Star Trek: Defense Line (Developing a new ST RTS game)

What's your favourite episode? How is romulan ale brewed? - Star Trek in general :-)
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posted on February 6th, 2018, 8:17 am
"Returning"

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Nagasaki & Beowulf models by TUB_Husker
Valkyrie Mark-IV model by u.s.s.defiant
Planets' textures by u.s.s.sovereign
posted on March 10th, 2018, 3:14 am
nice! seems interesting!
posted on April 16th, 2018, 1:27 pm
Hello, everyone! We have been silent for a while. Here is some news:

1. All the starships' subsystems are now finished;

2. We have already showed you tractor beam. We have upgraded the effect now;

3. Assimilation and damage effect for stations is completed;

4. New stations selection effect is done. The contour is coloured with the player's colour;

5. Thanks to TUB_Husker, we have a new great model of advanced drydock. Wonderful work, TUB_Husker. Your models are great!

6. The sensors and weapons range visualization in now completed (green and red circles around selected object). Player can hang the cursor over the station or a ship to see the ranges;

7. Weapons system is completely remade. The new system let the ships have more than three phasers. Now the quantity is unlimited. The same with torpedoes;

8. The starbase is now armed and able to open the fire;

9. We have finally deleted the fog of war. Player can see only objects inside sensor range of his ships and stations. Already found enemy stations outside sensor range are shown as ghosts.

A couple of screens:

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posted on April 19th, 2018, 3:39 pm
Rock on
posted on April 24th, 2018, 10:16 am
Sovereign class in the atmosphere of a gas giant

Sovereign model by TUB_Husker
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posted on April 25th, 2018, 1:54 am
Could I give my suggestion?
I think the "assimilated form" has too much green glows.

From the partially assimilated Voyager pics here:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/File ... ilated.jpg
http://borgcollective.wikia.com/wiki/File:USS_Voyager_NCC_74656_(Assimilated).jpg

The warp engines don't glow green, instead the Borg parts glow.
posted on April 25th, 2018, 3:45 am
yochenhsieh wrote:Could I give my suggestion?
I think the "assimilated form" has too much green glows.

From the partially assimilated Voyager pics here:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/File ... ilated.jpg
http://borgcollective.wikia.com/wiki/File:USS_Voyager_NCC_74656_(Assimilated).jpg

The warp engines don't glow green, instead the Borg parts glow.


Thanks for your suggestion. We would like to make player feel the ship totally assimilated. The Voyager assimilation shows us only partially assimilated craft. The assimilation concept was taken from the Armada game series, where the engines glow green too.
posted on August 26th, 2018, 5:10 pm
We haven’t written for a while. Here are things we were working on during last months:

1) The Attack order is now available and ships can attack even friendly targets at command.
2) The Protect order builds ships in a protective formation around the target to protect.
3) The Self-destruct sequence could be canceled now. A player has five seconds to change his mind and not to ruin the ship (the button is highlighted)

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4) Now it is possible to order ships to patrol the area. There is a button in the Orders Menu or player can press Shift+Click to set waypoints. The set waypoints are visible only if the ship is selected.
5) The Stop order cancels any other commands to the ship.
6) The fleet now moves at the slowest vessel’s speed to make all ships move at the same velocity. This function is needed not to have your small ships destroyed by the defence line of enemy base while your big ships are still moving to the battlefield.
7) The ships create queue to the place where they could be repaired while the dock is already busy.
8) The Engine System is reconstructed again. Now the ships act more realistic.
9) Cursors are replaced with new ones.
10) We have upgraded our Unity 3D to the 2018 version. Because of this upgrade, our celestial bodies were broken down and we had to replace the whole module and remake all planets, stars and other space environments.

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In the meantime, we celebrate Defence Line’s birthday, as it is 3-years-and-2-days old. Here is a wallpaper as a small present to you.

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By the way, thanks to Don Woligroski (Cleeve) for his permission to use his models in our project. You can see his Klingon K'vek-class vessel on the wallpaper. Akira-class is by our friend and colleague TUB_Husker.
posted on August 24th, 2019, 7:33 pm
Good evening, officers!

Today our project celebrates its 4-year anniversary since the beginning of work. We're still alive, though a lot of game modules had to be rebuilt. Thanks to unexpected reinforcement we finally managed to finish a workable engines module. It causes no bugs. The work is going on.

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posted on August 26th, 2019, 11:54 am
I'm really looking forward to this. I would even consider porting my mod, because I want to be working on a game that is still supported :)
posted on August 27th, 2019, 6:47 am
k_merse wrote:I'm really looking forward to this. I would even consider porting my mod, because I want to be working on a game that is still supported :)


We're thinking of how to make the game modable without getting into trouble with some other elements. It depends, but we'd like to make it possible to expand the game. We hope there will be mod support.
posted on August 28th, 2020, 5:32 pm
Greetings, Ladies and Gentlemen!

The Defence Line project celebrates its 5th anniversary. We’ve been silent for a year, and you could consider DL dead. Well, that’s not true. Now I’m going to tell what has been done since our last news report.

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Five years ago our project leader was a schoolboy whose enthusiasm started our DL project. He was just an amateur solo developer. Since then, the old Defence Line had been under construction. Of course, the amateur programmer had to make his own billion of mistakes. The project had a dreadful amount of troubles and bugs, and each next got was more and more difficult. So our project leader had to start the re-coding the game mechanics from the beginning.

After a year of working we finally got to the point where we left the old Defence Line.

1) The main part of game mechanics has been successfully recreated. The game feels as it used to be before the “reboot”.

2) The building system is much better and more stable than in the old DL. The player can select unconstructed stations and decommission stations and ships.

3) Each starship or station has its own building animation (Armada 1-2 style — polygon by polygon).

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4) The starship’s or station’s icon now has a faction background that shows which faction controls it. The colour of the selection circle shows the colour of the player:

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5) A small but very nice effect for phasers: arcs are now visually loading before firing. USS Typhoon is about to fire phasers:

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6) We have upgraded the MSD system to display systems status in colours. Green, yellow and red on the MSD icon of the ship or station:

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7) We’ve improved the sensors. Their effectiveness depends on alert status. The range is not affected but if your ship is on Green Alert, the full range allows you to see starships and stations, as well as all the data about them. If the ship is on Yellow Alert, only part of the range is fully informative. The outer part of the range shows only a noisy shape of the ship, without any info about it. If your ship is on Red Alert, you can see only full data in close range, in the middle range you can see a noisy shape, and the outer range shows you only noises, even without a shape to guess the nature of object or its side:

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8) Impulse engines now stabilize the ship’s position if it got impulse after impact. If the engines are down, the ship or station will keep drifting through the map until it is destroyed by stellar bodies or leaves the map boundaries.

9) We started created special abilities of ships. By now we have antimatter mines (Defiant class) – mines model is needed; and phasers sheaf (Saber class) - 4 accurate shots at the selected target or its subsystem with heavy damage to the shields or the selected subsystem.

10) The main death explosion effect is now preceded by small explosions:

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11) We have added pulse phasers for the Atlantia class:

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12) The research system has been completely changed. Upgrades are now located not in the science station menu, but on the separate screen where the player can choose which station or facility should conduct the research.

13) Asteroids are now selectable and mining ships are gathering dilithium from them.

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14) The light has been changed. The skybox now creates soft illumination.

15) And perhaps the most odd thing is that now the name of the ship is displayed on its hull. The NCC numbers will be added a bit later.

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16) Ships now can change the altitude. It allows you to build your fleet in formation in full 3D.

17) If the ship is severely damaged its lights (nacelles, impulse engines, etc) will wink.

18) The ships’ “parking lights” added.

19) Thanks to TUB_Husker we have Defiant class, Prometheus class, textures for some models and drydock model.

Along with the good news we have some problems that still take time to solve:

1) The engines works a bit oddly (we cannot find the reason for ships’ short range teleportation. Spore-drive experiments? XD).

2) The fleet control menu is now absent. It will be added after fully functional MSD and Specials.

3) The Borg Collective is still needed to be created. We plan to make the Borg very different from other factions. One of the reasons is to make the game for the Collective more complicated as the Borg is outbalanced.

4) Borg ships moving needs to be created.

5) The trading station and the trading itself have not been created yet.

6) The AI is lost and needs to be recreated from the beginning.

7) The cursors system needs to be readapted from the old DL.

8) The Main and Pause menus are lost and the only way to exit the game is with alt+f4.

Here is our leader’s attempt to texture. Klingon construction ship.

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As you can see we are still fighting and have the desire to win.

Live Long and Prosper!
posted on August 24th, 2021, 12:34 pm
Hello to all fans of the Star Trek universe. Today Star Trek Defence Line project celebrates six years since the beginning of active development of the game. We have been silent for a long time, but today is very special day for us. For the last six years we have been working on the game, for these six years you have been supporting us giving strength in our struggle. Thank you very much for being with us.

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This birthday will be special primarily because along with this post we are releasing a demo 0.10 of the second phase the project development. The last playable demo available for anyone was released in 2017. Since then a lot has changed and it is very important for us to know your opinion on the current state of the game. If you find any bugs write to us about them. Unfortunately, not all systems have been restored since 2020 data loss, and some functions are turned off. For example the resource collecting is not working by now (the player is given 1,000,000 points of Dilithium and Titanium instead).

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What you can do:

The player can build five types of stations: starbase, two shipyards, research station and outpost.

The player can build twelve starship classes: five in the first shipyard, six in the second and one in starbase. Outpost is also capable of building Defiant-class ships, but since this class could be constructed in the first shipyard, it does not count.

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The player can upgrade the starbase twice. So far, upgrades have not effects.

The player can start a research, which is also just a test and has no effect. To do the research, you need to build a research station, select in the research menu the station and after that research itself. Then it will be possible to start it.

In addition, the player has four starships’ abilities to test: antimatter mines for Defiant-class, a phaser bunch for Saber-class, warp trail scanning for Nova-class, and tractor beam for all starships.

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As to completely new mechanics that our players have not seen before we would like to demonstrate the global minimap, which is very different from the old version, that could be seen in previous test demos. The new global minimap can be scaled with the mouse wheel and moved by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen.

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On the opposite side of the map, there is a hostile base consisting of one starbase, two builders, and a Sovereign-class starship. They do not have AI, so they will not build something or fly around the map, but they will allow the player test the firepower of his ships. If you do not want to fly to another part of the map, the ‘orders’ menu will allow you to attack any target, including your own ships. Key 'A' on the keyboard is responsible for the same order.

Download the demo:
https://www.moddb.com/games/star-trek-defence-line/downloads/demo-m2-10

Thanks again for being with us. Live long and prosper!
posted on August 25th, 2021, 4:17 pm
Superb news!
Every new RTS is a good thing. If it's Star Trek, it's even better :)
posted on August 25th, 2021, 9:47 pm
k_merse wrote:Superb news!
Every new RTS is a good thing. If it's Star Trek, it's even better :)


Exactly! Thank you!
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