Cross ST:RPG with TA

[martyparty]

This would be ambitious, but how about crossing Star Traders with Templar Assault, so that players who have the paid version of both games, have the option of conducting boarding operations as an "away team" in a tactical environment?

That way you'd have a more than decent chance of wiping the floor with the aliens, though it wouldn't just be a walk-over.

[slayernz]

Would be awesome but for the fact that with the lack of permissions, neither game knows of the other's existence
further, games are all sandboxed anyway, so would be very difficult to do using separate game architecture. Could combine the two code-bases into one uber game, but then for users not expecting it, would be quite a jarring experience going from ST to TA and back again

Finally, TA is set decades or more earlier than ST.

[martyparty]

A combination for Star Traders 2 perhaps. I know there's a surprising lot of mini games in Space Rangers 2, and another very ambitious game (though buggy) was Birthright, so scope alone shouldn't be an excuse not to make a game super awesome.

[Cory Trese]

ST2 includes plans to allow space exploration, planetary surface exploration and complex ship to ship involving a secondary battle map.

I don't think anyone is looking for an "excuse" but right now there are certain realities (60 hour weeks at work) that dictate boundaries.

We're very keen to keep our bugs and game issues to a minimum -- our rule is that we'd rather have balanced games that live up to the platform and player instead of ambitious titles that don't balance or live up to the promise of the design.

I played a lot of Space Rangers 2 -- I think I've played almost everything from StarDock. That game has serious balancing issues, especially with the minigames. The open-ended world is awesome, complete and expansive. There are no doubt a lot of minigames, but they're very uneven and some of them really feel thrown in at the end. I don't mind the missing polish at all (obviously) but the balance issues really got to me after a while.

StarDock makes great games -- with usually awesome reception from the press and game media. We can only hope to someday have half the resources and budgets they do.

[martyparty]

Jan 15, 2013 1:16:18 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

I don't think anyone is looking for an "excuse" but right now there are certain realities (60 hour weeks at work) that dictate boundaries.

Perhaps it was an unfortunate choice of wording from me. What I meant is that since you've already done the hardest part of getting each of Star Traders and Templar Assault working well, an opportunity exists to combine them into one even cooler game.

I agree the balancing would require some rethinking so that battling alien ships doesn't go from "OMG!" to "well that was easy"

[Cory Trese]

Well ST and TA have completely different game engines, saved game formats and underlying data dictionaries.

As a metaphor we've already done the hardest part of getting both automobiles and airplanes to work ... but we still don't have mass market flying cars.

[ahhhonfire]

Every time I see "ST2," my excitement doubles.

[slayernz]

Wooah exponential excitement for ST2! Soon your level of excitement for ST2 will exceed the number of atoms in the ST2 galaxy. Amazing given that ST2 has a bigger galaxy than its predecessor so therefore must have more atomic mass.

[ahhhonfire]

Let's pretend that 100 represents my excitment for this example. Here are my calculations. 100^100000. The number would definitely be bigger than would fit on this page, as I don't want to spam. So I'll just calculate it on my phone

And the answer my phone gave was: infinity. That's incorrect, but close enough.

[slayernz]

Hee hee, you know I only have half of infinity, which is exactly equal to your whole infinity.