Unfortunately exponential is often not meant literally in english anymore, but rather any explosive-type growth. But yeah you're right it's cubic, although my point remains that with every light year we add there are increasingly more stars. Since we have discovered very few planets aside from Jupiter-type really massive planets thus far, we have no idea what proportion of those systems also have rock/metal-based planets, which in turn would be habitable in the game. Therefore, by including sytems without habitable planets in the game, we are making an assumption with no basis at all regarding what proportion of systems with planets have habitable planets and which don't. Therefore, to be more scientifically sound, we should omit those systems altogether, thus not making that assumption and increasing "believability". Then the only assumption that remains is the one regarding what kind of density there is of systems with habitable planets per certain stretches of space, an assumption we can't avoid making for the purposes of the game.

I do not quite understand the last part of what you're saying, I'm sorry . We need to make assumptions here based on nothing cause we simply don't know anything precise and definite about the universe around us. All we can do are "projections" and if these "projections" don't violate any new and old findings about our universe in real life, then we're all fine no matter how much star and planet density we project there.

of course there could be a lot of rock planets per star we just can't see and make habitable later but as I said, we don't know yet (and I have the gut feeling we still don't know that long after the last one played our game ) so we're fine the way we are .

In my opinion, scientific accuracy is secondary, the main deciding factor is whether having all-gas-giants systems will make the game more fun to play. This we will not know until the game is more complete, like wolfe said it could add more strategy/variety or like matress said it might be valuable to have all that deuterium, but we don't know how scarce deuterium will get nor do we know for certain it will add to the strategy aspect of the game, they could just be annoying systems that no one wants. Basically, these systems will become part of a game balance issue for later, and as such they should stay in the game for now.

I imagine some kind of random event or even special tech where one can "implode" some exactly fitting kind of gas giants (doesn't hold for every gas giant in order not to have all transformed) into a class A-Z planet in no-time. That way they become useful without further ado .

OK let me try to rephrase and simplify it for your benefit. If we only have systems with habitable planets, we have only made an assumption regarding how many systems with habitable planets there are per area of space. If however we add systems without habitable planets, we have to make the previously mentioned assumption AND we are making an assumption and statement regarding the proportion of systems with and without habitable planets. Therefore, by including systems without habitable planets we are forced into making another baseless assumption which would most likely be wrong since we have no facts to support it.

@Strings - For myself and all the Trek (and in fact sci-fi in general) fans I've ever met, scientific accuracy would impact whether the game is fun or not. That's why we should limit our exposure to being wrong by making fewer assumptions.

However, as you can tell my beef with having these systems is that they serve no purpose and yet force us to make an additional assumption. Therefore, if those systems had raw materials we could exploit even if the system itself is not habitable, then that would justify having them on the map. A useless system after all would serve no purpose and should instead be an "empty" sector, especially considering that we are already working on the assumption that only a very few select systems are on the map because they are useful, as opposed to the billions of stars out there.

okay let's get to the bottom of this. At bote, we have a map of 30x20 sectors equalling 600x400 ly² in a 2D plane (let's simply for the task at hand, multiplying it later on is easy enough). Now how many stars/suns does such an area include? Really billions? I'd really like to know that. (maybe we should open another thread for this)

It's a game so stop arguing! (Never thought I would say that )

Here's the download link if you Want The New Supremacy Images.

To put them in the game, DELETE your TechObjects folder - Supremacy/Resources/Images/TechObjects, then unzip the TechObjects folder contained in the zip file into your Images folder.

You need to delete your old TechObjects folder because several of the images in the current release are duplicated for some unknown reason. These have been deleted from my updated version, and there are a lot of new minor race structure images, thanks to Dafedz. I've also finally sorted out the transparency issues with the last few files. Most of Zeleni's images have also been replaced with new versions created by Dafedz. Sorry Zeleni, but Dafedz makes better eyecandy!

I don' t know what are you talking about Matress. All my pics are in your " New Supremacy Images ". rar so i will assume you actually don' t know who created each image. Uff Matress, you are doing the same mistakes all the time, downloading fully transparent images from sharepoint to your IrfanView and accidentally giving them background only to remove it later with some kind of magic wand!

Example:






Matress, some of your images are models for sale on TurboSquid, they are copyrighted!



@Mike, do the images for Supremcy need to be CGI's, or we can cut scenes from movies and shows?

@Zeleni: I had to correct a lot of transparency issues in the latest batch of images Matress sent me as well . CGI images are preferred, but not strictly required. Non-CGI images can be used as placeholders, but they will hopefully be replaced in the future.

And as for the systems without planets or with only gas giants, allow me to bring the debate to a very abrupt end: all star and planet placement is based on a set of probability tables. That means it is entirely possible (though improbable) for empty systems to appear, or for systems with only asteroids or gas giants to appear. This will not change. Period. The only constraints I place on system generation is that pulsars, quasars, etc. cannot have planets.

What are you talking guys talking about? I fixed them all, there's nothing wrong showing up on my end! No one has mentioned any problems until now. As for the glitchy image that you posted, Zeleni, that is exactly the sort of thing that I fixed. I took the image, edited each broken pixel in MS paint, pasted the image into irfanview, applied the transparency, then shrunk the files with PNGGauntlet as told to do so by Mike. I really am not seeing any broken pixels on my end because I fixed them!

Yes, I already uploaded them to sharepoint, but that file contained a separate GLITCHY file with all the updated database files. (Which is now out of date as i've made some more updates ) Since - as far as I know - my updated images are fine, I thought I would post them as a separate download.

If there are any copyrighted images in there then this is the first that I have heard about it. All the images that I got off you were posted by you, therefore it would be your fault, Zeleni. If you mean the newest image additions then I got those off of Dafedz's database, which he updated with these files only last week or the week before. In that case it is his fault.

You've going to have to tell me which images are at fault because I honestly didn't know. Stupid copyright.

Matress, images like the ones Zeleni posted already had full alpha channel transparency (note the smooth antialiased edges and translucent smoke). Editing the individual pixels in Paint and then re-applying transparency using IrfanView is going to result in an ugly bitmask transparency effect. Somebody also resized it from the correct 270x225 size to the incorrect 270x255 size, resulting in distortion from the change in aspect ratio.

270x225 is the right size? :O damn, I've only ever heard of 270x255 being thrown around.

Mike, I can certainly understand that some scientific accuracy needs to be lost if it's too hard to program or for the benefit of gameplay. And Matress, I wouldn't say we were really arguing, more like debating, and it was all very civil. I wasn't insulted at any point and I don't think (and hope) Malvoisin wasn't either.

I would have PMed the following to Malvoisin, but I wanted to explain my reasoning to the others that have seen and participated in our little chat, so here it is anyway. The case of BOTE and Supremacy is quite different. After all, BOTE doesn't ask what shape you want your "galaxy" to be, but rather the map in BOTE is just a tiny bit of the galaxy. As for the "billions" of stars, well... Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the maps in our game maps are 2D. Therefore, I guess what is in effect true is that in BOTE the map is 600 by 400 by 20 light years in volume (only one sector "deep", assuming we're looking top-down). If we find the volume of the galaxy, pi x 50,000^2 x 1000 (50,000ly being the radius, 1000ly being the depth), and we take the common estimate of there being 100 billion stars in the galaxy, in the BOTE patch of 600 by 400 by 20 light years there would be over 61 million stars, and in fact there'd probably be more because we found an average density of stars in the galaxy, but the "empty" spaces in between the spiral arms imply that the non-empty spaces are even more dense. If the map was actually 1000ly deep like the galaxy itself is, then there would be over 3 billion stars. So returning to BOTE the number of systems that are actually shown are an exceptionally small proportion of how many stars there are in that volume of space. Therefore, the rationale behind not displaying useless systems is clear to make the game even vaguely playable, however I don't see the rationale of then including systems which have no impact on gameplay. At least in Supremacy those empty systems are gonna have a good chance of having usable resources and/or habitable moons, which justifies their presense.

I've just checked and actually MOST of the images are 270x255 - including all of the BOTF originals. I haven't done any resizing on them as I assumed they were all the same size - I didn't even notice the problem, as 30 pixels isn't really that much difference, and you're not going to notice unless you look/put them next to each other. I don't know what's happened there.

What's an alpha channel?

an alpha channel is a transparency "layer", well not a layer, more a mask. doesn't matter, it marks the transparency effect (the alpha value) of each pixel so any compatible program immediately knows how transparent every single pixel of the pic is.

fedor, we need to open up a new thread, this is beginning to spam the supremacy thread up .

and btw. don't take bote already for completed in every aspect, there could still be the possibility that sir p. implements adjustable galaxy sizes, star densities and such too. In fact, I think he will do that someday . Where are your numbers coming from (like the 100 billion)?

Just checking - I have the ship and station png images set at 270 x 225 so that is OK?

yep that is alright. I don't know who started the 255 thing but I can faintly remember it all started last year with that slippery . Anyway, 270x255 would be too much 1:1 and look a bit "squared" and not wide-screen-adapted which nowadays many displays are.

That pain in the ass thing that you need to sort out to get your texture files not to have a black border around them, when editing when editing various photon and explosion effects, only to be forced to do it in photoshop where you procede to waste 5 hours of your life getting it to work

As you can see i'am well versed,

Regards Wolfe

Ok...so what's going wrong with irfanview then? I've got the latest version. Is it a bug? I'll email the developers if it is.

Try with PaintNet, it' s free and easy to work with

wow zeleni, are these guys n00bs or what?

Noob?

( )

Photoshop is the debil

Regards Wolfe

hey mike what did you use to make the vids you have up on star-trek games? all i have is the trial version of fraps and it`s not very good.

Camtasia I believe.

bugger that for a game of imperial stormtroopers, thats about 150 quid, i like stuff to be free

Jig get on msn tomorrow ill sort ur fraps out mate.

Actually scratch that im sending somit to nem you get it off him instead ok mate?

There's a fully functional trial version of Camtasia available, I believe. If you don't need it long-term, that could work for you.

or in most cases, just resetting internal timer works perfectly for 30 days-trials .