Star Trek - The Final Frontier (Beta 1.0)

[rjord2021]

Have modified the image that will appear when you play this mod to the one shown below which is much better.
Title of the mod will remain as The Return of Khan.
Even though Space Seed never occurs in this timeline the Eugenics Wars still happened and Khan and his followers still fled Earth.
Hence his hatred for the Federation and desire for payback has not changed.

So as not to put undue pressure on myself the release date of the mod has been extended by one month to August. There is still much to do and I do not want to rush this project.


I am considering adding youtube content for this mod as a preview of what you can expect.
Please post a comment if this is something you would like to see.

[Dakkon7]

Video updates aren't necessary for me, your current style of updates are more than enough.

[rjord2021]

Last few days were slow going. Small changes like the one below adding in Warp 3, 4 and 5 speeds should only take 10 minutes to change and test but took hours.

It seems that over 600 files in Distant Worlds Universe were corrupted and needed to be redownloaded via Steam.

Now works ok but 2 days development down the drain.

Am adding a procedure to the development cycle to regularly check for any more issues with the base files outside of the mod.

In the picture below I have added warp speed to the graph..... you will notice
Warp 3 speed = 22
Warp 4 speed = 25
Warp 5 speed = 2850

The big jump in speed to Warp 5 will be fixed when all components are added to the ship.

I also need to fix the fuel type shown below as it should not be Polycarbonate....

[rjord2021]

In the Kirk TV series era Dilithium Crystals are used as a power source to drive and control warp drive engines and these crystals are rare and only found on certain planets.

If you are on a planet that does not have Dilithium Crystals you can use crystallized lithium which was used up to the mid 2260s to power warp engines.

I am busy working out the ability of races in the mod to have sufficient quantities of Dilithium Crystal or Lithium at all times either on their home planet or nearby systems.

Role play will also have the ability to make a contract with a visiting trade ship to bring in a supply of Dilithium Crystals if you run out.

The price you have to pay the trader in Federation Credits will increase the lower your supply of Dilithium.
If you do not have enough Federation Credits you will be in trouble.

As refueling happens often in Distant Worlds and Dilithium Crystals take time to become drained or became fused in their assembly, I am modifying the entire refueling process..... if Distant Worlds allows me. I have a few ideas of how to do this but need to run some tests to see which method is best to use.

In role play there are visits to starbases, shore leave, new crew and other missions which can be used instead of refueling. I just don't want ships to be refueling so quickly when Dilithium Crystals do not drain that fast.

The harder to find Dilithium Crystals also caused many battles between races and I am going to try and bring that to the mod.

[rjord2021]

Putting together the manual which will explain how to play this mod with or without role play.

The mod will be available as a pdf document or online in the Wiki.

[rjord2021]

Teaser #1
=========

Some of the 112 playable races in the mod..............

[Retreat1970]

Quick question: How did you manage to diversify 112 races?

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970

Quick question: How did you manage to diversify 112 races?

When I first started adding in more than 30 races, I think that was the figure, the mod would break with an error message which never told me what the problem was.

I then determined that the problem was in the races.txt file sitting in the main directory of the mod.

However I then found that the information in races.txt was contained within the text files for each race in the race folder.

Therefore removing races.txt from my mod I have been able to add in all 112 races.

When testing the mod I put in the must have races such as the Klingons, Romulans and Vulcans and the rest of the 15 to 20 races to be included in the map are selected at random from the 112 races in total. This means there is a 0.8% chance of playing the same game as your previous game.

Files such as the racebias files have their values generated by excel sheet so every time I play the mod the bias between the 112 races is always different.

Bias between the Federation and Vulcans is always positive between 0 and 50 while biases between the Federation, Klingons and Romulans is always below 0 to minus 50.

In this way Vulcans will more likely get on with the Federation while the Klingons and Romulans will have varying degrees of hatred towards the Federation.

Shipsets are limited from 0 to 50 so several races will share similar ships whose appearance could suit any race. Mostly the races with shared ship sets are the races who we never saw their ships on tv.

With my randomly generated biases you have a 0.008% chance of ever playing the same game twice.

[Retreat1970]

Thanks for the reply that was good info but I guess I was asking how did you make them different? Spying, research, happiness, and whatnot. Seems to me with limited attributes you cannot diversify enough without having races blending with one another. Just asking.

[Hattori Hanzo]

are all 112 races present in a game ?

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

are all 112 races present in a game ?

You select the races you want in the game or do a random number of races as you do with vanilla Distant Worlds Universe.

So for example I would play the Federation and have the Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans and Khan as must have selected races and then have another 10 races randomly added to the game. The 10 races would be selected randomly from the remaining 108 races available to select.

I would never recommend playing 112 races at once... the quadrants would become very crowded.

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Retreat1970

Thanks for the reply that was good info but I guess I was asking how did you make them different? Spying, research, happiness, and whatnot. Seems to me with limited attributes you cannot diversify enough without having races blending with one another. Just asking.

Each race has a race file and in each race file many of the attributes have a range value eg 50 to 200
I use excel formulas such as below to give different attributes for each race
=(RANDBETWEEN(50,200)+(ROUND((RAND()),0)))
See page 33 for all the attributes with ranges

i can even put in a scenario where the mod will have random races appearing as playable just by applying a formula to the races file. So at times you could have all 112 races available as playable or you may only have 10.

Races will also be different based on characters and I change the way characters appear and how strong they are by using question marks (?) to create a random value every time that character appears.

So for example all the attributes for Captain Kirk appears as follows
1, James Kirk, 9, James Kirk_Federation_Captain.png, Federation, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?


With Distant Worlds I can create the races and characters to be as they were on TV or have randomly generated traits.

With the excel files I am looking at generating new versions of the race and character traits every fortnight or monthly.

[rjord2021]

With making changes to 112 races as per the last post this would be a very timely exercise because to output the files for the races and characters would be 224 files..... not a fun exercise.

What I would more likely do is randomly select 5 random numbers between 0 and 112 , check the bias file to see which of those races had those numbers and then create the new files for just those races.

By doing this I would not need to wait 2 or 4 weeks but could change the text files at any time I wish and obviously after finishing a game and before starting a new game. You do not want to change the values in mid game.

[rjord2021]

For a complete replacement of Distant Worlds Universe components with those found in 23rd century Star Trek I have to document each and every component including where vanilla components are used, are not used and which ones should be replaced or removed.

For example the explorer ships need a Resource Profile Sensor component so that it can determine what resources are on a given planet. Given this requirement I determine that the explorer ships should not be converted into Constitution Class Starships such as the Enterprise but should instead be Science Vessels which in Star Trek would be the ships scanning and surveying planets.

Creating starbases, neutral zone monitoring stations and so on will need some components and not others.

Templates for private sector ships are also being added so I need to know when to use standard passenger compartments or massive passenger compartments, which and how many weapons to assign to those ships and so on.

As mentioned in a much earlier post the ship types will be renamed so there are no explorer ships, construction ships etc and these will be assigned more Star Trek type names.

[rjord2021]

Teaser #2
=========

The planet Romulus...........

[Hattori Hanzo]

the replacement of the top bar original icons with the Star Trek faces has an extremely "amateurish" feeling in my opinion [8|]

[Darkspire]

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

the replacement of the top bar original icons with the Star Trek faces has an extremely "amateurish" feeling in my opinion [8|]

They really do not seem to look right considering all the hard work and polish you have put into this mod so far.

Darkspire

[Hattori Hanzo]

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

ORIGINAL: Hattori Hanzo

the replacement of the top bar original icons with the Star Trek faces has an extremely "amateurish" feeling in my opinion [8|]

They really do not seem to look right considering all the hard work and polish you have put into this mod so far.

Darkspire

it's exactly what I mean !!!!!

[rjord2021]

The top bar icons were never the final version and I have being working on replacements. The problem with creating the pictures for these are that I have to work with images for example at 70 x 70 which does not leave a lot to work with.

I do agree that they are amateur in appearance and do stress that what you see is not the final version. When creating a mod like this a lot of testing needs to be done.

When you look at the making of Star Trek back in 66 Gene Roddenberry worked with artists to design a unique look for the Starship Enterprise. I have seen 9 versions of what the Enterprise could have looked like and Star Trek would not have been the same if any of those 9 versions had been used. 4 of them are shown below.

[Hattori Hanzo]

despite the fact that they have not ben chosen for the Enterprise final version.. these 4 old images are really "Amazing".. !!!!! [X(][&o]