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

Ladies and Gentlemen may I present NG’s latest creation Trek Battles 3!
What more could the Legacy community ask for this Christmas? This is New Gens biggest ever release showcasing some of the finest workmanship from some of Legacy’s finest workmen!
The Gigabyte size mod contains enormous vessels including the Excalibur Class and Kelvin Class, and miniature shuttles like the Delta Flier. There’s also an abundance of additional ships for all the races. The Cardassians are able to enjoy new ships across ther Era’s. The Dominion now enjoy space beyond the war. The sheer amount of content in the form of ships is enough to keep one entertained for days.
In addition of ships, there are maps. The space that NG|mods has constructed is vast and beautiful. The wide array of maps expands from clear space, to asteroid filled expanses. Each map, and each mission has its own realistic setting and characteristics allowing exploration and tense battling.
The content comes down to opinion. People will appreciate all the ships, or the concept of recreating missions in a shuttle. Some may not like some of them, or how they appear. Though I’ll leave the opinion making down to all of you!

Merry Christmas to All
Acidfluxxbass

You can download the mod 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.

Now I go on with modding: In spring of 2007 i joined nEw-GEN. So I’m a member for 2 and a half year. At the beginning I tried many things out. I learned more and more things about Legacy and haven’t stopped learning and testing stuff yet. After TB2 has been released I’ve also started modeling.

But what am I doing at the moment? I’m working on a Stargate addon, which became almost my addon, for the upcoming TB3 mod. So I’m mainly busy with making ships. It’s really fun to make those SG ships, because it’s something different to all the “usual” Star Trek stuff. Additionaly I do sometimes things for TB3, but there’s just to little time for all those projects. As I’ve said some time ago to gdata, we’d need a 48 hours-day.

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. And seven of those years I spent with learning English, four learning Latin, and one learning Spanish. My favorite subjects are Physics and English (still my English isn’t flawless, but I suppose it never will be). And when I eventually passed my final exams I intend to study aerospace engineering or mechanical engineering. In my spare time I read a lot of books, meet with friends, or – which  is pretty obvious – I mod for Star Trek games. Another part of my modding career is my position as site manager at Legacy Files. I joined the team there in March 2008 at took over IKS’s position a few months ago.

Two and a half years ago, in March 2007, yopyop and me founded nEw-GEN (which has been “rebranded” NG|mods recently), since then I am the maid-of-all-work here. I model, texture, map and script everything that needs to be done, so it may be that I’m kind of stressed some times. When I start little modding projects of my own it is likely that they never get finished or it takes ages until they are – probably because I can’t decide what to do first. Although I’m familiar with almost every aspect of Legacy modding, I prefer to do programming and scripting, I don’t know why, maybe because of the logic and math skills it requires. The most of the time I spend with modding I create content for Trek Battles or compile all the stuff other team members created.