NG|mods

As we already promised some time ago, we have a New Year’s present for you: The Hirogen Hunter we know from Voyager. The mod will require version 1.1 of Trek Battles 3 so make sure to download the latest patch when the Hunter is available. The model has been created by shadow and the textures by JLS from Bridge Commander, so you may consider this some kind of joint venture.

Hirogen Hunter

Hirogen ships make use of various technologies including torpedo launchers, shield emitters and sensors. (VOY: “Flesh and Blood“) Hirogen vessels are also equipped with a subnucleonic beam that can perform rapid scans of other vessels and can severely disable another ship, disrupting its propulsion and its navigational sensors. Once a target ship is disabled, the Hirogen can use their tractor beam technology to tractor in their prey. Their ships also have monotanium armor plating. This plating offers extra protection and it has the added effect of scattering targeting beams. (VOY: “Hunters“) Hirogen vessels are also able to mask their engines by operating in stealth mode when they wish to track a vessel without alerting it to their presence. (VOY: “Flesh and Blood“) The command center of the Hirogen vessel has a large metallic sphere with deep intersecting grooves. Manipulating the rods set into the unit can alter the vessel’s speed and attitude. Information about incoming fire, the stability of the Hirogen ship’s hull armor and navigational sensors are also relayed through this station.

- quoted from Memory-Alpha

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.

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…)