Wednesday May 31st
Welcome to the first installation of the Starfleet Command: Volume II: Empires at War development diary. I will be updating you, the fans,
every 2 weeks on what's going around the
Taldren office. I will try to give you an inside look on what it takes to make a game. I will also give you other tidbits from around the office on what we do for fun and how we keep sane. I will talk to various members of the team and let you know how they are doing.
First off my name is Joshua Morris and I am senior designer on SFC2. This means I get to design menus and control panels and many other aspects to improve SFC2. Another aspect of my job is marketing and producing tasks. You will see in the coming installations what this entails. Lastly, I manage our scripting team.
I want to catch you all up on current events at Taldren so I will cover what everyone is doing and who they are. Here is a list of many people involved at Taldren, Interplay, and Paramount. Please keep this list handy as it is the decoder key to my future ramblings:
Taldren:
Erik Bethke- Founder of Taldren, CEO, Designer, Producer, Programmer. (Whew! did I Miss anything?)
Zachary Drummond - Founder of Taldren, Meta Server Programmer.
Sean Dumas- Founder of Taldren, Graphics Programmer.
Marc Hertough - Lead Programmer
Paul Scheiber -Programmer
David T Potter. Art Director
Bradley W. Schenck. - Senior artist and Web Master.
Ed Lacabanne - Artist
Nate Simpson - Artist
Dave Ferrel - Designer/Scripter
Dan Suleski - Programmer/Scripter
Warren Shultz - Scripter
Mark Pfeiffer - Line Producer
Joshua Morris - Senior Designer
Contractors:
Mike Todorovich - Programmer
Scott Bennie - Missions design
Interplay:
Brain Christian - Producer of 14 degrees East
Steve Baldoni - Producer liaison from Interplay
Scott Bieser- Art consultant
Chris Taylor - Design consultant
Heather McLaughlin- Public Relations/Marketing
Paramount:
Harry Lang - Director Interactive Product Development
Now that you know the cast of characters let's tell you what they have been up to.
First, We have the very talented artists. David Potter, The art director, has been on vacation for the last week so I will give you the update from Bradley W. Schenck as you might know as the webmaster of the Taldren website. In addition Brad is a senior artist at Taldren and his work can been seen in the look and feel of the Mirak Star League.
Brad gives us the following:
"This week we've been spending most of our time on adding improved luminosity
maps to the ship and starbase models in the game. The Federation, Mirak and
ISC models were already in good shape from the pre-E3 push and I'm not sure
that the Lyrans really need modification, so this week we've worked our way
through the Klingon, Gorn, and Hydran models. That leaves the Romulans left
to go."
"Ed, Nate and I split up the models for each Star Empire and that gave us a
chance to compare notes and steal from each other as we went. Still not
sure where my car is. But in spite of all that, we worked out some nifty
tricks beyond the obvious floodlights, windows, and surface lights on the
hulls."
"Even with the first Klingon models we were adding some nice touches, like
picking out highlights on the "raised" plates where they were near our new
ights; but as we worked on the Gorn models we found that a lot of really
beautiful detail in the images maps was just getting lost, even on areas of
the ships that stayed well lit. So we applied that same idea of creating
"forced highlights" and extended it to imitate bump mapping or specularity
mapping effects - we'd use the luminosity map to force a highlight a plate
edge or other detail in the image maps. As we moved on to the Hydran
models, whose image maps detail some nice flowing shapes, we continued to
use forced highlights to make the low res models look more rounded. The
false bump map effects worked really well on detail that appears on the
undersides of the models, which apart from weapons fire are never lit. All
in all we managed to make the luminosity maps some of the prettiest art in
the game 8-)."
"It's really paid off - as you see the ships turn into shadow those "raised"
details seem to pick up the last of the angled light. Really adds a lot of
apparent detail to the models."
"Ed completely retextured the Gorn dreadnought and built a new break-up model
for it. He just doesn't know his own strength."
"Anyway, it's on to the Romulans next, though I'm likely to get diverted into
the interface for the metagame again, and I do need to do some catching up
on the various web sites, too."
Moving on to the scripters. We have 3 people inside the company working on scripts. Dan is working on the new API and making sure the last of the bugs are crushed. Dave has finished 5 tutorials recently and is moving on to the first Meta mission. Dave also wanted everyone to know that he has bought a new monitor for home use on Buy.com and he is hoping that he doesn't have to squint when playing SFC at home. Warren is starting to work on his first Multiplayer mission of Base Assault. Warren has gotten his Ogre shaman to 24th in Everquest recently.
Mark Pfeiffer, Our line producer extraordinaire continues to support the team daily. He is involved with the rest of the team in a heated diplomacy game at work.
Diplomacy breakdown:
France - Josh
Germany - Paul
Italy- Eric
Turkey- Marc Hertough
Russia- Zac
England- Dave
Austria- Mark Pfeiffer
We are entering spring 1902 today.
Now on to the programmers. There is LOT being done in this department as we near our month end milestone.
Zachary Drummond: Zach has fished a flat file database for Meta game and is currently making it thread safe. He is also working with Marc to integrate it with client. In other news, Zach bought Tivo and Direct TV this weekend and had it installed.
Eric Bethke: Erik has been working all weekend with Paul and Sean to get the Meta game up and running. He is working on Meta game mechanics and we should have something test with soon. (I would like to note that I am not comfortable with Italy and Germany working so many hours together. Oh well, It was my birthday weekend so I couldn't come in and spy on their dastardly plot.)
Sean Dumas is working on a common interface issues. This includes menus for both the single player campaign and Meta. This is a lot of work.
Marc Hertough is up to his eyeballs in Meta game issues. The whole programming team is working together to make sure the Metaverse is up to speed this month. He relaxed this weekend by building a play area for his parrot "Cowboy"
Paul: Paul has finished the map editor and is now working on the fleet control panel. I will update you more on this exciting stuff in the future.
Well that should do it for my first installment. I have to get going now, I only have and hour left before I need to put in my Diplomacy move for France.
Next time we will discuss the meaning of the "golden ping pong award"
Joshua "Jinxx" Morris
