TREKCORE > GAMING > STAR TREK ONLINE > DESIGNER DIARY > Development Update

PUBLISHED: Dec 23, 2005
AUTHOR: Daron Stinnett

Here's a brief summary of the latest happenings within the STO development team:
The engineering and art teams have been working together to see how close we can get to photo-realistic, real time ship interior renders. They've started with the TNG era Galaxy class since it is so iconic and also happens to be the setting for at least one major hub. For this particular exercise, they modeling and rendering a hallway, turbolift, and the observation lounge and rendering it all in real-time with next-generation lighting & material effects. Their results are stunning. Once we've completed look development for our other two environment types (space & ground), we'll release some screenshots - figure sometime before summer...

We have our first character modeled, which is a female Vulcan. Though we're not ready to have a character walking around in the game yet, we went ahead and built her so that we'd have at least a static character to pose in our interiors so we could better judge proportions and evaluate how to render characters within our environment. The new uniforms look even better in 3D.

Ken's team is continuing to concept the interior of a Galaxy class to study how we can create spaces that will allow the Galaxy to serve as what is effectively a player city. In my last update, I mentioned how we were diagramming deck layout. Now we have perspective drawings of familiar spaces that have been revised, and new spaces that have never before been seen. We will be releasing a few of these drawings very soon to give everyone an idea of where we're heading.

We're continuing to add to our team. I mentioned a few of these new team members in my last update, but I want to share a little more on everyone's background to give you a sense of the talented team we're putting together.

• Ira Goeddel (Character Technical Director) - Ira comes to us from New Pencil, a contract art development house where Ira gained extensive experience working within and creating new art pipelines for games throughout the industry including The Sims and our very own Gods & Heroes.
• Lorien Gremore (Production Assistant) - Lorien brings her recent experience working on the operations side of The Matrix Online and before that, experience playing and helping create MUDs. Her role is to support our development process in any number of ways and we're pleased to have her perspective and experience with live team operations incorporated into pre-live development process.
• TJ Holleran (Art Technical Director) - TJ joins us from Microsoft Game Studios working on a variety of sports titles for the XBOX. TJ's role on STO is to oversee the technical aspects of our art development and to bridge the gap between Art, Game Design, and Engineering.
• Todd Berkebile (Server Lead) - Todd will be leading the development of our server-side technologies. Todd's experience at Turbine working on Asheron's Call as well as shared technologies for D&D Online, LOTR Online, and previously at Microsoft, gives him formidable server technology chops as well as a deep understanding of the MMO development process.
• Michael Stemmle (Story Lead) - Adventure game fans will recognize Mike as the co-creator and Director of hit titles such as Escape from Monkey Island and Sam & Max Hit the Road. And his writing credits include many other great titles such as Jedi Knight II, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, KOTOR II - the list goes on and on. We're pleased to have Mike's writing and adventure experience, not to mention his enthusiasm for MMORPGs and his encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek characters and stories from every era of Star Trek.

I'll finish this development update with a list of some of the design issues that Glen, Eric, and Mike are currently tackling:

• Travel - We're finally getting a handle on how we're going to deal with player travel throughout the galaxy. We've wrestled with this issue for a while with some advocating instant travel to destinations while others on the team wanted the freedom to explore the galaxy. But we all agreed that for there to be a travel component to Star Trek Online, it needed to be entertaining since you'll be doing a lot of it. Our design challenge was how to turn the empty space in-between destinations into an environment that is exciting and will capture notion of space exploration and reward players for doing so. So I'm pleased to report that while we haven't yet finalized our travel design, that STO will indeed have robust support for travel within and free-form exploration of the galaxy.
• Mission & Skill Systems - We've recently taken a first pass at describing how our mission (quest) system will work and the player skill tree. These are both extensive and important systems that we've only just begun to document. But we're pleased to be making progress on them and we're looking forward to sharing details soon.
• State of the Galaxy - Mike has recently put together a "State of the Galaxy" document that describes the political and cultural landscape of the major forces within the galaxy at the start of STO. While this document reveals too much about our story to release in its entirety, Mike will be talking about this document in another update that will be posted later today.

Happy Holidays!
Daron Stinnett - Executive Producer

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