Another Star Frontiers Blog

Just a quick shout out to w00t (aka simple). He's got another Star Frontiers themed blog as well although it is not 100% Star Frontiers as he has other gaming topics as well. Read and enjoy.

Star Frontiers Software Development

In the past year or so there has been some very active Star Frontiers themed software development. I thought I'd take a moment and highlight the projects going on that I know about (since I'm involved to some level or another in them). Details and discussion forums about all of these can be found at the StarFrontiers.org Forums.

• Star Frontiers Knight Hawks Vector game - (Windows) This is "A real-time multi-player Knighthawks computer game" according to the blurb on the forums. It is an arcade style implementation of the Knight Hawks Vector rule set. In the game you can play against the computer AI or against up to 7 other players over the Internet. There a huge number of ships to choose from both UPF and Sathar. It provides some prebuilt scenarios as well as a scenario editor that allows you to create your own playing field and opponents for custom games. My main contribution to this one was playtesting but I did help out just a tad with some of the display code.
  
• StarFrontiers Orbiter add-on - (Windows) This is a add-on for the Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator that implements the Knight Hawks Vector rules into a complete 3D spaceflight environment. This project is currently on hold as the main developers (Art Eaton and myself) are currently working on other projects and are waiting for the Orbiter Multi-player add-on to mature. An earlier version, written by Art and others can be found at the Knight Hawks Vector download page. The new version implements new ships as well as the combat rules of the game allowing for realistic Star Frontiers battles. I'll probably be coming back to this one later this year and finishing it up for single player mode.
• Second Sathar War game - (Linux, Windows) This one is my current project. I'm implementing the Second Sathar War game from the back of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book into a computer game. I've almost got the single computer strategic version complete allowing you to keep track of the strategic logistics on a single computer. This version requires you to conduct the battles off-line, old school on the table top. Following that I intend to add multi-player support across the Internet and implement the board games rules. The board game rules will also be spun off into a stand-alone game for Internet play.
• Star Frontiers RPG game - (Windows) Art, Imperial Lord and myself are working on a full blown RPG game based on the Star Frontiers milieu. Art is providing most of the heavy coding and Imperial Lord is working on the storyline. I'm just mainly providing wise cracks as the moment but have been contributing NPCs and will help out with playtesting and coding as things move along. This is Art's current main project and rapidly evolving.
• Hover Races game - Related to the SF RPG is the hover races game that lets you race your hover car and (soon) hover bikes around a track.

Again, those are the ones I know about. If you know of others please post them in the comments. As always, the developers would love for people to download and test out the games and provided feedback. So go try them out and tell us what you think.

Boy have I been lazy

Three and a half months since my last post. I guess this takes getting used to. There have been a bunch of behind the scenes things going on, some related to Star Frontiers and some related to Real Life, that have been of sufficent distraction to ignore this completely. Anyway, I'm going to try to do better and we'll see what happens.

Related to my previous post, on-line gaming has been pretty slow all year. Partially due to the fact that our super referee, Shadow Shack, has been under the weather and busy at work to the exclusion of all else. He's projecting a comeback in mid June so we'll hopefully be getting back into the swing of things. There are also a few more new games getting ready to start but I'll save that for a later post. On the other hand the Britmol's Tavern and Black Hand Gang games have been continuing, if slowly.

Anyway, that's it for now. I've got a post planned on all the Star Frontier's related software project going on and what to look for in the comming months on that front. That will be coming soon.