CTO #5 - Regarding Starships

I thought this time I would let images speak for themselves. :D

NX-01 Enterprise

Nova Class & Refit

B'rel Class Bird of Prey

2009 NCC-1701 Enterprise

Future Vulcan Ship

Daedalus Class

Custom Ships

Next episode is likely to showcase a whole lot of interiors for the Enterprise D, as I am hoping to have some kind of mass room building event. The best work from that event will be shown in one of my future videos for the server, and we're bound to get a lot done on the D from it, so I am really looking forward to seeing how many people participate.

Live long and prosper!

Nothing Major

Not a lot is going on right now, at least, I'm too lazy to make full posts about it. :D

- Recently imported the Equinox deck plans by PatchyPatch

- Some work has been done on NX-01's hull by LoakeyRonso and girhawk.

- Several freebuild projects have had interesting additions to them recently.

- Server plugins have been updated and everyone now has access to multiple homes using /sethome

- Voyager may be an upcoming project when the deck plans get worked on.

- Interior work on the Enterprise D has been happening here and there, mostly quarters but also a few various other rooms.

- Recently I was able to link dropbox to our schematics folder so now it is possible to export just about anything from the server as a schematic without my assistance retrieving and hosting the file.

One thing I would like to do is organize some kind of "build off" day where everyone logs in and builds as many rooms as they can on the D. I'm thinking of a weekend, probably a Saturday in a week or two.

There would  be no obligation to log on all day, only whenever is convenient to you, but the goal is to build as many rooms in the Enterprise D as possible. I'd like to assign a few individuals the task of gathering up the best of those builds so we can have a poll voting for the best of them, and that location will be included in my video (still a work in progress but I have done some recording for it!!)

I have another CTO coming up soon, so be sure to stay tuned!

* Bluegobln salutes you *

CTO #4 - Hornet Class (or something)

Anyone who frequents the server knows I like to jump around the dozen or so separate projects I have running at any given moment. I also like to start new ones. Recently I was browsing starship blueprints and came upon one I liked a lot. I found it elsewhere but later realized the images were available on Cygnus-x1 as well.

That is the USS Hornet. Well... I don't like the name much (I hate bees and all varieties of hornets and wasps) but I do love the design. Among other things it carries a squadron of small but powerful fighter craft.

So I set to work, stepping briefly away from the standard formula of deck plans in favor of testing my handcrafting ability. It was a long and painful struggle! I think I will take the time to use deck plans in the future.

Here's the progress so far, hull nearly finished and some of the turbolifts set up (mainly the central shafts).

My version is smaller than the measurements listed in the blueprints, but the decking would be ridiculous if I kept the scale exact. I attempted to comfortably adjust it to "realistic" levels and also fit it into minecraft, and as a result this version will end up with an extra deck and a lot of double floored decks (which allows for better ceilings so no harm done really).

I also made the saucer edge a bit taller to accommodate Minecraft's unfriendliness toward shuttle sized vessels. That should allow us to make a bit nicer details for the saucer bay.

No fighters yet, just fine tuning the hull shape before details and interior start to get love.

We're always on the lookout for interesting stuff on the MineTrek server, so please let me know in the comments or elsewhere if you think I should share something in a CTO episode!

All hands brace for impact!

PS - the Ironhour is the name I am using for this ship. It is a name I created back when I played WoW and just seems to me to represent some sort of burst of strength to me. The ship is well suited as a strike craft or patrol vessel, it kinda fits. :D

Virus Woes and the Enterprise E

So today (right now actually) I am formatting and freshly installing the operating system on our server hardware because of a nasty little virus. Typically with a virus I can identify it online by its activities, but this one seemed to be too unusual a case to be identified so.

What it did was close off a section of my hard drive, a folder in my main OS directory actually, and hide it from view. When I say hide, I mean it was hidden in all ways - I could not see it with hidden folders being shown, I could not see it with hard drive scanning software (made for recovering lost files and such). As far as I was concerned this folder was literally nonexistant.... except that it was slowly but surely filling up my hard drive to the brim.

That is, actually, how I found it in the first place. The hard drive capped out and I thought "how strange". So I cleared up some extra space (over 20 gigs actually). After that, a few days later, it capped out again. Whaaaat?

It was pretty obvious something was up, so I started looking for the culprit, some program or folder was growing at a pretty quick pace to pull that off, and that meant it had to be quite large by now (at a minimum 20 gigs, right, but probably more).

I was able to identify this nonexistant folder because I could see the size of its contents, and the number of files, but when viewed directly there was simply nothing there. I tried every trick I could think of to open it, but even if I managed to enter a folder that was hidden (by typing its exact name) I was unable to see a single file within that folder anyway and so was stopped again.

I'm not typically forced to do a fresh OS install, but in this case I simply gave up on other solutions because I think at best it would take me longer to clean the system anyway. A fresh OS is quicker! I designed the system to allow easy fresh OS installs anyway. :D

----

On another note: we've been working on the Enterprise E on our server! At present it is only a shell, and one in the process of  being cleaned up, but it may one day get decks just like the Enterprise D.

We're planning on extracting slices of the shell as decks to create by hand in an image editor. The only downside to this side project is, well, there are no blueprints available for the E. That means we'll be working from scratch!

Well not entirely from scratch, really, but the only materials we have are descriptions of the decks contents on various websites and a few side cutaway images of the ship. That gives us a pretty solid place to start, but ultimately there's so much that will need to be done to create these, trial and error with each of its 24 decks until we're satisfied with the quality.

All else aside, we'll probably base a lot of the interior space off the Enterprise D. It seems to me that the design of the ship is close enough that it aught to be a similar style in most respects.

Shipyards

It was always part of the plan for MineTrek 2 to go well beyond the capabilities of classic servers. There are plans to do those things (as you may have read in this blog), but what about other ships?

Well with some thought I decided we'd go ahead and make it officially part of MineTrek 2, we'll be doing other ships and were not afraid of neglecting Enterprise D (lets face it shes still the biggest attraction to the server by far, and is getting love here and there still).

We have the Defiant, a Bird of Prey being worked on in Freebuild right now (perhaps to be brought over to the  new Shipyards map), a Nova refit, and then there is my current deck work on the NX-01 Enterprise. There will be more ships in the future. :D

I thought I would share so people could see the complexity on some of these decks. They're not as bad as I say lol... but its no walk in the park.

CTO #3 - Grotto

Check This Out #3 - Grotto!

I mean I really dig a lot of the deco on this ship, but nothing blew me away quite like this. I've seen the grotto - it has looked like it did in my video a while back for pretty much the entire time I've been a part of or even visiting the project - a big sorta empty room with some waterfalls and grass and stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I do think that is ok... but why should it look like Minecraft generated it randomly? Why not a real mall, park, or whatever it is supposed to be? It's a public place on a star ship, not a nature preserve. I don't know what I am saying, it never really was that either... but it bored me after a while. I'm glad to see things are changing!

Here you can see the recent work by Patchypatch, despite my server dying on him and wiping out a fair amount of work.

Super awesome. There are pathways up the hill, little stands for vendors, a more scenic sitting area... the whole park having this level of love poured into it is just awesome. Its one public area on the ship, one relatively small room in comparison to the whole, yet is so packed with awesome detail. This is why MineTrek is where I want to be!

Thanks for the good work so far, guys, keep it up!

Defiant, Texture, and Video Updates!

We'll start with the video updates.

I'm planning to do a mini-series of videos in as high def as I can manage showcasing the server, its features and goals, the build, how to become a builder (Ensign), and other such things that are common. This video should serve as a much more helpful introduction to the server than forum posts etc, and hopefully will pick up more interested parties via Youtube (and perhaps elsewhere that the video could get linked to).

The first episode of this video will deal with everything in short form except connecting to the server, becoming a builder, etc..

The second should be dedicated to showcasing the current state of the Enterprise D, many of its unique rooms and areas, and advanced ways to navigate it.

The third should be about current and future features of the server such as the freebuild area, arenas, holodecks, holodeck adventures or quests, PVP, and whatnot.

Texture Pack


I recently posted the updated 1.1.1 version of the textures which I apparently had been keeping to myself for a while. Since I was posting it I decided to update it with a few more details anyway.

- Added Gorn Creepers, Jem'hadar Zombies
- Adjusted the colors of several blocks
- Remade the Slab texture (and doubleslab of course)
- Tweaked a few other textures to be smoother

You can get the latest texture pack from the forum thread for the server. The page is shown at the top in the blog summary!

USS Defiant

This mini side project has been progressing EXTREMELY rapidly. Mostly this is because with something new to work on there is a sort of excitement. People get to do things that are simply not possible to do for Enterprise because, well, its already done. Not everyone was made to build out rooms!

Some of us were just made to do this kind of thing. (Note: not finished yet, its coming along very nicely though).

This is really why I wanted to make the Freebuild map, because it allows people to do things like this that are a part of the server, yet do not intrude on the Enterprise D projects space. It does consume some peoples TIME which might otherwise be spent on the Enterprise, but as I said not everyone wants to build out rooms and light hallways all the time. I'd put money on people being more motivated to get things done on Enterprise in between other side projects than were they dedicated to Enterprise the whole time (aka stuck on the D).

I plan on starting and probably finishing multiple similar projects to this in the future. Stay tuned for that.

The Defiant herself is just screaming by. We've got most of the decks set up, the top hull is completely done and just needs some detail work, and the bottom is going to be pretty quick. A good number of internal components are finished and many rooms have been done as well.

This ship will be released as a Schematic (WorldEdit and MCEdit compatible file) when it is completely done. :D

Live long and prosper!