Star Trek - The Final Frontier (Beta 1.0)

[rjord2021]

For this mod to work I need to get the phasers and photon torpedoes looking and sounding just right. Will start testing this week modifications to the weapons to try and get it looking like the concept art below.

[Rising-Sun]

By the time you get this finish or out for release, Distant Worlds II would probably be out by then.

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Rising-Sun

By the time you get this finish or out for release, Distant Worlds II would probably be out by then.

It does take time to create mods for DW...but I can assure you this mod will be out in next month or so.

[rjord2021]

I am now editing together the music that will come with the mod.

I am trying to extract some of the music from the original series and include it in more modern music pieces which do not sound so 60's. I do however want to pay homage to the soundtrack we have heard from the original series where possible...just give it a 2018 feel.

For example the opening score of the mod before you start the game begins with the Star Trek TOS Theme and is followed by a great piece of Klingon music to indicate that the Klingons will be one of the Federations early foes to battle.

This is a time consuming process and I am still putting together a longer version of the Original Series Main Theme.


The main

[rjord2021]

The mod soundtrack that is heard when you are in the selection menu should be finished by the end of the weekend.
2 days to do one Star Trek theme?

The first 2 minutes of the mod theme were nice and quick and include a monologue by Captain Kirk which you will really enjoy..... and no what I am referring to is not the "These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise" monologue. It is a really neat piece of audio I have managed to locate. I needed to do work on it to remove the scratches and other noises appearing on the original monologue. It was also in mono and needed to be converted to stereo to fit in with the rest of the theme.

That was the first part of the mod theme song.

Tomorrow I am taking specific scenes from Star Trek and removing just one part of those scenes and adding them to my mod. I am not going to say more about it but what I have so far gives a 2018 update to Star Trek TOS.

What I do tomorrow will see the likes of Khan, the Borg, Q, the Cardassians and more seemingly appearing in the TOS episodes with Kirk.

Yes it is taking time to do but believe me when you hear the finished result in the mod it will be worth the time spent on it.

[Hattori Hanzo]

in my opinioni the soundtrack of a Star Trek original serie's mod MUST be sixties.. !!!!!!!!!!!

any other more modern tune "sounds" absolutely inappropriate.

my "two cents".

[Omnius]

I like the green Klingon D7. Thanks for putting in the time to make an awesome Star Trek mod, hope you can finish the Star wars one even more.

[rjord2021]

As you expand across the galaxy you will need to consider how you communicate with your starships. The further away your starship is from a planet or other ship it will take longer for a subspace signal to be sent to that starship.

In this mod this problem will be fixed by building a subspace communication network consisting of subspace relay stations as shown below which will boost the signal and allow faster communications between planets and starships.

The next few days will be spent working out how to get these stations working and put together the rules such as what to do when a Klingon ship destroys your subspace relay station.

The actual size of the relay station is still to be set in the config files.

[rjord2021]

There were 79 episodes of The Original Series and 22 episodes of The Animated Series and I am hoping to have many if not all of these episodes appearing in the mod in one way or another.

With the soundtrack I do aim to have the original music in the mod.... but it will be mixed in with other music.
However the majority of it will be from the Original Series....

This is the background story of the mod:

"It has been 70 years since we saw the Romulans.... it seems that they have decided to leave our space alone for the time being and leave us alone.

It has also been many years since we had problems with the Klingon Empire. Many years ago the Klingon ships had arrived in our system and our freedom was under serious threat from invasion. Thankfully we received help from a fleet of ships that arrived soon after the Klingon warships and drove the Klingons away.

We were contacted by the Vulcans who had driven off the Klingon threat. The Vulcans assured us that they would monitor the Klingons and make sure the Klingons stayed in their own space. That was 10 years ago.

We feel that the Klingons and Romulans will not stay away much longer and the Federation has setup an organisation called Starfleet which will build Earth's first interstellar starships.

We need to make contact with the Vulcans who we have not seen in 10 years and also begin exploring our neighboring systems and make contact with new races and new civilizations and ally together to defend against any further attacks by Romulan or Klingon warships.

Your first steps are to establish Starfleet and build the early mark Federation starships, research new technology and establish sensor arrays on the edges of our system pointing towards deep space looking for signs of new civilizations as well as monitoring for early signs of Klingon or Romulan activity.

We do not know where Klingon or Romulan space is located but once we find their locations we can establish outposts to monitor ships heading our way. Hopefully the Vulcans will help us with this ...but we also need to find the Vulcan system first."

[rjord2021]

Encountering Kodos the Executioner

While playing this mod you will at some stage discover the Tarsus system and meet Governor Kodos who is also known as Kodos the Executioner.

The story of Kodos is one of the stories I remember from the Original Series where as Governor he responded to an exotic fungus which destroyed most of the colony's food supply by murdering 4000 of the 8000 people in the Tarsus IV colony so that those colonists who survived would ot die slowly of starvation.

Kodos will not appear as he did in Conscience of the King where he was part of the Karidian Company of Players. Kodos will still be on Tarsus IV leading a society who wanted to be left alone by the likes of the Federation, Klingons and Romulans.

The Federation has learned of the extermination of 4000 colonists from Earth and I am putting a story together of how the Federation reacts to what Kodos did.

I have read the Discovery novel "Drastic Measures" which goes into detail what Kodos did on Tarsus IV and gives a lot of detail into who Kodos is as a character.

[rjord2021]

When will you be able to play this mod?

I know that there are many people here eager to get their hands on this mod....after all it has been in development for some time now.

With that in mind I am aiming to release a very early version of the mod in the next few weeks which will allow you to play the Kirk era mod.

The mod will be limited to around 22 races while I am working on the rest of the mod.
Updates will then be downloadable as each section of the mod is finished.

[rjord2021]

The early version of the mod released in a few weeks will have civilizations encountered by the Enterprise in the first season of The Original Series.

This will of course include the Klingons, Romulans and Vulcans.

Civilizations from the Second and Third seasons will then be released in subsequent updates.

[rjord2021]

The Salt Creature of Regulus VIII has also had a slight makeover.

While considered the last of its kind in The Man Trap episode a small colony of these creatures had being able to escape Regulus VIII and hide on another planet.

I am still in two minds of what to call this creature and how or even if they should be in the mod.

EDIT:

In this mod the Salt Vampire will be known as a Regulan Vampire

[Wolfe1759]

After 34 pages is this an art project or a mod?

[Lecivius]

Patience. "As it will be ready, when it is ready" (quoted from Master and Commander)

[rjord2021]

ORIGINAL: Lecivius

Patience. "As it will be ready, when it is ready" (quoted from Master and Commander)

Thanks for your comment Lecivius

I was not sure how to respond to the prior comment by Wolfe1759. I am ok with little feedback in the forum but yesterdays comment left me feeling a bit miffed.

[rjord2021]

The Thasians were met in the Charlie X episode and I have redone the look of them for this mod.

Using the original actor from the episode and adding his picture to the inhospitable world of Thasus instead of the Enterprise bridge.

[Wolfe1759]

Apologies.

I've been keeping my eye on this since it started, maybe it is just that I'm seeing huge amounts of screenshots with no feedback, echoing your comment. Maybe it is the sceptic in me saying this looks too good to be true, I'm sure you'll prove me wrong. Anyway my bad, keep up the good work [:)]

[rjord2021]

Work continues on the mod.

[rjord2021]

Why is the mod taking so long to complete?

If you have had a go at modding in Distant Worlds Universe you will see there is so much of the gameplay that can be changed in this game. This is what separates Distant Worlds Universe from other games.

I could just change the pictures for the ships and races and have the mod out in a week.....but this mod is going where no other mod is going before...... (excuse the pun).

In my early testing of the mod when I was looking through the research tree and seeing weapons such as beam weapons, Graviton Beams and Area Weapons for example and I knew that the research tree needed to be replaced as none of these were Star Trek technologies. The problem was that as soon as I made changes to the research items the mod would break. There was not much documentation on how to replace the research tree and I have had to learn how to do this by trial and error. I even created a post 31st July asking if anyone had any tips for the research tree but got no replies.

Then I have to work out what to put in the research tree....which technologies are used by which races...and so on.

In order to add a Star Trek feel to the game other areas of the game are being changed as well which does take time to plan out and then change.

Another huge change is a complete overhaul of the way the races in the mod talk to each other.

For example when playing the Federation and they encounter the Vulcans you will at times get dialong such as this:

Welcome strange one! We are the Federation. We are impressed by power and strength.Lets be friends, we could be unstoppable together!"

This works with the Vanilla game but not in Star Trek so for every race I have being changing the dialog to that you would expect to hear from the Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Borg and so on. Believe me just this takes a lot of time.

So I do apologize for how long this mod is taking but believe me when I say this mod is going where no other mod has gone before.......