Birth of the Federation

Hello all you BotF lovers, it became a bit silent over the year in the afc community and some might think this game is near it's end. And people passing by often wondered that this community is still alife at all.
But most agree they've never found a better game in the 4x turn based genre.

There's been lots of efforts and attempts to mod and improve this great game in past years, and more than once it seemed a limit was reached. I might be one of the last that still believes in modding this game, but I hope I'm not and work on reviving it again with a fresh engine as that's what increasingly troubles us most with modern systems. Plus a fresh engine will give lots of new modding abilities once it's done.

Let's show you two videos of current progress with the mpr++ project:


video 1 (youtube)


video 2 (youtube)

As you can see, the engine already is quite advanced. Not yet complete though.
E.g. for effects currently a mixture of old rendering and new replacement rendering is done. That and some other improvements, lots of minor stuff, plus testing and this engine should be ready some time next year.

I always have in mind what ruthlessferengi says, that botf keeps alife by being played and we need better support for multiplayer and such. I agree on this, but for now let's just finish the graphic engine and advance modding to boldly go where no man has gone before.

cheers, hope you all have a great christmas and a great new year
And thanks to anjel for the superb videos and thunderchero for all these awesome ships.

i tried once installing MPR++; i did it over a UDMd 1024x768 patch that was crashing once in a while in battle; but once i installed the MPR++ it would crash when i was viewing the ship list in the research screen. I had a number of ship model added.
Was MPR++ not compatible with any of that?

Is it like a list of steps to follow for installing MPR++? Or some restrictions?

P.S. Nice videos; but it broke my heart to see the cool Romulans getting thay asses kicked by the bugs eating Ferengi.

Hey, first comment, nice you like the videos.

The graphic engine is still a work in progress and the version available for download is known to have it's issues.
Specially the old render emulation caused alot of troubles. For some it worked better, for others worse.
I'm not going to investigate issues with the old version anymore, as there changed too much already.

So long only use mpr++ when you've no other option to get the game run or do not care on issues.
And once the engine is ready we'll see to do some better testing.

Btw, the scene I like the most in the videos is first video when we get to see the sovereign in close view for half a second (in HD ofc).

I am LOVING the potential of this project. Good luck.

videos look great

thunderchero

Fine videos indeed, though I'd hate to be at the helm of one of those ships and having to avoid all that firepower

Hi everyone,

impressive videos. Thanks for sharing this footage with the community.

I always have in mind what ruthlessferengi says, that botf keeps alife by being played and we need better support for multiplayer and such. I agree on this, but for now let's just finish the graphic engine and advance modding to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Your sneak peek helped me to 'login' after a year of just reading posts. I'm sure there a more people like me just waiting for sign of live. :-)

impressive i like it

Gh0st wrote:Your sneak peek helped me to 'login' after a year of just reading posts. I'm sure there a more people like me just waiting for sign of live. :-)

Cool, welcome back Gh0st, and don't forget to check the forum every once a while or better just keep here and talk some.
We sadly still have no off topic forum (but the general chat), but who cares.

Off topic: I regular visit the forum once a day but I'm not logged in. I'm also interested to see more hints from qd and his clone-project (open source). Didn't he say something about a demo (as an x-mas present).

Back to topic: I really like the shape, the color, the glow, etc of the models. Specially the second video and the single presentation of the romulan fleet one by one - it looks quit awesome. My second thought was that the sounds of the phasers and torpedos perhaps needs a rejuvenation!

Gh0st wrote:Off topic: I regular visit the forum once a day but I'm not logged in. I'm also interested to see more hints from qd and his clone-project (open source). Didn't he say something about a demo (as an x-mas present).

might be, he's still working on it

jet another question: is that music in the background (video 2) ingame sound or do you include 'em after tape the video? This background theme fit very well.

anjel applied it afterwards (as you notice by the video cuts) but could be added to ingame too

btw I wonder noone has complained on jerking yet, it's all anjel's fault I bet!
joking, still I was a bit surprised, will be looked into. I already saw battles with more than hundred ships and it went fluent. And I have no good graphics card either.
I just mention as previous versions REALLY had some heavy speed issues, but that's not related with the jerking you see in above videos.

Hey Flocke,

is it posibile to tape a third video with some 360° shots from your vorcha and neghvar? In your first video... my eyes can't catch 'em but they looks cool (alot of detials windows etc). :-)

Hi Gh0st,

Flocke did not create the video anjel created them.

thunderchero