Other Star Trek games?

posted on November 26th, 2012, 2:34 am

Does anyone out there play Star Trek Legacy or anything else? infact any games in general whats this community into most?

posted on November 26th, 2012, 3:05 am

I've played almost all PC Trek games over the years, if your looking for a good starship combat game I suggest trying to track down a copy of Bridge Commander and get the KM2010 mod, its pretty badass. Klingon academy was great but good luck getting that to run on anything modern. Unfortunatly Legacy is the most recent Trek game we have save for Star Trek Online (which i would also suggest, it IS alot better then it used to be) and being that its free to play, you dont have much to lose.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 3:13 am

Star Trek Online is entertaining.

The Starfleet Command series of games (at least I, II, and Orion Pirates; I've not played III) are great fun, as well.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 11:00 am

legacy's multiplayer was really buggy, i don't even think it works on windows 7. so i doubt anyone plays legacy. also legacy was shit, i mean really shit.


artist's impression of legacy

so many problems with legacy. the pc version was a shitty console port. worse than saints row 2.

you might find a couple people playing legacy's ultimate universe mod. but i don't think any are on this forum.

as for the other trek games, i don't any are good enough for online mp (or don't even have it). so i only keep them to occasionally run through the campaign.

i really wanted to play fifa 13 this year, but it's like legacy (see above image for artist's impression). it's so damn buggy. EA need to stop with the whole yearly release bullshit, they obviously can't polish it off quickly enough. every year now the game is full of bugs. fifa 12 was playable at least. fifa 13 just isn't worth it.

one game i'm really looking forward to is Rochard 2 (and the rochard 1 dlc). the original rochard was brilliant in so many ways. Jon st John's voice work was great.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 2:58 pm

Yeah, Legacy was kind of a mess. They put less experienced devs on the project which was probably too ambitious for the target time frame; they got rushed and were forced to release it unfinished. The graphics were alright, but the coding was crap. As I understand it, there are even some parts from the ancient A2 engine in Legacy.

As for other games Elite Force and Elite Force II weren't bad; EF2 tends to be considered the "worse" game although I liked it well enough. I'm not sure what the MP scene is for these anymore; there may not even be servers running. I think EF now is mostly RPG play through the RPG-X mod.

I played part of SFC III, it was alright, but it got a bit tedious after a while and I kindof lost interest.

BC is a bit bland on it's own, but KM definitely spices it up. That said, if you thought A2 modding was a bit of a mess, you'll quickly find that BC modding is a bloody nightmare. All of their scripts are exposed, which on the one hand is good for modders, but on the other hand they never intended it for modding so there's no larger structure around them. So you often have to merge global scripts when installing mods. And when things don't play together nicely, forget it. If you like BC, you may want to follow Star Trek Excalibur if you aren't already. It's a fan produced game which started as a BC mod. It aims to be better, and truer to Trek, than any known Trek game yet.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 3:20 pm

The problems with Legacy wasn't really the developers' fault - there's some really bad blood there on that side. Legacy was originally intended to be Armada III - an RTS -, but Bethesda decided near the end of the cycle that it wanted what became the game you all know and love. The engine is a step above Armada II in a lot of respects, but the rush to cobble a first person game in a matter of months won't show that.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 6:18 pm

Sort of odd really. The Battlezone engine, a Third-Person Action game, was converted quite successfully into Armada, which was then somewhat haphazardly modified into Armada II, which then got butchered back into another Third-Person Action Game, Legacy.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 6:27 pm

That's pretty typical for an RTS engine (take the CnC series or WC or SC series): the Armada II engine actually has an even more complex history than that . The text input is from Mechwarrior, other parts are from Dark Reign and Interstate '76, and there are a few more games included there too. Armada II, although built from Armada I, doesn't share as much as common, as the A2 engine wasn't an in-house creation. Legacy shares essentially nothing with Armada II by the way, just the toolbase that was used to create Armada II and a few other elements.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 8:49 pm

The problems with Legacy wasn't really the developers' fault - there's some really bad blood there on that side. Legacy was originally intended to be Armada III - an RTS -, but Bethesda decided near the end of the cycle that it wanted what became the game you all know and love. The engine is a step above Armada II in a lot of respects, but the rush to cobble a first person game in a matter of months won't show that.

Really. I hadn't heard that before. No wonder it was crap. There are clearly parts which are an improvement over A2, including the renderer, but it definitely feels like they didn't have time to optimize it. I suspect someone managed to leave a tripple loop somewhere in the input handlers.

That's pretty typical for an RTS engine (take the CnC series or WC or SC series): the Armada II engine actually has an even more complex history than that . The text input is from Mechwarrior, other parts are from Dark Reign and Interstate '76, and there are a few more games included there too. Armada II, although built from Armada I, doesn't share as much as common, as the A2 engine wasn't an in-house creation. Legacy shares essentially nothing with Armada II by the way, just the toolbase that was used to create Armada II and a few other elements.

Ah, component reuse. A great idea in theory, but one which rarely comes out as nicely in practice. Legacy must at least share some of the reasource parsing code though, right? Or was it all rewritten by Bethesda?

posted on November 26th, 2012, 9:11 pm

If you don't mind a slow paced game for multiplayer I highly recommend Birth of the Federation. While I find Armada a bit more fun in the short term, BotF feels more like Star Trek to me since you're actively exploring an entire galaxy and doing more then just building armies of ships. I'd also recommend downloading the Ultimate Dominion Mod for BotF if you ever get bored of the regular game, it adds the (surprise) Dominion into the game and a bunch of other NPC races like the Breen and Son'a.

I'm still upset they never made a sequel to BotF.

posted on November 26th, 2012, 11:05 pm

I can't confirm or deny the deep down nitty gritty code, but I know that a LOT of the old ODF structure was left in from Armada, referencing things that have no place in Legacy (bit that sticks in my mind is about the Shield Inversion Beam)

posted on November 27th, 2012, 12:02 am

If you don't mind a slow paced game for multiplayer I highly recommend Birth of the Federation. While I find Armada a bit more fun in the short term, BotF feels more like Star Trek to me since you're actively exploring an entire galaxy and doing more then just building armies of ships. I'd also recommend downloading the Ultimate Dominion Mod for BotF if you ever get bored of the regular game, it adds the (surprise) Dominion into the game and a bunch of other NPC races like the Breen and Son'a.

I'm still upset they never made a sequel to BotF.

I totally agree with you on that, Birth was hella fun and if you got some of the modes it was epic fun, unfortunatly its so damn ustable I cant get it to run anymore. Was hoping that Star Trek Supremacy was gonna make it out but it looks like that project ground to a haul. Havent cheaked on Birth of the Empires lately though, another fan made "sequal" to BotF, altho they are using non star trek races to avoid copywright infringement and once completed they said they would make a Star Trek conversion mod for it...pretty sneaky.

posted on November 27th, 2012, 12:04 am

I've been praying to whatever deities that will listen that someone will make a complete, polished, finished total conversion for Galactic Civilisations II to fill the gaping void that BotF left when it refused to run on my system many moons ago.

posted on November 27th, 2012, 12:12 am

Legacy was pretty much written from the ground up by Maddoc - I think some of the pathing and pizza-box stuff was kept from Armada. I hadn't inquired too much about what was retained. All the core functions - AI, weapons management, etc - was rewritten or started from scratch. Although Maddoc used the Storm3d toolset to begin building Legacy, Legacy doesn't use Armada features and is its own engine.

Yup, the reason that Legacy has so many issues is that it was super rushed. Armada I had ~2x the development time of Armada II, and Armada II had I think 2x the development time as Legacy, and Legacy was only changed to its released state very late in the development stage. A lot of Armada II's problems similarly were caused by the rushed/publisher-demanded nature - some of the most prominent examples include the truly flawed craft AI, and the slapped on warp system.

The ODF structure being kept was due to the comfort of the design team really. If you wanted, you could design a modern engine with .odf file endings or even Armada-style file structure, but it isn't anything more than superficial. As for the remnant naming schemes or seeming leftovers of weapons, that's essentially due to the handwritten nature of the files. Armada I and II are good examples of this for instance, as their ODFs are filled with irrelevant flags and even ODFs that look like they were ported out of Battlezone or Interstate '76 (although that's also because Maddoc was trying to understand Armada I via an incomplete toolset, so a lot of code is re-commented). I presume with Legacy, files were ported from Armada II simply as reference material and then forgotten later on.

posted on November 27th, 2012, 12:15 am

I've been praying to whatever deities that will listen that someone will make a complete, polished, finished total conversion for Galactic Civilisations II to fill the gaping void that BotF left when it refused to run on my system many moons ago.

I'm pretty sure someone was making a Star Trek mod for GalCiv2 but they fell off the face of the earth and I don't think it was ever finished. Some screenshots of it are floating around: