I've been a fan of FASA games since the 1980s, especially Star Trek and Battletech. One of my first attempts at making a game as a noob was a mech battle game, which failed miserably because I had no idea what I was doing. =) But that inspired me to learn.
I've wanted to make a new Star Trek game based on the FASA ruleset for many years. I created a battle-only version way back, like 20 years ago now, in Turbo Pascal 6.0. It supported two players with dual joysticks and Sound Blaster, which were both really awesome at the time (not normally found on the typical PC in 1992). It was hugely fun... a great learning experience. Hand-drawn art based on ships from the FASA game...
Now, I've acquired 3D models for all of the ships from the FASA game, converted them all into .X format, and gotten them all to load and render with my own Direct3D code. I'm wanting help to make this game a reality.
The game will be two-fold: First, a turn-based recreation of the Starship Tactical Combat Simulator (STCS), which follows the original FASA rules, renders the ships in 3D on a 2D playing hexmap. The second part of the game will be a "Birth of the Federation" style game, but with an arcade-style gameplay bent, not a grandiose MOO style game, but just a fun arcade game where you explore the galaxy, discover new planets, and the goal is to get new civilizations to join the Federation, and in turn, you fight enemies, and get to upgrade your ship at starbases. No savegame... just play with a randomly generated galaxy each time. This would be fairly easy to make with all of the assets for the STCS part of the game. This would be combined into one project, and the arcade game would be called "The Federation" or whatever... while the STCS would be for old-school fans of the FASA game.
There are scores of scenarios published by FASA in various books for the STCS that could be created and fans could create their own scenarios. So, a scenario editor would also be included in the game. By chaining many scenarios together, you could create a Campaign. This would be hugely fun.. a campaign for each of the races: Federation, Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire, etc...
I'm not sure if continuing to use a custom Direct3D based engine is a very good idea. It may go more quickly to adopt an open source engine. But at any rate, here are some screens of the ships rendered with my existing code.
I'm asking for anyone interested in helping build this game, regardless of skill level!
Ship models rendered with the DirectX Viewer:
Ship models rendered with my own engine code:
The start of a ship data editor tool:
Here's one of the ships in Milkshape being converted to .X:
Here is a demo that causes the ships to move within the hex map properly. The hex map shown is actual size of the hexmap on paper included in the FASA game.
Another demo with the background scrolling and the ship remaining fixed as a possible gameplay orientation for the arcade-style "Federation" game. The white balls are star systems just spread across the playing field but they need to be randomized and include planets, etc.
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