If a Early Version of Supremacy AI is made by Christmas ... I''ll run over to Mikes house and throw him up on my shoulders while we all sing For hes a jolly good fellow lol.

I did say hoping, Ford. There is almost no chance of the AI being out by christmas now because Mike is swamped with work. He's working as fast as he can but you can't do much when you've got little to no time to do it in.

Darkmind, a lot of the changes you've alluded to are being made anyways - because i'm doing them myself.

Just as an update for you guys, I have now completed updating the buildings in the game. All I need to do now is assign the buildings and facilities to each of the five Empires and 150 minor races. That's an average of 60-75 buildings per minor race and god knows how many for the Empires. There's still a lot of work to do, but it's simple, repetitive mouse clicking now rather than stat editing.

I figured Mikes busy... *as usual lol. Hes a bonafide workaholice .... We got to get Mike to a Sunny beach in Hawaii after Supremacy is done.

I will also keep hoping and dreaming that the AI in some form will be released Christmas 2008

Just a quick note that (as stated in my signature) I will be away from the forums for a few weeks while traveling. I may drop in from time to time to check private messages. Have fun!

Shanghai? Sounds like you've stepped up your plans for Galactic Supremacy. Today, the game; tomorrow, the world!

Have a good trip. We will leave a light on for you.

Since Mike is now away, I thought I would give you guys a taste of what is coming with my future update to keep things going. It still isn't complete yet, but i've now implemented all of the structures for the Federation, so i'm getting there. I've got some big exams coming up this week, but i'll be working on the updates at full steam this coming weekend, so I should get all of the Empire structures done over the weekend. The minor races will take me considerably longer to do simply because there are soo many of them.

If you would like me to send you a current copy of my update, please let me know, but please also remember that as it is incomplete, the minor races and other Empires will be even more useless than normal, so you've been warned.

Anyways, here's the taster I promied. I've attached some of the eye-candy since that's easier to display and more interesting than the mundane stats that i've mostly been working on.

...

First off, i've added in some new custom planets to the game, or updated the textures for existing custom planets. Here's three of them. From left-to-right, T'Khul, Andoria, and Ferenginar. (Not actual size, I set them all as giants to show off the new textures better. I'm particularly pleased with the Ferenginar texture)



And here's some of the new structure images, courtesy of Zeleni:

Advanced Irrigation Network


Bajoran Jalanda Forum


Karemma Trade Agency



I hope that whet your appetite for the game.

Very nice MOE - Keep up the good work. Zeleni sure is doing some nice art work for us. So what does the little star burst emblem mean next to the first planet?

+50% Energy . It's the same symbol like in old botf.

isn't it called Karemma Commerce Ministry http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Karemma ... e_Ministry ? btw. that pic is really nice I wonder if it is resembling any "real" trek building and if zeleni made it himself 100% his own creation. I'd like to take this for some other buildings too .

I've been busy making a list of all the structures that are still in need of images (Or need better ones/ones to replace the BOTF ones) - i'll be sending that to Zeleni on the weekend too. If you like the image for the Karemma building, there's another one that I think you might like; the Federation ASDB Complex:



As for the name of the Karemma structure being wrong, blame Dafedz. It's his database. (Albeit with some changes that i'm gonna be telling him about on the weekend)

...

I did the first of my two big exams today. It was a professional interview - i've got the written exam tomorrow. I think it went well, but they're gonna email me the results in three weeks. Wish me luck.

Good Luck!

is there some kind of a problen with database & editor2 ? i download update 12.11.08 and changed some values - cheats mostly - and found shipyards not saving their %efficiency.. - any changes in that field reverts back to 0%, and feature that adds stats for building didn`t do anything...(i mean addin % shipbuilding efficiensy didn`t solve a problem) also.. there`s problens with enterprise having cloak, akira being a colony ship with anormously high raw materials demand.. (- because of that i found that "scrap" system ain`t working at all - not only the button for ships, but resources ain`t going back, when you cansels ship building...) then i tried to change some misc stats in unrelated objects, save changes and see if it works at all... it worked, but when i reopened the shipyard editor crashed with no info...
as for the gameplay.. don`t you think that first contact should be more.. customizable.. according to player choices in some sort of minigame? questions and answers? and related to race diplomatic relations with other races, current economic, scientific, military, morale levels? (i can`t imagine, how to put it into numbers or multipliers.. hope you woul figure it out))

When you make changes, you've GOT to save them first before they will appear in the game. The save dialogue box will appear if you try to close the program by clicking on the x in the top right-hand corner. If you're not using this box to save or you're closing the program in another way, you're probably not saving your changes.

The efficiency rating is basically the % of system industry that is put into your shipyards. The bigger the shipyard, the higher this rating will be. (Because more of the system economy will be tied into supporting these massive structures) It doesn't have any effect on the rate at which you construct buildings though, even if you're building a ship at the same time. (This would be one of those features that would be too realistic and would adversely affect gameplay) This can then be further modified by adding a % ship construction bonus for the shipyard. For example, the Dominion Attack Fleet Construction Facility has a 100% efficiency bonus AND a 25% build rate bonus. That means it uses the entire system industrial output, plus an additional 50%, to build ships.

The problems with the existing ship are something that I will be personally working on - I'm making a major content update for the game. This includes updates for the shipyards. The building updates are pretty much done, but I haven't touched the ships yet. I'll be working on those soon.

If you look through some of my previous posts in this thread, you'll seen that I have mentioned this update many times now. You'll also see that i'm willing to release it to anyone that wants a preview - but that there are also some problems associated with it. I'll go into detail about these in a PM if you decide you want me to send it to you.

There are some crash problems with the editor that you need to be aware of as well. If you try to open a building whilst you've got an entry for a race open, the editor WILL crash, regardless of whether you've made any changes. Mike knows of the problem and is working on Supremacy Editor 3 to fix it, as well as add in new editing options. With any luck, this will include more first contact stuff. I'm especially hoping that Mike will allow us to add in custom race intros so that each of the Empires have something different to say about the minors - just like in BOTF. Dafedz has already written these intros for us, but i've been forced to use the Federation one for the time being, with some alterations to make them more generalistic/less happy.

Don't worry about disappearing from the forums, 3 of 12. We're all friends here and know school/college/uni/work/life can get in the way of things. Tons of people have disappeared and reappeared over time. Annoyingly, many more people haven't returned...CVN-65, OmniQ, STHedgehog, Marky, Rigel...all of them were at one time major contributors on the forums. We can only hope they're still out there and will return one day.

If you want to help with the planet textures, you need to know what the image files are a single "flat" image, such as This One Of Jupiter, so simple photos of a round planet are not what we need. The game takes the flat images, wraps then around a sphere, adds a semi-transparent, coloured layer a few pixels above the texture to look like an atmosphere, then rotates the image so it looks like a spinning planet.

If you do manage to find any textures, we need them in the .png format at 512x256 pixels. You can use Irfanview to both convert and resize the images. Oh, and make sure we actually have permission to both edit and use the files in Supremacy from the image owner. For that reason, it's usually easier if we use images that people have made for us, although there is no pressure on you to make any. The more planet textures that we use, the slower the game will run anyways.

sorry, there`s a right place for it, i know... but i`m too lazy))
it`s about ship`s stats... few thoughts..
klingons - strongest hull`s.. dangerously effective in fast attaks & dog fights
cardassians ships should have some kind of a bonus system, when in groups
romulans hulls fragile, and their shields activates instantly (from cloak, when enemy is not in red alert, hasn`t detected a threat yet), weapons deliver huge damage, but recharges slowly...
even if fed`s saying about their "piceful exploration", their ships dangerous because of their strong shields and balanced systems - they almost "golden middle" - every part of their ships only a bit worse, then best system of that type (out of almost all races) (ofcorse, not from very beginning of the timeline))

romulan cloaked ships in engage mode should be able to aviod enemy on encoulter? without revealing themselves - running / fighting / communicating - when not detected
and they can they travel in warp cloaked?

The ships stats have already been worked out - you can find the stats in Dafedz's Database. These are obviously only paper-based stats though; they haven't yet been tried in a "real world" situation since the combat system is not yet complete. The ship stats will be entered into the game as they are in the database, but will be tweaked later on as needed after people have playtested the game; for instance, if we find that the Oberths are impossible to destroy because they are so maneouverable, then we know to either reduce the evasion of Oberths or to increase the accuracy of enemy ships.

I tell you one thing the Defiants may be a tad over powered, the slaughter anything in there path

Regards Wolfe

...Your point being...?

New release working good on win 7 i not re activated account before now it works i not wasted my time to prerelease so it work in win 7 i wanted to say i can use win 7 to august 2009 i tested supremacy latest update it work good after five turns so i not know is there something new happen all the time.

Wow no new posts since Nov 17....

Geez. Mike come back we need you lol.

Cmon guys I know theres tons of things we can chat about.

Heres my question:

Wormholes... is there a way we can travel through them without loosing a ship. I hate it when I have to order a ship into the wormhole only to find... theres no end to it.... and loose the ship.

I click the View New Posts link to see what has been going on. That is if you are interested in activity other than in this thread.

Mike is back from his business trip to save China so we will see more going on soon.

If you'd been checking the other threads, Ford, then you would know that quite a bit has been going on. Only this morning I sent a bug report and submitted two new feature requests. If you knew how to access the Codeplex development site, you would also know that I updated three existing reports - and that Mike replied to them. Mike definitely has returned.

I'm back . As for the wormholes, here's the plan:

There will be three types of wormholes in Supremacy. These are, in order from most common to least common:

• Wormholes with unfixed exit points. The exit points of these wormholes will jump between sectors at random, but the entry point will remain fixed. The exit point will always be within the map.
• Wormholes "without" an exit point. Actually, these wormholes *do* have exit points, but they are far outside the galaxy, so ships that enter will disappear from the game, never to be heard from again.
• Wormholes with a fixed exit point, similar to the Bajoran wormhole. These wormholes will serve as static conduits for the duration of the game.

Nice plan, I like this, very canon. But does one always have to send a ship through and risk the crew? I mean, it's something that's okay for making the game easier, but one usually sends a probe...but for the sake of simplicity and making it easier on Mike (hi Mike, pleased to meet you ), perhaps it's best to leave it at that. And by the way, thanks for all the hard work.

Hi Stromgarde, welcome to the forums, and thanks for posting so much feedback .

I have been tossing around some ideas for determining a wormhole's endpoint without sending ships through. Perhaps science vessels could scan the wormhole to gather some information. Maybe science vessels of a lower tech level would be able to detect whether there is a star system in the sector where the wormhole terminates. The presence of a star system would indicate that the wormhole terminates somewhere within the galaxy; the lack of a star system would suggest that the wormhole either terminates in an empty sector within the galaxy or somewhere outside the galaxy (still a gamble, but a smaller gamble). Science vessels of higher tech levels could have scanners that are sophisticated enough to determine the approximate, or even exact, sector in which the wormhole terminates. Thoughts?

One idea that me and Dafedz were tossing round was that you wouldn't even be able to find Wormholes without sending a science vessel to survey a sector. The Cardassians never discovered the Bajoran Wormhole in all their decades of occupation afterall, and it was only once Sisko actually looked for it that it was discovered.

Perhaps as part of these surveys the science vessels would automatically send probes and find out for you? Of course, that would take some of the fun away from the game and scanning sectors might get tedious, but we also thought about the surveys yielding small amounts of research at the same time to give the feature more of a useful function to players - that's actually how the whole idea of scanning stellar objects to get research points came about. Is that idea going to be in as well?

Matress has a point on the DS9 wormhole. I too think that it would be best to have a science vessel only find the wormhole and perhaps the other end of it as well, if it exists. If it does exist, the ONE sector of the other end would light up on the other side, provided the science vessel is located exactly in the sector where the first end of the wormhole is located, or passes exactly through that sector. Being in proximity is not good enough (otherwise the Cardies would have found it, don't you think?). I'd suggest do not bother with probes and stuff, as that will only take more time out of focusing on more important aspects of the game.

Could science ships launch probes into the wormhole?