Béta 1 of the U.S.S Leonov has now been released to all beta testers who have entered the registrations. If you haven't, check your junk/spam section of your e-mail client.

Béta registrations have now been closed. All participants: thank you and good luck.

Just a quick note to remind you all that there are only three days left before béta registrations are closing. All participants have recieved notification that they have entered the closed béta.

Also, some 11th hour changes are being applied to the map. Though I don't believe that they will intervene with the releasing schedule, it is possible that the release may be pushed back to Saturday ...

After many months of mapping, internal playtesting and a hell of a lot of curses and swearing, I am announcing that a closed béta will be released on Friday November the 13th at 0:00 CET.

Anyone can participate in this béta session. All you have to do, is to drop me an e-mail which contains the following:

Name

Your online nickname will be sufficient and gives me an idea with whom I'm dealing with.

Location

Just a city and/or country is sufficient. Gives me an idea from where you are regarding latency to the server.

Specifications

For this, only your CPU and graphics card is more then enough, anything else isn't nessacery (game doesn't run better if you have a $100 mouse hooked up rather then a $10 dollar one).

Even if you have a low-end graphics card or an integrated one, feel free to apply since I'm trying to measure out exactly how the map runs on both high-end and low-end rigs.

E-mail address

It will be somewhat important to know if your e-mail address can support both attachements of around 15MB and *.zip files so that I don't have to hassle with spamfilters, mailbox limitations and the likes.

Applications close on November 11th around 18:00 CET and all applicants will recieve a notifications ASAP that they have entered the béta session.

Note: Participants of this béta must be able to use the ioEF (v1.37) or ioCow versions of the Holomatch engine. Due to the size and scope of 'The Animal', the map will NOT work with the default executable of the game.

Due to several bugs within the latest RPG-X beta versions and the apperant unwillingless from the developers to solve them, development of the upcomming map 'The Animal' has been halted until these issues have been resolved in either a bugfix or a next release (if that ever comes).

Sadly, this also affects the real roleplaying version of both Asteroid Base - redone and Asteroid Base II. Development of both Director's Cut versions will continue as normal.

--- PRESS RELEASE --- FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION ---
August 1st, 2009

PREVIEW OF APPRENTICE’S LATEST PROJECT FOR BOTH RAVENSOFT'S FPS STAR TREK® VOYAGER: ELITE FORCE AND THE RPG-X MODIFICATION: "U.S.S LEONOV - 'THE ANIMAL'"

Apprentice is proud to present a preview for his latest project named U.S.S Leonov, nicknamed "The Animal". As the spiritual successor of 2007's original and highly regarded map Battlestar Bellerophon, "The Animal" expands on a concept and idea that was first introduced with the Bellerophon map.


Especially developed for the RPG-X modification, the map will feature both basic and new features found within the latest version of this modification (v2.2 béta 6 at the time of writing).

The map has been in production since 2007 and a release date is yet to be determined. The first screenshots are available in a 16:10 widescreen format and are accessable through the Screenshots page.

It's about time ;)

Eversince the RPG-X modification was released, I have seen a lot of starship-like maps developed for it and although they have been nicely designed, I felt that regarding mapping and layout, only a few of them have reached or partially reached their full potential.

Most of the maps I came across still use the 'stock Raven corridors' that came with Raven's Voyager *.map files and are either using both brushwork and textures and other maps may use custom textures but are still using Raven's dimensions regarding height and width and while those same dimensions may work within the default game (and other modifications), they do not work in RPG-X. Another thing that I feel strongly against it, is the use of dead-ends, as in corridors that either lead to nowhere or have been clipped by clip brushes to hold the player in that particular area.

Since bickering about it is farely easy to do, I decided to release a small video with an example on how corridors can look without resorting to dead-ends and/or clip brushes. Furthermore, I like to inspire fellow mappers out there in making something that is different and do something that either hasn't been done before or hasn't been done that very often and prevent them from falling in the same traphole as other mappers did.

It took a little while but after tonight all downloadable content are now available from either the Fileplanet mirrors or from the website itself.

Altought the Filefront mirrors may remain operational, I would urge you NOT to use them until they have decided to get their acts together. In my opinion, any hosting facility thay shows this kind of incompetence should be discarted 'as is' and your efforts should be taken to other hosting facilities who are competent enough to deal with (technical) issues in a timid, professional manner, which is currently not the case with Filefront.com . . .

Due to the level of incompetence of several people at/with Filefront and the length of how long it's been going on there, I have decided for the time being to remove all links to content hosted there and re-upload all files onto the Fileplanet servers. Let's see if Fileplanet is competent enough and that Filefront can get their act together . . .

My original webhoster decided to cease all hosting activities in the near future so I had to find a new hosting facility to host this webpage.

A new one was easelly found, so everything was transefed from one host to another. Everything should work as it did previously but it it doesn't, dead links can be reported to the (web)apprentice ;)

Happy new year :)