Time for another quick status update on the mod, its been some time since a news article so it seemed fitting to update you all with some of the latest developments and features that have been implemented.
Hero update:
Heroes have become a really neat feature to play with, these ships are available relatively early in the game, however when you lose one its gone for good.
Im sure some of you are wondering which heroes youll get to play with and what kind of roles they will fill.
The main goal of a hero ships is fleet command and support, however each hero does this in a unique way, for example General Martok is a brute force attacker with specialisation in massive damage boosts, these boosts might however go with a reduced shields strength for a short time, while Captain Kurn will have the ability to reinforce your fleet with additional ships and what Chancellor Gowron will be able to do...well lets just say...Experience bij...
The Federation heroes follow a similar with with the USS Defiant with captain Sisko having a more offensive role when the USS Enterprise being more of a fleet commander and USS Voyager being for of a powerful support ship.
The Romulans will be very unique of course with espionage and sabotage very fitting of a romulan...watch out for Commander Sela..
As for the borg...lets just say She is the beginning...the end..the one who is many...
Each Hero WILL be voiced fully by the characters that are supposed to be on them, so expect some nice head nods to older games and series.
Debris:
If you have been watching the screenshots you will have seen allot of dead ships floating around recently, these are the new unique debris meshes. Each ship type will leave behind one or two pieces of debris when they explode, like normal stock debris these will disapear over time.
What makes this feature so nice is that after each battle it leaves behind a mark about what happend there and how many ships you lost...or destroyed. The idea behind this came from the episode: Best of both worlds, where the Enterprise arrives at the battlefield of wold 359 and you see all those dead ships in space and i think its safe to say we've captured that feeling in this mod.
Beta and release:
I know allot of you are dying to know when we are going to release and I can tell you its this year in December, we haven't locked down the date entirely but were pretty confident we can make our own deadline. As for open beta, i'm afraid there wont be an Open beta, we will however have a closed beta this will most likely be in Early/Mid November, you can already apply for the beta by sending us a Private message here on moddb we WILL need to know the following though: PC Specs, if you have the Forbidden worlds DLC or not, age and location. We will select approximately 10/15 candidates for beta.
Thanks alot for this effort, I really cant wait.
I sent you guys a PM with all my details regarding the closed Beta. Been checking this page daily for the last few months.
You guys rock
Thanks for the updates guys!
You guys have so far broke the mole for this game and with the eye candy you keep showing me i might have to apply for this Beta so i can just play this game Dec to far away now XD
Thank you for the update and also please keep up the hard work
Have you noticed a hit to performance with these new debris meshes? We've been talking about doing it over at SotP for years now, but have always been concerned about giving SoaSE more excuse to lag. Using smaller textures for it?
no hit to performance whatso ever.. in an earlier post Max made he described how he is using the existing bump maps and also a lower res damage texture (plus a few other aspects) that really do allow for the damage models to function with little trouble to the games performance. it also has been test between a veriety of specs and pc builds.. the only time with this mod you'll see any performance issues is theres a bandwidth lag spike on a multiplayer game (and that effects pretty much all games modded or other wise)
The only real risk I can see is if you exceed the hard code limit for meshes.
Hopefully we won't, but if it does happen we may have to give some lesser used ships more generic damage meshes (using the federation as an example use generic sections of hull plating that's clearly federation in origin thereby reducing a potential of 5-6 meshes down to one)
this is one christmas present i'm in great anticipation to receive :) thanks greatly for all of your hard work!!!!!!
THIS IS SO AWESOME!
Yeah thanks this looks amazing I cannot wait to try it out!!
This might sound like a dumb question, but will I be able to play this in a Windows 8 operating system? Thank you for all your hard work and dedication. It's great to see people doing what they love to do and doing it so well! I wish I can help out but I'm not a programmer.
yes it works in windows 8