Awesome, can't wait!
Congrats on the somewhat successful upgrade man.
Thanks, it needed doing
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Nice to see you back in the saddle, I'm just getting back into it as well.
Ah, USB's back ups, where would we be without them?
I'd probably be crying softly to myself if I hadn't bought that 8GB USB a while back
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Anyways, I promised an update today. There's a couple of things to say first, mostly to do with the coding side of things:
I've removed the avatar system
Now my reason for this was two fold. Keeping it practically doubles the number of odf's needed; and causes a lot of issues when it comes to balancing. It's difficult, as well, to make the same faction play different enough to warrant a seperate avatar. I'm not a big fan of limiting ships/stations/tech that way - so I wasn't going to do that.
Trial and error approach to balancing
As I write this, the federation combat ships are done save the battleship - the largest ship available - and I've realised something. Looking at it in the form of numbers on a spreadsheet, all of the races play the same way with the same tactics. That is to say, they've the same number of ships with roughly equal values.
I do not like this.
One of the things that sets FO apart (IMO, of course) is the lack of actual 'links' between the races. There is not a baseline cruiser with equal stats shared by all, there is a set of passives and such like that result in both hard and soft counters. I like the way that works, though the whole passive system I find very complex to implement by hand. I've heard tale of mythical developer tools that generate all of the odf's, but just using notepad means a lot of tedium. Especially if one thing doesn't work quite so well and needs to be adjusted.
In essence, there's going to be a simpler version of this. The number of ships won't change, but combat mechanics will. The Federation - simply by virtue of already being done - serve as the all-rounders; with no specific strengths or weaknesses. Romulans need special weapons and/or stealth to make up for weaker hull strengths. Klingons rely upon quick, powerful opening salvoes in 1 on 1 combat; and numbers in fleet action, to make up for their inferior construction. Tholians can take a lot of damage compared to other races, and when coupled with weaker weaponry means that battles against them will become a matter of endurance more than anything.
And, of course, some pics. I've put in the starbase, and the construction rig today. Also worked up a new naming scheme for the non-combat ships.
Note: Everything, save the ship models, is subject to change. That includes such things as the interface, buildbuttons and textures.
. I can't take credit for the Fed ships (well...except the lightmaps) they were Majestic's work; I just ported them over and dressed them all nice in their new odf's.
. 3.2.6 will be a rather large content patch for both modding and gameplay, and there are a significant number of tasks that require attention before progress on some of the major items can begin. If I recall, the registries are just simple small textures, with an ODF command to associate the texture with the correct unit name - I've only talked to Optec briefly about this however, so don't take my information as wholly accurate. 
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