The team behind the hit Armada 2 Modification Fleet Ops, recently launched a patch project for the original Star Trek Armada game designed to solve some of the problems that this aged game experiences on newer systems.

Back in September, FleetOps leader, DocaCola, posted the following:

Armada 1 has problems running on newer systems. I was unable to run it at all so i begun debugging and fixed some of these problems. Besides bug fixing the patch has two new features for Armada 1. The first is widescreen (all resolutions) support.

The second feature allows to activate the map editor mode in a ‘live’ game (similar to Armada 2). This can be useful for debugging purposes (modding) and of course people who ever wanted to command a fleet of Enterprise Ds in their skirmish games.

The bugs fixed include:

• Game would not start on some systems with more than 2GB of memory
• Game could crash on systems with a very long PATH environment variable

You can download the Armada 1.3 patch and get installation instructions, over at the FleetOps website by clicking here

Over the last couple of weeks, Hailing Frequency has been reporting on the future of Star Trek: Infinite Space, which has recently been stalled following the layoff of over 100 employees at GameForge and an internal company re-structure.

GameForge previously indicated that Infinite Space would only have a future if a co-publisher could be found to help bring the game to completion (relativly speaking) and today, one possible contender has been revealed.

Earlier today, german gaming website OGLabs reported that BigPoint Games, most famously known for games such as Battlestar Galactica Online (BGO) are in discussions with GameForge to come on-board as a co-publisher!

According to the report, GameForge has not yet responded to the offer from BigPoint, but if the deal is succesful, it will see Infinite Space launched sometime in 2012.   The game would continue to be developed by Keen Games, with GameForge and BigPoint acting as co-publishers, however, the partnership would also likely need to be signed off on by CBS Consumer Products, who tend to be quite fussy with regard to who they give access to the Star Trek license.

This is good news for fans of the game who were worried that it may be completely dead.   Hailing Frequency will continue monitoring the situation and will publish updates as and when they become available.

The latest update from the “Star Trek: Excalibur” project has been posted and shows off several examples of how transparency effects are being used in the game:

Some Transparency: One big advantage for Excalibur’s ship framework is how well it supports transparent parts of a ship. This album describes some of the interesting uses we have found for transparency over recent months, and shows just how far it can be pushed.

You can see the full update at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150474332529810.435249.349086809809&type=1

As previously reported, the Enterprise Temporal Cold War modifiation for Half Life 2, which shut-down development in 2010, recently found new life as Enterprise: MACO, which is currently in development for the cutting edge CryEngine3 game engine!

Its a couple of weeks later now, the official MACO website has launched and with it, the very first Media Release for the game!

In the media release, the project leader, Trip Tucker, had the following to say about the storyline for MACO:

Set one year after the events of Season 4, the modification aims to portray the events leading to the Earth-Romulan War in a linear, story-oriented fashion. The story arc itself would be told from the perspective of an operative of Earth’s elite military organization known as Military Assault Command Operations, or M.A.C.O. Unlike its predecessor, STE:M aims to follow the footsteps of the Elite Force FPS-series in these episodes: gameplay would consist roughly 75% combat and 25% puzzle-solving, sometimes interrupted by free roam sections during which the player can explore the titular starship within reasonable bounds.

The full media release contains a tonne of information, several screenshots (which you can see below) and promises of much more!

Interestingly, as this mod is a ressurection of the Temporal Cold War mod, its important to note that this mod is not starting from square one.  Dozens of object and character models, animations, scripts and sound effects have been brought forward from TCW into the new C.E.3 platform, ensuring that MACO gets off to a running start!

In addition, the team is adopting a more realistic and bite-size philosophy with regard to the release of the mod – rather than trying to complete the entire storyline prior to the release of the project, it will be released in one-hour episodes every few months, thus ensuring that the community can play the mod much sooner than might otherwise occur and, hopefully, keeping fans coming back every few months to experience the next episode in the storyline!

We here at Hailing Frequency are excited to see this project resurrected and moving forward with new life, and we cannot wait to play the first episode.

Those of you with a more technical background should… Read More

In the most recent weekly media update from the development team behind Star Trek: Excalibur, we can see the familiar Norkova Class in all of its Excalibur-ian glory!

The team had this to say:

Norkova Class: This week we have some shots of our Norkova Class transport which is seen throughout TNG, DS9 & Voyager and is seemingly used by many species for transporting cargo. The ship was modelled some time ago by Tvrtko (Newman) and was textured by Jonny (JB06)

Here are some pictures:

See more at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150439991359810.429188.349086809809&type=1