G'day Moddb Community!
For Mod of the Year we had a prearranged set of topics to discuss, we'd set them out for weekly news updates and waited for MOTY to begin... now a month after we had anticipated releasing these news items MOTY has actually begun! And the items that were slated for news posts over the past month are all going into this news post today.
News Item 1: Refined Shield Effects
The Shield effects you saw in images like this one and this one were the 1st generation shield effects produced and have been the recipient of more time and effort since then. Beside other refinements a pulse or torpedo hit will now cause a small impact wave on the shield. The current shield FX look more like these:
News Item 2: Refined Damage Effects
One of the legacy items that we had from the old iteration of the mod was the "event" files that were being used for each of the ships. Because they worked we copied and pasted the same event files, with some differences in the explosions, to every ship. One thing you may have noticed in release Alpha is that when a ship is damaged it always plays a certain effect at a certain spot on the hull.
Not any more!
The damage fx have been randomised, with a blank fx included to mix it up further, and the marker on the ship that the fx is played on is now one of several that might house the effect. The result is that you can take 5 of the same class ship into a battle, win by the skin of your teeth and see different damage on every ship!
If you take 3 or 4 of a single ship type on the Romii map in release Alpha and sit them in the nebula until they're at 20% health then you will see what I mean with the old, rigid system!
Not only have the damage fx been given this new life another effect has been added in to compliment the existing ones!
News Item 3: How're we doing? Where're we going?
Since the 20/08/2011 when we released the first iteration of the mod up to today there have been 10,404 file changes or new files added in 254 transactions into our mod, that's an average of 40 changes per upload by each team member, that's about 690 changes per week for the last 15 weeks!
We have indeed been hard at work, but Release Alpha and Release Beta are just the foundation!
Many of you have asked for ships like the Ambassador class or the Excelsior class or even to have the excellent B'rel and K'tinga that Herby did made available for the Klingon side, and the mod team have stood united in saying no.
Others have asked for the Cardassian Union or the Dominion Alliance to be made into a playable faction, or for the Borg collective to be made one of the Deathmatch races alongside the Federation, the Klingons and the Romulans. Again, the mod team have gently declined these requests.
But why?
The answer is because we have always had another plan, and in a shameless effort to secure more votes we are going to reveal the planned path for the Star Trek: Continuum mod now...
News Item 4: Star Trek: Continuum, the whole continuum!
To understand our ultimate plans for the mod a simple list of the currently planned releases is all that's needed!
- Release Alpha (released!)
- 2380's [The Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager] - Release Beta (pending!)
- 2380's [The Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager]
- Scripting enhancements
- Effects enhancements
- New models and maps - Release Gamma
- 2290's [Late "TMP" era]
- Excelsior is the mainstay of Federation fleet - Release Delta
- 2250's [Cpt' Kirk and friends in TOS style] - Release Epsilon
- 2160's [Set just after the "Enterprise" series ended]
Please note we will not be mixing eras, the choice of which era to play with will be made during the deathmatch setup and each era will be exclusive of the others. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section of this news post.
I think that's enough said :o)
Please! Don't let me keep you from voting!
Continuum Corp.
Can't you use the HWU race selection system, it seems like you could have a unlimited number of races then. Suggesting this option to be named any,it should say in the options list era, if you chose a certain era you choose between those races from that era, if you choose all then you choose races like in HWU.
But change one option to a certain era you should be able to choose races from the era to play as I said earlier.
Now i know, it might not work to put it in the option list but maybe if you put it in the game type list.
Anyway there should be possible to pick between different eras to play and with a certain era you can choose between certain races. It should be possible to choose to get all races available, but that would only work with the HWU race selection system.
In the game mode list you should be able to choose between that, but if you want to choose game-mode maybe that could be an option in the options list in each game-mode list in which you choose eras or the option mixed in which you will be able to chose any race from the mod with the HWU race selection system.
We're re-purposing starting fleets and using special research items to split eras, this fits in best with other more important scripts that we have integrated into the mod.
The HWU system has everything in one race, that wont work for us.
Its useless to don't download this mod, " What is it your Borg friends say? "Resistance is futile""
I've downloaded the first verion of this mod and i gotta say, great work!
I've also tried to download this new verion with shields and better fx, but the same mod as before is downloaded and installed.
Maybe the mod isn't out yet, can't find any dates, could someone enlighten me?
Thanks