f13.net

http://www.startrekonline.com/devlog/

Devlog 1: it's map-tastic!

It's been so long since I signed up to this, I'd forgotten I had. I seriously hope STO is further along than this.

I promise there are currently thousands of angry nerds viciously emailing, blogging, IRCing and podcasting about how he got the stardate wrong.  THE DEVS DON'T CARE OR RESEARCH THE LORE THIS GAME WILL BE A TRAVESTY!!!

So they are using Zbrush to design land?

Not a bad choice.

Ugh.
That is one game I know I definately will not play.

No it isn't. I'm just not sure what is supposed to be so innovative about their whole process...

Nothing, i think its just a glimpse of there process.

ok, wait... so a planet is simple 1 SQUARE zone? Talk about suck.

Have they ever made a decent Star-Trek game?

Maybe there will be thousands of planets since the point of Star Trek is space exploration/combat.

Also, the completed example did not look bad at all.

The original SWG planets were a one square zone (20km x 20km) too, unless I misunderstand.

Otherwise, I'm disappointed they didn't go a bit further with the motif of a Captain's Log. Sure, gamers don't care about tone so much as info, but like LoTRO, Star Trek is mostly going to appeal right now to fans of the various series (where they played fast and loose with Stardates anyway, so nobody cares there ;) ). Only if these fans start announcing some whizbang stuff never seen before in an MMO will others really begin to care in my opinion. Sorta like AoC for Conan fans only until some of the UI started emerging.

Until then, they should make an effort to talk like Picard would, high water mark for the IP in my opinion.

Maybe they will make a Blood Gulch level as well.

These are planets.  Couldn't they make it so that if you reach one end of the planet you go to the other end?

Should we be scared that you know what today's proper stardate is?

I love Sam and thought this was suitable for this thread as well.

(http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/6811/thisiscrazycr9.jpg)

I didn't know, I swear.  I was genuinely curious to know if the number he used actually translated to the date, if he was that hardcore, so I googled "stardate converter" and sure enough a page full of hits appeared.

Apparently we can only be represented using negative star dates for some reason, I wasn't interested enough to find out why.  Perhaps the second coming occurred and we had to reset all the damn clocks again.

If i had to hazzard a guess, then like any good Empire the Federation began it's calendar on some date most relevant to it.  Perhaps the first vulcan-human meeting or  the actual founding of the Fed.

Damn big-government types! Get outta my space!

Stardates are meaningless; writers pulled the numbers out of their asses at random, at least for the original series.  They made more of an effort to not have them be completely random in the later series, but they never came up with any system to provide a correlation between real calendars and their phoney-baloney made-up stuff.  Various nerds have proposed numbering systems that would be based off of our calendar, but the shows and movies use none of those systems, so anyone claiming to have the correct stardate for a real date is full of shit.

Exactly.

The concept of a Stardate is to decouple Earth movements from a galactic calendar so you don't end up with that wierd affect in the Asimovian universe where everyone knows a year is 365 days but nobody remembers why.

Someone jump over the geek line further. I dare ya!

What about how time slows greatly when you get close to the speed or light?

Pray that a bad episode doesn't come on as you near c.

Please. That's when you kick on the inducer and burst into warp space.

That at least skips the commercials.

Someone should bring these guys to speed about Terragen (http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/) and such. Reinventing the wheel is all cool, but bit of a time waste.

Actually, it's dealt with in the trek universe by a galactic version of the NTP protocol. Because even extended use of the impulse engines can skew the onboard time clocks, there are beacon satellites scattered throughout the known universe that communicate with time+date+location pings. When a ship comes out of warp, or at specific intervals, these beacons are queried and the time is synced from them. They can also be used for astronavigation triangulation, confirming one's point in space a lot faster than local star scanning.

I thought those beacons were merely backup for star scanning though, how they were able to have stardates at all when flung all over the galaxy by Q/wormhole/sadistic-entity.

I'd imagine the majority of starfleet is a quiet place.

You can reset your clock all you want but you'll still be thirty years younger than your twin.  That could, however, explain why everybody makes up their stardates.

I want to belong to the faction that Q belongs to.

You mean the Q?  :-D

Stardate 9er073.01

We've learned this is the worst possible license to turn into an MMORPG as it's a character driven drama. Investors dropped out. Slashing wrists at 0300.

Will it meet with the same fate as this title (http://www.rpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10075&games=724)?

(http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/lejendarymmo_1092704267.jpg)

But that's only if your Twin turns arround and comes back to meet you. While you are both traveling away from each other, both of you are younger than each other (as paradoxical as it sounds) so it would therefor be impossible to sync clocks without using some sort of quantum entanglement. But having a clock that was not based on a local frame of refference would be silly because it would just randomly speed up and slow down all the time with the movement of the ship.

Picture 8 looked cool, and the concept art (for what that counts) also looks pretty hawt.  I played SWG so square planets, if large, are conceptually acceptable to me.

Terragen isn't suitable for generating terrain models for real time visualization.

You obviously don't remember the trek universe. All communication, and therefore all syncing, is done through subspace, which is many orders of magnitude beyond lightspeed. Furthermore, the ship doesn't actually have any time dilation effects while in warp. The syncs are intended to compensate for traveling around at impulse speeds while in-system where the skew, while minor, can build up over time.

Yes, but how do they explain the causality violation then? Basically FTL travel is impossible. If you were to send a message to someone FTL it would arive before you sent it. Even if you sent it via the mythical subspace.

Now who's the super-geek?

btw, I still think this game will suck.

I am a big fan of Earth and Beyond... I see a lot of EnB in STO and I am actually happy about that.

Your gimmick is growing tired and transparent.

What the heck are you talking about? It's not a causality violation and FTL travel is also impossible in the trek universe. Subspace is another dimension superimposed on ours that they travel through, blinking in and out of space, traveling but not actually moving.

It doesn't arrive before you sent it, except in the same way that quantum interference happens before you initiate it.

Actually, iirc, sub space is different from warp space (and therefore transwarp space and the hyperwarp space of TNG, why their Warp 9 was very different from TOS Warp 9). Something about sub-space prevents matter from going through it by communications are fine.

Whatever. They need to start using slipstream anyway.

and what gimmick  is that? I really dont get your problem, maybe you should GTFO?

(http://www.clisham.com-a.googlepages.com/heavyhit_top.jpg)

Oops, sorry: I thought your whole "drug-ruined brain; spouting nonsense and unfunny grade-school-level insults in text-speak" thing was a gimmick.  If you're really like this then I'll try to be more understanding and patient.  :oops:

Um yeah... am i the only one who liked EnB?

Does this thread have E&B in the title? No! Go bring that up in the TV thread if you must. This shouldn't have to be explained.

I feel like I have missed out on something in my life -- I've never seen a single episode of Star Trek.

Is it really something worth getting into, and if so, what should I start with? I read the ST threads from time to time and see people retching through the movies, so I don't want to start with something bad.

Nah it does not, but it looks like an EnB clone. which i was trying to point out.

Well, to be short:

ST:TOS -- it's cheesy 70s shit. However, at the time, there was something there that wasn't anywhere else. Like actual ethical questions, if handled cheesily It's like everyone went ape-shit for Star Wars, but looking back -- it's cheesy (although the fx upgrades have helped), but nostalgia gets you through.
ST:TNG -- Cheesy, preachy, shitty FX for the first few seasons. Later seasons got into decent enough storylines and used the strengths of sci-fi (create a reality that highlights whatever you want) to good effect.
ST: DS9 -- Boring but much less cheesy, until the guys in charge of the franchise got bored and went to handle Voyager. Then they added a series storyline, darkened the shit out of some characters, and added a whole fucking lot of 'grey' into a universe that was starkly black and white. Some good TV there.
ST: Voyager -- Cheesy, and back to a lot of black and white.
ST: Enterprise -- Oh dear God, cheesy.

Even squinting very, very hard so that everything has become a vague blur I still don't see that.

So far, what I've seen of STO has been this one devblog... and land.  Pretty terrain, but land.  There was NO LAND in EnB.  There was space, and spaceships, stations, and you could go in a station and be an avatar, but only to get quests, and they were narrow tunnels and stuff.  No land.  Planets might as well have no existed.  To me, STO and EB are completely orthogonal at this point.

--
Alkiera

You could fly around some planets there at the end.  There was also a giant space fishbowl...

No walking on the planets though, but you could fly through the atmosphere and see the terrain below.

Right.  So far they have in common:

1.  Space.
2.  Planets.

Still squinting but c'mon, no one is going to buy a blur that vague.

They're still looking for a Design Director (http://jobs.gamasutra.com/Jobseekerx/ViewJob.asp?JobID=UBbh%2BejHnK9zc2qEjeb2YEuLmrAu), so I'm thinking we're not going to see much for some time. In fact, the recent devblog seemed motivated purely by gutted-E3 more than anything else. There's, like, no information there save those starved for anything.

Wasn't this the company that secured the license and then began to staff up to build something?

I'm not saying they're nowhere of course. I'm not saying I actually care either. All things Trek need to take a break for a few years.

Haven't we already learned that MMORPG games based off of existing movie/TV license are doomed to fail?

I am biased - but yes you are.  During my last job hunt I picked up the full 3 years of the original Trek and watched every episode.  Let's put it this way - we know the special effects are crap - so the durability of the original series could only come from good plots and terrific characters.  Best of all, the original series was not politically correct  :-D

I would assume any STO game would incorporate the best ideas from the all the series that followed.

Planets did exist. You could orbit them and land at there "towns" some planets you could actually enter their atmosphere and fly around. I had many missions where i encountered hostile "life form" on said planets.  Sure i can’t get out my ship and walk around, but i could still explore planets.

So we can actually get out and walk around, it’s still a space PVE mmo. Could it be more elaborate then EnB? Sure, but right now it just looks like an enhancement instead of being something "new"

I'd love a game where space and planet surface were seamless, including getting out of the ship and walking around. This may be beyond current technical capabilities on the server side, particularly if you can customize the planet surface and/or your ship. But the convergence of these two unique experiences really allows for a great deal of creativity. Heck, I'd grind for hours on enemy ships if I could take advantage of gravity wells and upper and lower atmospheric conditions and use canyon runs to my advantage. In my mind I've already quit all all these other pretenders just play that :)

I don't really buy that.  From SGW, we learned that taking a license based on swashbuckling with laser swords and making a game based on mining ore to make into barrettes for wookie beards will not be a big hit, especially when it's an embarrassingly bug-riddled piece of shit in every imaginable aspect.  From Matrix, we learned that a license with no entrenched fanbase won't save a game that reeks of failure from every miserable pore of its being from failing.



To get my nerd on, TOS ran from 1966-69 and was culturally groundbreaking (for the time) in some respects, like having the first black-white interracial kiss on TV, a favorably-portrayed Russian during the cold war, a favorably-portrayed Japanese character who wasn't a martial artist, women (albiet almost universally hotties in miniskirts with positions analogous to jobs that were"womens jobs" at the time) with military authority, etc.

Which Japanese character wasn't a martial artist?

As to licenses and MMO, there's not enough datapoints to measure. Of those that exist, they did not achieve their potential* because the experience delivered did not match the expectations of the fan. As El Gallo notes, this is the real case with SWG and MxO.

Meanwhile, LoTRO seems to be doing *fine*. Sure it didn't make WoW numbers nor probably ever will. But that has more to do with the license being delivered too late into a genre full of games that knocked off the license, and thus devaluing it's uniqueness. If Sierra hadn't dropped the ball back in the day, or RG created "LoTR III" instead of "Ultima III", the world would be a very different place.

* games that still exist do so because they fill a business need by being enjoyable to "enough" people. As such, if a game is still open, it's not a "failure". Better to say it didn't reach it's intended (or believed) goal.

Yeah, I was trying to sort of say that with the "stuff that wasn't anywhere else" bit, but didn't really want to go into detail. As Trek moved from franchise to franchise, they tried to stay further and further away from that.

DS9 was the only one to really get into some nasty areas and some dark stuff. Favorite episode to date is the one where Sisko arranges for the assasination of a Romulan Ambassdor to trick the Romulans into getting involved in the war. (Sure, he tried to pretend he didn't think 'assasination' would be the arrangement, but it was bullshit). That's some tough choices -- not just murder, and lies but murder and lies for the express purpose of dragging an empire of billions/trillions into what's looking more and more like a war you're going to lose. Lots of blood on your hands there.

I didn't watch enough DS9. That sounds awesome. If that's indicative of what the later seasons were like, I'm going to be doing me some renting.

There is historical precedent for that particular event of course. But that it appeared in a "mainstream" show is pretty gutsy.

Yeah, the two idjits who handle the franchise switched focus to Voyager, so DS-9's writing staff had a hell of a lot more discretion up until the last season or so. So they created a multi-season war arc with the Dominion (and the Cardassians joined up with the Dominion). The Federation and Klingons got their asses kicked, and even with the Romulans helping they were getting their asses kicked.

The "end of the war" was a bit weak (to my mind, at least) but the war itself was pretty cool. Especially given the Dominion were lead by Odo's race -- the Changlings, and they were a hell of a lot better at disguise, so you got some stuff about Changling infiltration of Starfleet and such that was pretty neat. Plus some talk about Section 13 (the Federation's Dirty Tricks section), which was really worth it just to show the Federation wasn't the fucking do-gooders of the universe.

Which was nice, since Star Trek has always been super-moralistic and preachy (which is nice in one sense but not terribly realistic). Someone once referred to Farscape as "The sewer for Star Trek" -- which was a fair fit, as Farscape was about a bunch of escaped criminals hanging out with...criminals. Pure chaos, basically. Star Trek was entirely too orderly and peaceful.

Sounds even better. Which seasons should I get and which episode should I start and end with?

Or just watch Babylon 5 which did it much better than DS9 did.

If you have Netflix -- just start at the beginning, and everytime you want to kill Sisko, just grit your teeth and think "I've been assured he's not a jackass forever".

If you're purchasing -- I couldn't tell you. I watched the entire thing from 1:00 to 3:00 AM (back-to-back episodes) when I had a rather late-ending job (ended around 12:30) for a year or two. So I got reruns of it and have no idea when in the series I started watching. I remember trying to watch the first season and just being annoyed.

Sort of.

B5 had some clunkers too. And the last season? Teh lame. (yeah, extenuating circumstances, but still...)

Do yourself a favor and watch both.

Proof is in the pudding.

I'm sure the array of excuses is endless, but bottom line is MMO based off of an existing TV/movie/book license is weighted with a heavy handicap. As has been borne out to date with all of the empirical examples, including LotRO…

But the reason I mentioned LoTRO is because I think they did most things right. They just did it too late. The license certainly did hamper when this game was slated to first come out, but so did the development house. To me, LoTRO doesn't miss the intended target audience all that much. It's just that this audience got pulled into this largely Tolkien-esque genre years ago, particularly through EQ1 and then WoW. So much so, nowadays a direct iteration of the license that spawned the genre is seen as a knockoff. They're a victim of timing, and the only way they can resolve that is through the ongoing progressive storyline we all hope they'll actually do. This technically should be the magic match between license (progressive storyline) and the one MMO company that ever paid that much attention to progressive storyline.

To your point though, proof is in the pudding :)

Could never get into B5. And I've no plans to watch all of DS9 before the Dominion War. I don't have that much time for bad TV :P

Any space sci-fi set in a space station is generally better than space sci-fi set on a ship. I've got theories about the 'why' of that, but it's true.

Watch B5, ignore all of season one apart from 'Babylon Squared' and the final episode of that series. Watch the final seaon or so sparingly, apart from anything featuring Londo and G'Kar (I think they are around until almost the last episode...).

Watch DS9 from about where the Domninon appear and any episode featuring the Cardassian tailor. Try to ignore the episodes featuring the Ferengi as the main story. Do not watch "Profit and Lace". I repeat - DO NOT WATCH "PROFIT AND LACE". (http://www.agonybooth.com/extras/trek/profit_lace/)

That one DS9 episode where Quark and friends were trying to exchange a Dominion prisoner for Quark's mother but, oops, accidentally killed him and had to pull a "Weekend at Bernie's" with his corpse was some funny shit.

Thanks you. License based results are totally inconclusive. Also, "the proof of the pudding is in the tasting" is the real saying. (Makes a lot more sense)

As far as DS9, B5, etc. I just watched an episode of DS9 last night that kind of got me thinking about it, so I pulled up an episode guide and it made me remember why I only watched about half the episodes. It has a *lot* of filler. Jesus I still remember the episode where they played baseball - holy christ was that bad.

On a lot of episodes what should have been a side-story was made into the main plot. I don't mind character-driven, stand-alone or lighter episodes but they just did them too much and they weren't good at writing them. Episodes about the Ferengi, holodeck episodes, episodes about Jake, etc. Star Trek previously had been singular episodes with some loose ties; DS9 was much more plot-heavy with a strong arc but they went on way too many tangents.

There are 3 or 4 seasons of really good shows mixed into those 7 seasons. It's like they couldn't decide if they wanted to be a more traditional stand-alone show or B5-style plot-centric show.

As far as space ship vs. station - a ship is more conducive to adventure of the week format. Meet a new race, explore a new planet, etc. Station shows are a slower boil.

Edit: To be fair, B5 was basically 3 or fewer seasons worth of good shows stretched into 5.