NG|mods

We are happy to announce that we finally have a release date: It will be released exactly two years after its predecessor, Trek Battles 2, on December 25th this year. There has also been and interview with Amagosa, the Legacy Files Siteadmin, yesterday. You can get it here.

Badlands Mapbackground

As most of you will have noticed map backgrounds recently became a very popular aspect of Legacy modding. And since the stock ones are no real beauties I decided to give it a try. Now this is the theory or at least it’s the problem we face when we try to create map backgrounds: The background in Legacy is basically just a box (also called skybox in other games). This box has exactly six sides and each has a texture of the size 1024*1024 assigned. Now what if we want a Nebula to span more than one side of our cube? In theory this can be achieved with any image editing program, but if you want to create a fluidic space background for example with a consistent nebula, this will be very difficult and time consuming. Now in 3ds max we have the option to create a “reflective” material for an object; so we can render the whole scene in max on a material. Now let’s get a little bit more practical: We create a box and assign our reflective material to it. Then we create the map background using a sphere or any other object of our choice outside that box. The next step we do is we adjust the lighting and finally we render the scene on our cube. Max will create 6 different textures then (one for each side of the skybox). Everything we need to do then is to rearrange those textures in an image editing program of our choice and put it in Legacy.

I know this probably sounds very complicated and difficult for most of you, but I hope I could help those who have some basic max skills to understand the principle. If there are any specific question like how did you set up the material exactly feel free to ask on stl-central.com. I will be glad to help you.

Screenshot of the TB3 sol directory

Yesterday I as a little bit bored. Actually I was that bored that I decided to do what I should have done already months ago, but I never had the motivation to do it: I sorted out the maps in Trek Battles 3 and decided in every single case (140+) whether we want to keep it or not. And then I renamed all of these maps to the standard Legacy naming: Deathmatch maps are preceded by dm, coop-wave maps by mp, etc. So I opened every of these maps and saved them – 140 times. I think this should be world record in map editing…at least for Legacy. Everybody who thinks he has edited more than 140+ maps within 3 hours may post a comment below. I also attached a screenshot of the first maps in Trek Battles. You will notice that we already included the winner’s maps of the contest: Star Station India, the Drakas System, the Bronch Expanse and the Crytax system.

Original Mesh

As Trek Battles 3 will contain a lot of new ships of unprecedented quality many people ask what we are going to do to optimize the game for performance as well as for quality. Here is one little trick we use to avoid (or at least reduce) ingame lag: We optimize damage meshes. As this might be a little bit difficult to imagine for people who do not mod Legacy themselves, I have a short (visual) example here for you.

Optimized Mesh

Legacy uses damage meshes, these meshes appear when a ship gets damaged and there is a hole in its hull. Usually these meshes are duplicates from the original mesh with the little difference that a texture has been applied that simulates damage. This is also the way Bethesda, or actually MadDoc, did it. This means that you always have twice as many polygons as usually (without the damage mesh). And with detailed models the poly count also grows. To avoid lag during gameplay we decided to create an extra damage mesh for the higher poly ships. Some of these are tiptop’s TMP ships. On left side we have a picture of the original mesh and here on the right side is the optimized mesh. The polygon count of the Saratoga’s damage mesh has been reduced about 90%. So the overall polygon count can be reduced to almost 50% percent of its original value. Right now we are replacing the damage meshes of our TMP era ships for the Federation and the Terrans. Fortunately we can use most of the damage meshes tiptop created for his TLE era ships.

This is the introduction post to a new series of posts, in which members of the team will introduce themselves and talk about what they do here. As it was my idea, I suppose I am the first one to do this:

So my real name is Marius, which is, apparently, not a very English name. Actually it is German (originally Latin) and, yes, I also am from Germany. I was born 1991 and right now I’m almost 18 years old, which is the age of everything here in Germany: driving, drinking, etc. I have spent the last eleven years attending school and due to the weird German school system I’ll do so for another two years, before I can enter university. (continue reading…)

As you might have noticed the visual appearance of this website has changed. Not only that, but we moved from Joomla to WordPress as it is (at least from our point of view) easier to manage. Within the next days we intend to transfer the content from the Joomla installation to the new WordPress blog.

As we already promised a few weeks ago, the winner for the Trek Battles Contest will be announced now. It took a while until we were able to vote on that as many team members were either on vacation or have been busy with other, obviously more important things. Finally we have the results. (continue reading…)