Star Trek Excalibur

posted on May 24th, 2010, 3:40 pm

k ppl i just found this site and well i was blown away by it looks like it going to b EPIC

so check it out


STExcalibur.com


not sure how to link so this will have to do 

[Shril]

posted on May 24th, 2010, 4:30 pm

Last edited by Shril on May 24th, 2010, 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

STE is a very ambigious project. I follow it since 2-3 years....posted quite some news on ST Galaxy Network during the Great Depression of the ST gaming franchise. The problem I see with this fan game is that it will probably not come to a release cos of the lack of skilled scripters. Like many other projects of that kind the only things you ever see are of graphical nature be it screenshots, interiors or flybys of ships. I was quite impressed about the physics engine the STE dev team showed us quite a while ago though. But since then there hasn't been a major progress. This was also the case for the highly anticipated HL² mod Enterprise: Temporal Cold War which went down last year (?). So what they released was a crap of an ego shooter "demo" where you could walk around on the nicely done Enterprise bridge (which was sometimes even to narrow to normally walk - so much to canonity vs gameplay). Before the fall down of that project there have also been lots of great looking screenshots, videos and what not - but never one single real gameplay show off where you could see a major progress in game shape up and feel. That mod was also heavily hyped and turned out to be a flop and a waste of waiting time.
I fear the same thing will come for Excalibur as the development of a new game from scratch is even more difficult and time consuming as a total conversion is as you really have to come up with a huge amount of scipting labour resources (man power) to make major progress. Well, now they do it in their free time and they don't become younger and sometimes move over to have family and other priorities in their life than sitting months in front of their scripting tools hacking the keyboard.
If you see so less information coming from such an ambigious project you should not wonder to see it falling sooner or later. So I recommend not to lay so much hope into it to prevent yourself getting disappointed becasue the hype told you it would become reality and the fullfillment of all your dreams.

Fleet Operations is one very seldom and so lucky case we should all be very thankful for.

posted on May 24th, 2010, 4:52 pm

ninja'd by jan. i agree even so.

[Dircome]

posted on May 24th, 2010, 5:00 pm

Last edited by Dircome on May 24th, 2010, 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Star Trek Armada II: Fleet Operations - Bridge Commander Successor?

Here i posted it a while ago it has some responses from a Excaibur PR guy as well

Its always good not to get your hopes up about a mod but they still post regular updates but its on their facebook page not the website.

posted on May 24th, 2010, 7:50 pm

lol i only looked at some screen shots and 1 or 2 vids they looked good 
im not getting my hopes up ive learnt not to do that  with trek games 

posted on May 24th, 2010, 9:43 pm

lol i only looked at some screen shots and 1 or 2 vids they looked good 
im not getting my hopes up ive learnt not to do that  with trek games 

Indeed they do! I'mnot questioning the potential of STE. But I'm questioning the attempt to bring this potential to a fully working game. The only thing that I see will make it happen is the fact of this being an open source project where everyone can contribute and someday continue working on it / take it over AND, which is much more important, as far as I know there are people in the dev team that were involved with the highly successful Kobayashi Maru mod for Bridge Commander. They know what it means to spend hundreds of hours modding even though it is not fun all the time and also suck from time to time. Modders who have overcome their pigdog and bring continuity into their work (work!) will succed and present a decent game in the end.
It's like a marriage - in the beginning there are sweet feelings everything works so easily. After some time it turns to be different and maybe not even easy but you manage to overcome the unpleasant change and together walk into a new dimension of living together which is not necessarily a silent torture and loss of freedom, just another step, and shortly before you die you know it was good to not have left your partner during bad times. You realize you still love her/him, just in another way.

Well...modding is like marriage. Congratulations dev team! 

posted on May 24th, 2010, 10:07 pm

doca/optec 'ship? sounds like fanfic to me. 

posted on May 25th, 2010, 7:00 am

doca/optec 'ship? sounds like fanfic to me. 

ste looks alright, but the sheer amount of graphical and polygon replacement on the BC engine, it looks like it would take a very long time for each ship, even so thats not including the crew, voice talent, scripts for the voices, lower texture replacement for slower machines, having all in game scripts connect to the engine, missions... i mean there is at least 60% more work here then they are willing to admit, then there are the issues that were not accounted for, bug testing, software testing, alpha testing will take a while, beta testing, and general release including several more bug fixes or balance tweaks. if STE is gonna go through all known races, as ive seen pictures of some of them, it's going to take a very very long time.

im not negative, in fact i hope it comes, but with real life, it just looks too big a job for a 4 man crew on the main game components and several members elsewhere on the mechanics of the engine.

posted on May 27th, 2010, 8:27 am

posted on May 27th, 2010, 9:09 am

nothing special, what the video is saying is that its just speculation at the moment over what to do, but with added pr effect of more hype. freelancer 2 was the same until that was canned, same with starcraft ghost.

posted on May 27th, 2010, 9:33 am

They haven't even got it sorted to include one nasty weapon into the game after more than 2 years of the announcement! Instead what they have achieved is the modelling of dozens of ships and bridges which means the outer shell of a game. There is nothing that even reminds me of a core play element. So what about establishing a game with one ship, one weapon, one environment, one of each component you want to really roll out in the game and see if it works at all. After that they can build up on that frame. They should concentrate on the programming 100% and not on playing around with shaders and ship movement crap. It so looks like this project got stuck due to a false priority management.

[Dave Denton]

posted on May 27th, 2010, 10:45 pm

Last edited by Dave Denton on May 27th, 2010, 10:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

        [font=Comic Sans MS]Star Trek - Excalibur[/font]

posted on May 28th, 2010, 6:30 pm

Nice music...