Dear ModDB community, fellow modders and gamers:
Today we are proud to post some progress on our TC development statuses. Yes, the plural form. As many of you know we are developing a total conversion called Resistance, but we decided to start again with the development of Trek Battles 3. Originally we announced that we did not intend to release the addon or finish it, due to several reasons, but when we began the development of Resistance we soon noticed that it would become Trek Battles 3 and not what was supposed to become Resistance. Thus we split up the development into Trek Battles 3 and Resistance. It is likely that Resistance will be an addon for Trek Battles 3, since Trek Battles contains a lot features Resistance could use as well.
Many of you guessed about what Resistance might be and today we will let the cat out of the bag. Some of you have been right with the assumption that it’s going to be a Sci-Fi mod and yes, it is a Sci-Fi mod. Unfortunately the main developers of Resistance, Chrisluskey and Shadowbuilder, have been busy with real life work during the whole summer and thus we were not able to achieve a lot, which is the main reason that there is not going to be any promotional material in this news post for Resistance. We’d like to apologize for this. As soon as there is any promotional material or progress that’s worth to be reported we will post another news item.
But – as some kind of compensation – I will give you a short update on what has been done for Trek Battles 3 and what’s is still our intention to do. Logically we put in a lot of content in the mod, including most of our ships that have been released during the last few months and lots of new maps, but we’ve also been given permission from tiptop to include his TOS, TMP and TLE ships in the mod. So special thanks to tiptop. There are some models in there that are unique and won’t be available separately such as the D’Kyr that appeared on a PotD recently. Apart from the new content we made minor changes to the gameplay including improved AI, a Multiplayer race, Game Modes & advanced STL Manager support and it makes use of a little program I wrote that’s capable of parsing odf files. I will try to sum up a few things in the following paragraphs:
The Multiplayer Race:
Since non stock races are not available in Multiplayer, we removed the Breen as its own race and added the so called Multiplayer Race. It contains a duplicate of every Romulan, Terran, Vulcan, Dominion, Cardassian and Miscellaneous ship and is – as its name says – accessible in Multiplayer.
The Game Modes & STL Manager support:
After some consideration we decided to include – as Aftermath and UUM already do – Game Modes in the Mod. Every game mode has its own script, thus it’s easily possible to create new missions for these Game Modes without any scripting knowledge and we endorse the creation of new content for these game modes after the release of the Mod.
Till now we incorportated two game modes, one of them is called Capture the Starbase (=CTS) and it’s the equivalent to the CTF game mode in Elite Force. You simply have to try to board the enemies Starbase and the enemy will try to board yours. The second game mode is the Custom Mission mode, which works together with the STL Manager. The third version of the STL Manager contains a few minor, but important changes: It is capable of detecting the available races and ships in any mod and the Custom Mission has its own kind of AI to make the whole thing more interesting.
Of course we will try to add more game modes before the release of Trek Battles.
Odf Parser:
Gamer's won’t have any direct use for this parser, but we are able to do odf modifications that would take hours or days to do manually within seconds using a self written application. For example we could easily create the Multiplayer race odfs using this program, make all non-Federation ships available in Campaign mode, and add all new ships to the map editor, so that mappers can easily access the new ships in the map editor.
I thought about releasing the Odf Parser on Legacy Files, but I’m not quite sure whether I should, since there won’t be many people who know how to use it. But if you’re interested simply email me and I will send you the dll and if required also the C# source code.
Menu:
The menu has been completely redone, both scripting wise and the appearance of the interface, and its structure changed marginally. As soon as the interface changes are completed we will post some pics.
Release:
Well, we can’t really say when this is going to happen, we intend to get it done by Christmas, but I can’t promise anything and this may change.
Requests:
One of the main reason for keeping this a secret for the last two or three months, was that we feared that our email accounts are flooded with requests (this really happened before the release of TB2!), but of course we appreciate these requests, we simply ask you to use the thread on our forum or the topic on the Filefront forums. Every request will be taken into consideration and discussed with the team staff.
Beta Testers & Modders:
As usual we are always looking for people who test both Trek Battles and Resistance or help us with the development of this. If you are interested to help us, you can send your application to:
applications@newgen.stlegacyfiles.com
We also added new media to our ModDB profile showing some of the new features and content.
gdata out...
