Alpha 5.1 release

[Malvoisin]

Birth of the Empires Alpha 5.1 has been released and made available at main portal download page: BotE Alpha 5.1 Download

A lot of new features have been implemented like minor races building their own ships and defending themselves, a galaxy mini map and easily-scrollable map (left mouse button pressed down and then dragging around), anti-bribery measures, tons of tooltips showing ship strengths or enemy orbital batteries online when hovering over a system on map, unknown races displayed with a question mark symbol so you can no longer know in advance who's coming, unlimited tech levels and 2% bonus on production per tech level development.

The top bar has been made hideable so in order to save a game or open in-game chat tool, move your mouse to the upper left corner above the turn end button. Then it will pop up automatically.

To see an example of our new tooltips, here two small screenies out of the game (see here for more):

Coalition view of an early large Xibren fleet:


Rotharian view of an early large Vulmar fleet:



Installation and game control hints

• Installer is multilanguage, the language chosen there determines game language later-on.
• Moving mouse above turn end button to the upper left corner on the screen activates options menu bar where you can see save your game or open in-game chat.
• At first start, a bote.ini settings file is created. It will be either located at bote main folder or your documents and settings folder. If it is not created or nowhere to be found, set yourself write permissions for bote main folder. The ini allows to set difficulty levels (BABY, EASY, NORMAL, HARD and IMPOSSIBLE in capital letters) and several other options for map creation and music/sound.
• Scrolling on the map has been made easier. Instead of using scrollbars (which still can be enabled back again in bote.ini) you can now have your left mouse button pressed down and move the mouse around the map to have it scrolled quickly.
• Switching systems in buildmenu gets easier when you use your extra mouse buttons or cursor left and right.
• Ships are selected by clicking on the race symbol at the upper right corner of a sector on galaxy map. After that a list of available fleets in that sector are shown in the view below where you can give them orders or double-click on them to open up fleet menu to rearrange fleets and which ships should belong to which fleet. Transporters got their own transport menu when clicking on the order buttons at the bottom right. Somewhere there is a "Transport" order which allows to store troops and/or resources on the transporter.
• In order to simplify micromanagement with resources, there are resource routes available at System->Trade menu. You can lay a route for a specific resource to a destination system which can then access the storage of the source system for its buildings and structures to build.
• Also there are trade routes layable to another race's system once you have a trade treaty with them. It's located in the same menu. Trade routes are all important to convince minor races to join you since they increase diplomatic popularity gradually over time without you having to pay credits for that, quite the contrary even, with you earning credits by it .
• Later-on with advancing tech levels, there are so-called resource distributors and allocators which allow all systems to access storage of the one system where the distributor is located in. A very powerful yet not un-dangerous means to satisfy resource needs on all your planets.

Change Log V0.70 -> V0.71 (Alpha 5.1)

• project set to VS2008 standard
• complete ToolTip-architecture implemented
• tooltips at various locations in program manifested
• tooltip delay in ini file modifiable
• minors build their own ships
• new symbols for all minors with ships
• scrollbars in galaxy view disabled by default
• new ini commands (turn scrollbar on/off, star and minor system density on galaxy map)
• scrolling with pressed-down left mouse-button and dragging implemented
• tech level increasings in bio-, energy- and construction tech yields a 2% bonus on corresponding production value
• systems with resource allocators are labelled with a * before the resource in system overview
• further tech levels implemented (plus future techs)
• bribe resistance implemented
• a lot of new tooltips implemented at various locations in-game
• ships of unknown races are labelled with a question mark everywhere they show up
• trade routes generate at least 1 credits (before ZERO credits were possible)
• smaller performance optimizations
• multi-button mouse extra buttons for switching systems
• right click resets system, duration and resource button in diplomacy offer menu
• maneuvrability now internally up to 9 (phenomenal)
• some new structure and ship graphics
• some balancing changes at building and ships stats
• (near-)all bugs reported in Alpha5 v0.7 fixed
• crashes at turn shift by wild mouse clicking should now be fixed (respectively less often occuring)
• copyright information updated to the year 2010

[Matress_of_evil]

Jig's been super-hyper-mega-busy with his business lately, often not finishing until 1am.

I'll copy your post into a news item for you Mal.

*Edit - News item posted. Do you have a banner that I could include in the news post, Mal? Like the one we use for Supremacy? It's the image in my signature. Images help to attract people and make news items stand out more.

If you do have one, you might want to add it to your own signature as well. You can also make it a clickable link so it takes people direct to this thread or anywhere else you want. I've done the same to my signature.

The image needs to be the same dimensions as the one in my banner though, or at least needs to be to the same aspect ratio. I can shrink it down myself if needs be.

[Malvoisin]

I know he pm'd me about it .

thx for the news item. I had posted a corresponding text in staff room earlier, maybe you want to edit it on or replace the current one:

Finally the Alpha5 made it to a new version with both English and German language choosable during installation! Most prominent new achievement is minor races building ships on their homesystems (though not flying around yet) thus posing a threat at the beginning's expansion stage of the game.
Several smaller improvements have been made to the galaxy map including scrollbars that can now be turned on and off via the bote.ini file and scrolling on map with pressed-down left mouse button and dragging the mouse.
Also a really pressing gameplay issue was the missing bribe resistance which has been implemented now to stop minors from being bought so easily like especially the AI did before a lot. A lot of tooltips have made it into the game at various locations, most useful for example when comparing strengths of ships in your fleet. But beware to trust the pure numbers that much, they are modified by a lot of factors at combat like maneuvrability of the enemy, crew experiences, accuracy, flight maneuvers (still automatic) and fire arcs.

The BotE-team hopes all enjoy the game as much as it was making it so far!

[Matress_of_evil]

Replacement news item posted. I made some minor changes to make it more News-itemy though, and I also edited your post above and included the change log. Hope you don't mind.

[Malvoisin]

sounds perfect now, thx!

Edit: just noticed a small typo:

and firinh arcs.

About version numbers, I think it'd be better if title said "Birth of the Empires 0.71" released or alternatively "Birth of the Empires Alpha 5.1" instead of "Birth of the Empires 5.1" which hints a bit in the wrong direction, a BotE5 is really something for the next century or something like that . Also in first sentence it could read Alpha 5.1 instead of Alpha 5.

[Matress_of_evil]

0.71'd and typo fixed. Let me know if you want any other changes.

[denzil85]

Excellent! I'm glad to see it released, I'll have to get working on the English translations again though, as I've not done much with it in the last two weeks!

[Malvoisin]

take your time

[Paddy]

I ship the ship stats could be looked at again. The Raths ships are no match for the cartare ships. I think the cartare are why over powered. They all made balanced i think. Im playing with the power level now.

Paddy

[Malvoisin]

The strongest ships in-game are those of the Khaorons. Rotharians are actually pretty weak but not as weak as the Heyoun (plastic ) ships. But they got the advantage of being able to cloak.

Our combat simulator hasn't been updated yet to the new shiplist.data so there is no hard-fact reference for testing the power of different ships against each other. Once the combat simulator is updated, everyone can set up their own fleet battles and see statistical outcomes of these battles which then clearly shows which ships are over-powered or under-powered with clear figures.

Update: Combat simulator has been updated: http://botf2.star-trek-games.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=57466#p57466

[Malvoisin]

MoE, I did jig wrong, the Alpha 5.1 was online the whole time . He has updated the old Alpha 4 download "silently" so under the same link the new Alpha 5.1 download is located. He sent me a pm where he said he was uploading the new Alpha 5.1 but I didn't get it that he meant a silent update with it . Could you rewrite the portal announcement accordingly?

P.S.: The second V-5 download could be removed. I pm'd jig to remove it.

Also could you add (maybe rewrite again) these hints to the main article:

Installation and game control hints:

- Installer is multilanguage, the language chosen there determines game language later-on.
- Moving mouse above turn end button to the upper left corner on the screen activates options menu bar where you can see save your game or open in-game chat.
- At first start, a bote.ini settings file is created. It will be either located at bote main folder or your documents and settings folder. If it is not created or nowhere to be found, set yourself write permissions for bote main folder. The ini allows to set difficulty levels (BABY, EASY, NORMAL, HARD and IMPOSSIBLE in capital letters) and several other options for map creation and music/sound.
- Scrolling on the map has been made easier. Instead of using scrollbars (which still can be enabled back again in bote.ini) you can now have your left mouse button pressed down and move the mouse around the map to have it scrolled quickly.
- Switching systems in buildmenu gets easier when you use your extra mouse buttons or cursor left and right.

[Matress_of_evil]

Meh I'll keep the existing news post up. It's front page so should generate traffic. Don't worry about the technical double-post.

I've updated the article with the new info. Any word on a banner image?

[Malvoisin]

no word on that yet. There's only the old banner image from main portal site: http://star-trek-games.com/images/banne ... er8bit.png

[Matress_of_evil]

It's better than nothing. Added it to the news post.

[Malvoisin]

alright. could you add a "..and can be downloaded in the download section here" or something like that to the first sentence so that people know directly where they can go to to download the new release?

[Matress_of_evil]

Personally I would've thought "Birth of the Empires 0.71 Released!" would've made it obvious...

The last paragraph already mentions that the download is available within the posted link. I've re-jigged the post to move the link up.

[Malvoisin]

no, I meant to put either this link: http://star-trek-games.com/index.php?op ... nfo&id=434 or just a short "you can find it in the downloads section" hint there. Of course, it's clear with the headline in place , but it's a bit superfluous to link people to the thread here and then link them back to portal download page to actually get the game. I think it'd be better to directly link them to the downloads section in the first place. As you might have noticed I removed the older direct link (the svn.star-trek-games.com/birth/.. one) here in this thread and replaced it with a direct link to the downloads section on portal site.

The thread to discuss the release doesn't need to appear at first sentence, you could put it back again where it was before.

PS: I need to see if I can make portal articles myself, would go a bit easier for the next time I guess .

[Matress_of_evil]

Oh, I didn't actually look at your downloads link. I thought it was stored on your German site.

Link updated.

[Malvoisin]

7347 downloads in one year (since Alpha4refit release), not bad..

strangely enough only a very small fraction attends the forums...

[denzil85]

Yeah I've played many other games which have been like that, only a small number of the players actually take the time to come to the forums to get involved.

[Malvoisin]

Possibly it's also because of the missing trek content. I'm here for a long time now and I can remember that back when we were at Alpha2-4 stages, people were flocking in here and posted quite often (compared to now) which one can see when having a deeper look at BotE General chat forums. And even there I had to remove nearly as much posts as there are right now in that forum because of trek content that I could not un-trek .

[CornMaster]

Just wanted to drop in and say that I downloaded this recently. Been following the BOTF2 movement for many, many years, and this is a top notch game. Especially for an alpha.

One thing I'd like to see is combat, and possibly some influence over it. Not 3D combat or anything, but just display the ship graphics on screen (2D), and the calculations as the battle took place, that would add a whole lot of extra coolness and suspense to the game. It isn't satisfying to see a News screen with the results. The how would be good to know.

Not sure if you play Civ 4, but in the event log, it shows you the result of each round of combat. Something like that would be cool, and I imagine not too difficult to code (by avoiding the 3D graphics and manipulation of battles).

Not sure if it is your to-do list or not. One other thing, ran this in WINE, and while it ran, the font was tiny and hard to read, and it was slow to respond. Any plans to compile this using MONO instead? Might give a decent performance boost. (Also, my 6 year old computer could be to blame. )

I was reading about the game and I noticed you moved to Visual Studio 2008, but I didn't see anywhere which language you are using. I haven't had a chance to peak at the code, but just curious as to the language. Being mostly a web programmer and a linux user, not sure if I would be able to help or now, but I'm looking to get more into the compiled languages. Maybe I can lend a hand with that combat screen I mentioned.

[SirPustekuchen]

Any plans to compile this using MONO instead?

MONO isn't possible, because BotE doesn't use C# with .NET. We are using C++ with MFC (unmanaged code). But if you are interested, you can find the whole sources at Codeplex.