NCC1701: Exploration - The original series USS Enterprise
by Paul Weston · 07/10/2013 (11:56 am) · 15 comments
So, we finally pulled it off! All 24 decks of the original series USS Enterprise NCC1701 can now be walked in the Torque 3D engine.
After several reworkings of our models and code over the past few years, we managed to get everything to load without memory issues on a mid-range machine. The wonders of working zones and portals realized in T3D 1.1 Final made this all possible.
Those of you who may have followed this project a couple of years back, when we released a demo of it, will be pleased to know you can now download the entire ship completed.
We were recently discovered by the guys at Space Game Junkie, who did a little video review of the Beta, as well as a podcast interview with myself about the project. The podcast was a lot of fun, a great informal format, and these guys loved what they saw. I made sure to talk up T3D as a platform, it came across really well I think.
Video review:
www.spacegamejunkie.com/previews/star-trek-ncc1701-beta-walkthrough/
Podcast link:
www.spacegamejunkie.com/featured/sgj-podcast-20-walk-enterprise-or-paul-time/
I offer here the link to the first public release of the entire ship. Please feel free to download it and try it for yourself. We would welcome any feedback, as even though this is a "final" release of sorts it will always be a work-in-progress that we come back to from time to time. It's a labour of love :)
NCC1701: Exploration (RELEASE 1.0) download link:
gambitrealm.com/INSTALLER/download_release1.php
Anyhow, keeping this short for now, will be happy to continue the discussion as people post comments and feedback about their experience with the game...
Thanks all, live long and prosper!
After several reworkings of our models and code over the past few years, we managed to get everything to load without memory issues on a mid-range machine. The wonders of working zones and portals realized in T3D 1.1 Final made this all possible.
Those of you who may have followed this project a couple of years back, when we released a demo of it, will be pleased to know you can now download the entire ship completed.
We were recently discovered by the guys at Space Game Junkie, who did a little video review of the Beta, as well as a podcast interview with myself about the project. The podcast was a lot of fun, a great informal format, and these guys loved what they saw. I made sure to talk up T3D as a platform, it came across really well I think.
Video review:
www.spacegamejunkie.com/previews/star-trek-ncc1701-beta-walkthrough/
Podcast link:
www.spacegamejunkie.com/featured/sgj-podcast-20-walk-enterprise-or-paul-time/
I offer here the link to the first public release of the entire ship. Please feel free to download it and try it for yourself. We would welcome any feedback, as even though this is a "final" release of sorts it will always be a work-in-progress that we come back to from time to time. It's a labour of love :)
NCC1701: Exploration (RELEASE 1.0) download link:
gambitrealm.com/INSTALLER/download_release1.php
Anyhow, keeping this short for now, will be happy to continue the discussion as people post comments and feedback about their experience with the game...
Thanks all, live long and prosper!
About the author
Programming team lead, Gambit Realm development studio. Based in Ottawa, ON, Canada.
#2
We turned off the shadows a long time ago because of performance issues at the time, and we just never turned them back on. When we tried recently to do so, things just didn't look quite right because of the multiple lights in each room, shadows get a little wonky going everywhere.
We are exploring a few other options for lighting and shadows, which may make it into a later release.
Cheers
P
07/10/2013 (2:32 pm)
Hi Daniel,We turned off the shadows a long time ago because of performance issues at the time, and we just never turned them back on. When we tried recently to do so, things just didn't look quite right because of the multiple lights in each room, shadows get a little wonky going everywhere.
We are exploring a few other options for lighting and shadows, which may make it into a later release.
Cheers
P
#3
I would try to render out each module (I hope these are modules) on high settings and bake the lightmaps, then import it back to Torque.
Another solution would be vis-areas, so it does not render all the ship at the same time and you can turn realtime lighting back on.
For the small lights and shadows, you maybe can turn shadows of for small lights and only use shadows for main lights.
People will not judge the thing so much after the modeling, functionality or how accurate it is to the real ship, they will mostly judge it after the first visual impression.
Also I would try to make the textures more noisy, add some variation in some cases, not just a plain surfaces.
But I will test the demo now...
07/10/2013 (4:13 pm)
Lighting is a very important part, because it gives the greatest visual improvement. It seems like you spend a lot of work in modeling, now you should spend some time in making it look good.I would try to render out each module (I hope these are modules) on high settings and bake the lightmaps, then import it back to Torque.
Another solution would be vis-areas, so it does not render all the ship at the same time and you can turn realtime lighting back on.
For the small lights and shadows, you maybe can turn shadows of for small lights and only use shadows for main lights.
People will not judge the thing so much after the modeling, functionality or how accurate it is to the real ship, they will mostly judge it after the first visual impression.
Also I would try to make the textures more noisy, add some variation in some cases, not just a plain surfaces.
But I will test the demo now...
#4
Congrats for making it into a beta!
I agree that you could do some visual tuning.
Like Duion said, you can turn on shadows for each light separately as a quick solution.
Note; And there's the option to cast shadows for each material. Material editor > Advanced > Cast Shadows
07/10/2013 (6:21 pm)
You build the whole ship? How cool is that!Congrats for making it into a beta!
I agree that you could do some visual tuning.
Like Duion said, you can turn on shadows for each light separately as a quick solution.
Note; And there's the option to cast shadows for each material. Material editor > Advanced > Cast Shadows
#5
07/11/2013 (5:24 am)
As a huge star trek fan this is really cool! One question though: what is your end goal with this project? Are you commercializing it and if so, did you acquire the proper licenses from Paramount/Hasbro (or whoever it is these days)?
#6
07/11/2013 (6:36 am)
I already have an idea: Fly around with it, explore the universe, beam down to planets, have adventures ;) 
#7
07/12/2013 (7:09 am)
To Boldly Go ... and find Bones in the sickbay!
#8
OK, so we decided to go ahead and package and release... Beta testing was near-flawless, at least in terms of major bugs, so I have updated the link in the original post to lead to the RELEASE download page.
There is barely anything different from the Beta release some of you have already downloaded now, except for the Transporter room which was cleaned up for release. This is enough however to disallow connections between those running the release and those running the beta. So in order to play multiplayer, please make sure you are both running the same version :)
Appreciate the feedback on lighting ideas, we will be working on that now that the mechanics are all squared away and we have a working product with all 24 decks. Until now the focus has just been to get everything built and into the engine without it choking lol. Now that we have that licked, we are shifting to improving visual accuracy to the show as well as generally prettying everything up with better lighting and effects, etc.
We also started working on a couple of story ideas, to create missions where you will get some orders and beam down to a planet or two and get into adventures, etc.
Here's a teaser image, can anybody identify the locale?
Also, if Trekkies out there have models or artwork of any kind they would like to contribute to the project (we already have a few fan-created paintings that were submitted, and our background music was custom-composed by another fan for us), then please get in touch with us. We can place your artwork in the game, display a credit beside the work, and get it into a future release.
Would love to see community involvement to help fill out this behemoth of a ship... We're basically creating an interactive showcase/tribute to the original series here, and just in time for the 50th anniversary coming up soon.
We tried licensing from Paramount two years ago, but were refused because they had exclusive deals already for electronic entertainment. However after the Infinite Space game died and Star Trek Online has gone free-to-play, perhaps we may go back and ask again in the future. But for now, it's fun to be able to just give it away to the fans without any issue :)
Thanks and cheers,
Paul
07/12/2013 (8:08 am)
Hi all,OK, so we decided to go ahead and package and release... Beta testing was near-flawless, at least in terms of major bugs, so I have updated the link in the original post to lead to the RELEASE download page.
There is barely anything different from the Beta release some of you have already downloaded now, except for the Transporter room which was cleaned up for release. This is enough however to disallow connections between those running the release and those running the beta. So in order to play multiplayer, please make sure you are both running the same version :)
Appreciate the feedback on lighting ideas, we will be working on that now that the mechanics are all squared away and we have a working product with all 24 decks. Until now the focus has just been to get everything built and into the engine without it choking lol. Now that we have that licked, we are shifting to improving visual accuracy to the show as well as generally prettying everything up with better lighting and effects, etc.
We also started working on a couple of story ideas, to create missions where you will get some orders and beam down to a planet or two and get into adventures, etc.
Here's a teaser image, can anybody identify the locale?
Also, if Trekkies out there have models or artwork of any kind they would like to contribute to the project (we already have a few fan-created paintings that were submitted, and our background music was custom-composed by another fan for us), then please get in touch with us. We can place your artwork in the game, display a credit beside the work, and get it into a future release.
Would love to see community involvement to help fill out this behemoth of a ship... We're basically creating an interactive showcase/tribute to the original series here, and just in time for the 50th anniversary coming up soon.
We tried licensing from Paramount two years ago, but were refused because they had exclusive deals already for electronic entertainment. However after the Infinite Space game died and Star Trek Online has gone free-to-play, perhaps we may go back and ask again in the future. But for now, it's fun to be able to just give it away to the fans without any issue :)
Thanks and cheers,
Paul
#9
It's a great thing that you finished this project. (I have the original demo level on my HD still).
SOOOOO, I can appreciate the work you put into finishing it. Like Duion, I would like to see you use T3D's deferred lighting to really make each level pop. It's deferred, so you can get away with a TON of point and spot lights in a single scene. If you have issues, you are dealing with 'levels' in the ship.... use ZONES to occlude lights.
Just a suggestion and a way that you can add a new level of 'authentic reality' to a cardboard ship that is this big [-----------]. (Galaxy Quest reference for those that don't know ;-).
R
07/12/2013 (3:47 pm)
Just as a note;It's a great thing that you finished this project. (I have the original demo level on my HD still).
SOOOOO, I can appreciate the work you put into finishing it. Like Duion, I would like to see you use T3D's deferred lighting to really make each level pop. It's deferred, so you can get away with a TON of point and spot lights in a single scene. If you have issues, you are dealing with 'levels' in the ship.... use ZONES to occlude lights.
Just a suggestion and a way that you can add a new level of 'authentic reality' to a cardboard ship that is this big [-----------]. (Galaxy Quest reference for those that don't know ;-).
R
#10
07/13/2013 (11:20 am)
Again, I think this is really cool, so don't take this the wrong way, but just because you are offering it for free doesn't mean you have a right to use the Star Trek IP. I think their is a fine balance between things like 'fan fiction' and free products (that can potentially act as loss-leaders or what have you).
#11
Just checking in after the weekend... 300 downloads since Friday, wow!
OK, so I'm hearing loud and clear that you would all like to see better lighting, etc... We're playing with various methods to improve that, including the possibility of just re-lighting everything. We used many many point lights over the various iterations of the ship, and we didn't keep up on cleaning them up / removing extra ones as we replaced the decks with newer versions. So, the lighting needs a rework, agreed :)
@Bruno:
You are correct that we are unlicensed, and thus are not legally able to sell the product or use it in any way for financial gain... We are keeping to that principle, and stand behind the fact that there are many Star Trek-themed games built by fans that are available on the Net free of charge. There is an established precedent that allows fan-created products like this to be distributed, as evidenced by these games that were allowed to exist and continue to exist.
That said, of course if CBS/Paramount asks us to take it down we would... But until that time we are not going to deprive fans of this opportunity to walk the entire ship - there is no other offering out there that allows this, and from what we are hearing it's what fans have been looking for all along and the IP holders have failed to deliver on it.
Your comment reminds me of that Debbie Downer sketch on SNL... "You know, this a great game and is really cool, but it's illegal and you shouldn't be giving it away... Wah-Wahhhh..." lol
Anyhow, thanks for the feedback everyone, and enjoy the game!
PS - has anybody tried the multiplayer out?
07/15/2013 (8:09 am)
Hey again everybody,Just checking in after the weekend... 300 downloads since Friday, wow!
OK, so I'm hearing loud and clear that you would all like to see better lighting, etc... We're playing with various methods to improve that, including the possibility of just re-lighting everything. We used many many point lights over the various iterations of the ship, and we didn't keep up on cleaning them up / removing extra ones as we replaced the decks with newer versions. So, the lighting needs a rework, agreed :)
@Bruno:
You are correct that we are unlicensed, and thus are not legally able to sell the product or use it in any way for financial gain... We are keeping to that principle, and stand behind the fact that there are many Star Trek-themed games built by fans that are available on the Net free of charge. There is an established precedent that allows fan-created products like this to be distributed, as evidenced by these games that were allowed to exist and continue to exist.
That said, of course if CBS/Paramount asks us to take it down we would... But until that time we are not going to deprive fans of this opportunity to walk the entire ship - there is no other offering out there that allows this, and from what we are hearing it's what fans have been looking for all along and the IP holders have failed to deliver on it.
Your comment reminds me of that Debbie Downer sketch on SNL... "You know, this a great game and is really cool, but it's illegal and you shouldn't be giving it away... Wah-Wahhhh..." lol
Anyhow, thanks for the feedback everyone, and enjoy the game!
PS - has anybody tried the multiplayer out?
#12
07/15/2013 (12:25 pm)
Sorry, didn't mean to be a downer. Just don't want all of your hard work (and it looks like there is a lot of work there) to be pulled out from under you unexpectedly. It looks great and I wish you good luck with it. I think if you can get some type of licensing deal you could have a successful sim and even if you don't its still something to be proud of! :)
#13
No offense taken, and you are absolutely right, I just couldn't resist the Debbie Downer reference :)
If we get asked by CBS to pull the game from the web, well then I guess we have a good story to tell anyways, as being the first guys to actually release a full version of the ship only to have it quashed by The Man (who incidentally did not have anything at all similar to offer the masses).
All feedback is good and we welcome it, no worries :)
Cheers
P
07/15/2013 (12:33 pm)
Lol, thanks Bruno...No offense taken, and you are absolutely right, I just couldn't resist the Debbie Downer reference :)
If we get asked by CBS to pull the game from the web, well then I guess we have a good story to tell anyways, as being the first guys to actually release a full version of the ship only to have it quashed by The Man (who incidentally did not have anything at all similar to offer the masses).
All feedback is good and we welcome it, no worries :)
Cheers
P
#15
This site is old, and we don't update these posts anymore...
We have a thread in the newer Torque 3D site which is here:
http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=551
There is a download link in that post.
Please feel free to post in that thread once you have checked out the game.
Cheers
Paul
08/16/2017 (10:47 am)
@Qwe:This site is old, and we don't update these posts anymore...
We have a thread in the newer Torque 3D site which is here:
http://forums.torque3d.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=551
There is a download link in that post.
Please feel free to post in that thread once you have checked out the game.
Cheers
Paul
Torque Owner Daniel Buckmaster
T3D Steering Committee