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When I saw that RD was working on his own version, I wanted to get mine out there too so people wouldn't assume I just built off of his version.

Anyway, this is what I have been working on from the very start. It was never intended to see the light of day, in this current state. Many things are broken, and the Roton factory doesn't even upgrade correctly without turning 90 degrees for some reason.

I also spoke to the Boj-Man himself a while ago. He gave me unreleased assets, and said I could release the official Starfleet 0.8. Ill definitely keep this mod under my belt, adding to it as I see fit. I just wanted to share how far I have come along the way. I intend to continue working on this mod, adding more as my skill in modding increases since one day I intend to release 0.8.

Heres what Ive done so far. I think it goes without saying that anyone is free to take it and build on it, since it's not really my mod in the first place.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ab7rc ... et_1.3.zip

Just remember some things are very very very very broken and this isn't nearly done

Here's the unreleased assets. "Made by the community, for the community" he said. This is a big download.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/2aqwl ... Assets.zip

Have fun.

Paging Red Devil.

Just remember some things are very very very very broken and this isn't nearly done

It's ok, we know many things were broken right from the start and there is nothing you can do about it.
I never managed to play Starfleets campaign in it's original form simply because it ran so very badly on my pc.

this is great news, vadam. i'll give it a whirl. please tell the boj-man we said thank you. i didn't know someone else was working on it, too. between the two of us, we can probably get this thing polished up. the factory upgrade is most likely due to the terrain plate orientation being opposite from the first factory.

as always, be advised that you may also get some backlash from the pedants.

The pedants have issues with people making extreme changes not in the spirit of the original to mods that aren't theirs. This is clearly not that situation.

AHadley wrote:The pedants have issues with people making extreme changes not in the spirit of the original to mods that aren't theirs. This is clearly not that situation.

As probably one of the people RD is talking about with his pejorative use of that word, changes within the spirit of the original work that keep it functioning as intended are fine. I'd be doing a lot of such things myself if I had the time. Don't go adding in some nonsense like day/night cycles or merge in other mod's AI units unless it's part of the original design and maybe wasn't pulled off due to time or limitations, etc.

How well does it run on a modern system? It was years ago with pentium and 1.2 that I just gave up trying at 8 fps caused by nightmare swarms of mutant Threed models.

Red Devil wrote:as always, be advised that you may also get some backlash from the pedants.

Noted.

MrTwosheds wrote:How well does it run on a modern system? It was years ago with pentium and 1.2 that I just gave up trying at 8 fps caused by nightmare swarms of mutant Threed models.

It runs perfectly fine for me, the Threed models never caused me any issues. But then again, they never did even back in 1.2 so I don't really know.

It's to do with occluded faces, a model should really only have renderable faces on the outside. Then your video card/cpu can decide to not draw them when you can't see them. Starfleets Threed models often consist of more than one model just pushed into each other, they have visible faces on the inside, where they have to be constantly NOT drawn or partially drawn live by your video card/cpu.
A considerable amount of excess calculation can be generated this way, too many units of this type on screen at the same time can seriously impact performance to the point where you might be able to cook eggs on your CPU.
I recall one time joining a game on ground zero, Some guy drove something that looked a bit like a biometal horse into my base and I literally could not look at it due to the severe Fps drop it created. 1.3's dx9 should have reduced this impact considerably as the burden is no longer just on the cpu. The potential for massive inefficiency still remains though.
BZ2 has always been able to stress computers, add a long visibility range, a whole load of transparency, lights, particles and a swarm of ships making your video card constantly re-calculate what you can and cannot see and it will still get Hot.

An other problem with ThreeD is that it can screw up models, though that is something you can catch well before you put it ingame, in my experience.

i haven't had any problem with low fps, even when in the enemy base in a test ship and them all firing at me..

but, good to know about the two-faced friends and enemies, mts.

Some people never noticed it back then either, it may just have been a problem on certain types of hardware. I don't know for sure, I just know that I could not play that mod in 1.2 while other mods worked just fine. I assumed it was down to the unconventional modelling.

i can play it fine in 1.3

50 x processing power probably made all the difference.

MrTwosheds wrote:50 x processing power probably made all the difference.

You just have to learn to restrain yourself when about to buy a crappy PC...