Sadly Lazarus has again begun claiming other modders work as his own, he is also pretending to be a part of the Star Trek Supremacy team, which he is of course not. Please avoid birthofthefederation.net as neither the mods nor the posts which have been copy and pasted over from the botf2 forums belong there, just avoid the place and use the botf2 forums for all supremacy news

Update on this issue, Lazarus has now stopped claiming the mods as his own and hopefully this can now be put behind us.

Some may recall a post from a few weeks ago about a guy called Lazarus who had stolen some mods and claimed them as his own. I tried to put him on the right path, even to making a few models for him to help him along and bring him into the mod community. Sadly this has been thrown back in my face. In a chat with the thief he said this, "Lazarus: ive no idea about modelling and texutring nevermind all of the other steps. easier i just may aswell put the other mods back on my own site and claim UDM as my own har har" I will put the entire chat in The forum for all to see, such theft in the mod community has to be responded to. If you are a Birth of the Federation modder or are looking for Birth of the Federation mods avoid This Thieving Bastard and use the Armada Fleet Command site as it is the major resource for all things BOTF.

The Alpha 5 version of Birth of the Empires has finally been released in both English and German language. You can find the game download in our downloads section Here and we've got screenshots in our forums, Here.

The most prominent new achievement is that minor races can now build ships in their homesystems (though they can't explore with them yet), thus posing a threat at the beginning's expansion stage of the game.

Several smaller improvements have been made to the galaxy map, including scrollbars that can now be turned on and off via the bote.ini file, and scrolling on the map by holding the left mouse button and dragging the mouse.

Also a really pressing gameplay issue was the lack of bribe resistance. Resistances have now been implemented to stop minors from being bought so easily. A lot of tooltips have made it into the game at various locations, for example when comparing the strengths of ships in your fleet. But beware to trust the pure numbers, as they are modified by a number of factors during combat, such manoeuvrability of the enemy, crew experience, accuracy rates, flight manoeuvres (still automatic) and firing arcs.

Installation and game control hints:

- The installer is multilanguage. The language chosen during installation determines game language during play.

- Moving your mouse above the end turn button  activates the options menu bar. Via this bar, you can  save your game or open in-game chat, amobgst other options.

- At first start, a bote.ini settings file is created. This file will be located either in the bote main folder or in your documents and settings folder. If it is not created or nowhere to be found, set yourself write permissions for the bote main folder. The ini file allows you to set the ingame difficulty levels (BABY, EASY, NORMAL, HARD and IMPOSSIBLE in capital letters) and several other options for map creation and music/sound.

- Scrolling on the map has been made easier. Instead of using scrollbars (which can be re-enabled in the bote.ini file) you can now have your left mouse button pressed down and move the mouse around the map to have it scrolled quickly.

- Switching systems in the build menu gets easier when you use your extra mouse buttons or cursor left and right.

The BotE-team hopes that you all enjoy the game as much as they had making it! Again, you can find the download in our Downloads Section, and you can view screenshots of the update in the release thread Here.

Mike Strobel, the creator of Star Trek: Supremacy, has announced that he will be attending the Las Vegas Star Trek convention in August, along with Kenneth_of_Borg, our resident 3D Modeller. Supremacy will be at the computer game booth in the vendor area. Mike is also looking at potentially giving a talk about Birth of the Federation and the long road that led to his development of Star Trek: Supremacy.

In preparation for the event, he is going to release a game update in August that will concentrate on improving the multiplayer experience and game performance. The update will also include improvements to Diplomacy and the Intelligence services.

We will post more updates as they become available. To find out more about Supremacy and to download the existing Alpha version of the game, click Here.

Recently spotted news on the Half Life 2 mod Enterprise - TCW, (Temporal Cold War) that has a sad feeling to all looking forward to this spectacular mod.

Here is a quote that gives the whole story.

Source

Quote from CaptainSource:

Yes, it is over. After my resignation as Mod Leader, the interest for the mod dropped to an all time low. I felt that after the hard work and effort that had been contributed to the mod, that all of the assets produced and a working version of what we had should at least be released.

We have also added ALL of the model assets, textures and source coding files for those to use as they would like. Please give credit to those who produced them. Other than that, it would be great to see them used in a new mod, or in a Machinima project. I know there are a couple of German indie game and film developers are keen to get their hands on all of the assets and we bid them well with their projects.

I do not see this news as a failure, but as an amazing learning experience that lasted 3 years. In that time, I have learnt an amazing amount about how much work goes into producing a mod/game and have made many friends along the way. The talents of the Design Crew for the mod cannot go unsaid, as you will see in the working proof of concept release. I would to have enjoyed seeing a completed mod, but due to medical issues I personally was unable to continue with the mod, thus my resignation as Captain. I would like to personally thank all of those who contributed to the mod in the Design Crew and those who supported the mod over the past 3 years. Thanks again for the memories.

The main website for the mod will slowly transformed into a Star Trek Enterprise portal for news on movies, games etc so all of the hard work and effort will not be wasted. Unfortunately, I had a hard drive failure and lost all of the .smd files and .qc files for the mod (I would have loved to have give those away as well), which did contribute to the fast track of closing the mod down, since it meant starting from scratch in re-creating the major character versions and new asset compiles.

Thanks to all those who supported the mod over the past 3 years and lets hope some other talented people take up all of the files we have supplied and either continue the mod, or use them for a similar style of project. If any of the files are used, please give credit to the mod and those created the files. Thanks again.

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You can download what has been released Here