.bmp</t0> // Add <t0></t0> and fill it with your texture 'Case sensitive' which is located in the ship mesh folder, for each new texture add another
<t1>s512_2.bmp</t1> // line and increase t number
<t2>s512_3.bmp</t2>
</Ship_Texture_Name>

Hope this helps

Regards Wolfe

One note, the files Friendly.xml and Enemy.xml are redundant and not used, only SHIP xml's listed in the gamestae.xml are loaded, With each new ship comes the problem of editing beam cannon position and hitpoints etc.

Will there be a option to band box ships which selects them that way instead of clicking also will waypoints be implimented as that will be good i think to set 1 ship on a course of multi way points while u control the other direct or somit.

Btw the skybox is rather small in scope, perhaps increase the size by about 50?

About the hitpoints and firing, perhaps make a system with front and aft assigned hitpoints and sides as well as top and bottom, so if a ship is above firing down then it picks one of the top designated hitpoints, if from side, the use one of the side designated hps. etc..

okay worked. but what the heck..



who did that monster ship and how could the nebulas got so close?

Wolfe, what if you changed the system slightly so that when it decides to fire at a random hitpoint, it would hit the second nearest hitpoint instead of a random one? That would ensure that you'll only get front or side hits, then.

If the ship is larger and it has multiple hitpoints facing in the same general direction that are equidistant from the closest hitpoint, then it would randomly choose a hitpoint of those ones. Basically randomise the random that you just made less random.

...

I didn't notice the Nebulas when I first saw the image, Mal. It was only when you mentioned them in your post that I looked closer.

wow, then you might probably be interested to see those (all 3d models, well nearly all): viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2111 . All from talented guys on the net with permission for us to use (well not actually the models ).

if you happen to be able to share one of those (textured and all proped up if possible ), you know where you're welcome jig mate (we have enough pics already to kill all trek races but still, yours seem to be a fine distinction from all the other ones we have as listed in the thread linked above..)

christ some of them are great, really high poly jobs though. the ones i`m doing are for a commercail game so i can`t go any higer than 10k for the lod 1 mesh, although with normal maps it`ll look fairly good i think. i saw victoria in there btw, poser don`t allow the use of there stuff so you might want to lose her pic 8

I just had a look too, Jig. Christ they're good images! Definitely top quality work.

...Some of the images are repeated though. I just posted in there.

He has been for a while, Fox. That's why there haven't been any New Beginnings updates since...well Supremacy actually.

man the tal`shiar are letting you down moe, i sent a demo to skeeter ages ago

Post it moe??? Dont you mean post it skeet lol.

Lol thats entirely up to jig if he wants to share it or not. But its rather nice what i played with.

I was preempting, or simply poking fun at moe

Regards Wolfe

Actually I did know that you'd sent skeet *something* as he mentioned it on msn a few weeks ago. He never said what it was though. I've still got all the demos that you've ever sent me though. I've got four different versions of New Beginnings, four early versions of Supremacy, and Iwulff's Database as well.

God it's fun going through my BOTF2 files. So many memories...

put it up for dl if you want skeet, be nice to get some feedback on it

The link will be up in New Beginings forum in a mo.

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Ok up now, i hope its the right one as i had two testers, 1 was playing as enterprise blowing up klingons with 3d movement the other is where ur a cardy killing some feds which had some planets in.

wolfe, I'm still having problems with your latest demo (reproduced on two separate machines). Something in the Irrlicht library is constantly spitting out first-chance access violation exceptions whenever the game receives any input events, and double-clicking causes one of those exceptions to go uncaught and crash the game. I've also made it crash with a number parsing bug that I suspect is occurring because the game is attempting to parse some of the XML data before it's fully loaded (probably not reproducable unless you have a really fast machine). If you can zip up your solution folder and send it to me, I can hook it up to a debugger this weekend and take a look at it for you. You'll need to use 7z or RAR, as GMail won't let you send Zip attachments with any DLLs or EXEs included. mike d0tz0rs strobel atz0rs gmail d0tz0rs com (l0lz0rs, parse that, spammers).

Sorry I've been kinda quiet lately, especially about work on the turn based combat system, truth is I had a sudden urge to have a huge gaming session so I went and bought the Orange Box and I've been playing Half Life 2, Portal near non-stop. And the last few days I've been hooked on Team Fortress 2. I've burned out now after playing TF2 for about ~50 hours straight I think I got whatever it was out of my system.

First I just need to say I don't agree that wolfe's demo is less "complete" than mine, mine does not even protray turn based combat between ships, it is more like a basic space shooter. So wolfe has actually made more progress than I have in making a complete combat system.

Anyway I'll be getting back to work on the turn based combat system, during my gaming break I came upon a cool idea that I think can be and should be adopted. It will be a change to how combat was done in the original BOTF, but it has a lot of positives that will make the combat more fun without over complicating it (and risk making battles too lengthy). The main selling point is that the player will have more chances to influence the course of battle. I'm still working out the kinks but I will reveal all once the idea is properly examined and confirmed as really workable. Don't worry, it'll still be turn based with pre-set commands given out to groups of ships, to keep it simple and brief.

jig, victoria, poser? I'm not much familiar with the terms, but which pic do you mean? I'll remove it asap or contact the author about it if there's a way to still use them..

pic 8 mate, victoria is a very very famous model you get it with poser but i just remembered, is is the 3d stuff you can`t use it any other program, renders and cutscenes are allowed, sorry