VonFrank's Bridge Commander Remastered Project: RELEASE

[vonfrank]

It's been a long time coming, with a lot of delays due to life and what not, but it is finally time for me to release my Bridge Commander Remastered project!

This has been a lot of work and a labor of love for me for the past decade or so. Modding and adding elements to the game on-and-off for years has led to this project which is, for the most part, as complete as it can be.

The main aim of this modpack is to create a screen-accurate and canon compliant (as much as possible) enhancement of Bridge Commander that greatly expands the combat options in Quick Battles while also allowing for the Single-Player story to still be fully playable.

All stock ships and bridges have been replaced with the most detailed versions available from our modding community. To accompany them, all ships have been given new custom and balanced hardpoints that makes every ship in the game feel 'realistic' to what is shown in the Star Trek series and movies.

I know we all like our installs to be customized to our personal liking, but hopefully some of you will enjoy giving this mod a try, and possibly even building upon what I've brought together here to expand it further!

DOWNLOADS:
Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/startrekbridgecommmander/mods/4012
GameFront: https://www.gamefront.com/games/bridge-commander/file/star-trek-bridge-commander-remastered
Moddb: https://www.moddb.com/games/star-trek-bridge-commander/downloads/bridge-commander-remastered






EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS:

Elijah

Gizmo_3

Capt.Sedaris



==FEATURES==

-Fully playable and enhanced single player campaign.
-43 new ships form across Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, & the Star Trek TNG Movies.
-Top quality 3D models & textures for both new and stock ships.
-New and screen accurate weapon hardpoints for all ships and stations.
-Defiant, Excelsior, and Intrepid class playable bridges.
-New Galaxy & Sovereign class bridges.
-New Klingon, Romulan, & Cardassian background bridges.
-New sound and weapon effects.
-New combat regeions.
-1920x1080 widescreeen support.

V1.1
New Features:
-Added Federation Luna Class
-Added Federation Constitution Class
-Added Federation Constitution Class Refit
-Buffed weaponry of Dominion Founder
-Buffed weaponry of Breen cruiser
-Upscaled intro and ending movies to 1080p @30fps
-Added proper damage icon mapping to all ships
-Removed over 200mb of unused files to reduce overall RAM usage

Bug Fixes:
-Fixed issue where starbase hitboxes were larger than the actual hull
-Fixed issue where numerous ships would not display their specular maps
-Reduced visual size of Vorcha & Neghvar's Ion Cannon projectile
-Added proper Master Systems Displays for USS Berkely & USS Geronimo
-Added proper lighting to Deep Space and QuickbattleRegion system maps
-Fixed balancing of Episode 3 Mission 2 by nerfing the Romulan attackers
-Corrected numerous ship description errors


==INSTALLATION==

1. Install the stock version of Bridge Commander either from your original disc or from the newly released GOG version.
2. If you use the GOG version, skip to step 4.
3. If you are using the original disc, Install the 1.1 patch available here: https://www.moddb.com/games/star-trek-bridge-commander/downloads/star-trek-bridge-commander-v11-patch.
4. Go to your Bridge Commander installation directory and DELETE the "data", "scripts", and "sfx" folders.
5. Copy the contents of the "Bridge_Commander_Remastered" zip folder into your Bridge Commander installation directory.
6. Run the game.
7. If your desktop supports 1920x1080 resolution, the game will start with that display setting automatically. If not, editing of "options.cfg" with Notepad++ is required to manually adjust the resolution to your preference. 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 are alternative supported resolutions.


==KNOWN ISSUES==

* Multiplayer is buggy. Occasionally, the game will throw an error message for file mismatches even if the installs are identical.
* During story missions, the Sovereign's Quantum torpedoes will become silent after completing one mission and moving to the next. If selecting a mission from the "Mission Select" feature on the main menu, the sound returns.
* In Quick Battle, selecting the Sovereign bridge and then switching to another bridge afterwards will leave the Sovereign's view screen behind. Exiting and restarting Quick Battle removes the issue.
* Due to the game's old engine, Quick Battle missions with very large numbers of ships can cause game errors and crashes. Limiting Quick Battles to 20 ships or less is ideal, but the number varies greatly depending on what ships are selected.
* RAM usage can be high for the old game engine. It is recommended to install the 4GB address aware patch to the .exe (make a backup first!) if you have frequent crashes mid-game. This patch is universal and works for many old games. Get it here: https://ntcore.com/?page_id=371
* A few Federation ships do not yet have the correct hull IDs. A notable example is the Sovereign displaying the markings of the Enterprise.

And as always, if you have any further questions or encounter any bugs (which there might be, its BC after all  ) feel free to reach out here on the forums or on Discord!

[angryandorian]

Nice work! Can't wait to try it out.

Edit: Unfortunately I can't get it to launch at my resolution (1366x768). I've been following the instructions, but the default resolution is too big. Editing the options.cfg causes the game to not launch, even using the in-game resolutions or the alternative resolutions in the readme also causes it to not launch.

[vonfrank]

Edit: Unfortunately I can't get it to launch at my resolution (1366x768).

I don't entirely know why, but the game refuses to run at anything less than 1280x1024. So ya, 1366x768 is too small.

If I ever find a way to fix this issue, I certainly will. But for now there appears to be no way around it.

[angryandorian]

But what about 1024x768? That's a mode that the vanilla game comes with, yet this build refuses to play at that resolution.

[Vidmaster]

Huge Congrats 

Alright, how to you want bug reports? Right here in the forum? Thus far:

(last update 2020-05-11)

*the torpedo-spread feature is broken, looks like a speed issue to me. Easy way to re-produce: Start the main campaign, fly to Haven, approach a stellar debris fragment and park the ship 30+ units away. Engage Full-Spread of the Torpedos, line up the ship perfectly and fire. Am getting flashbacks to this, just that it affects most (stock) vessels in the mod.
*the Vorchas' large disrupter spawns "somewhere", but certainly not at the nose of the vessel as expected. This one is difficult anyway, because the game simply does not have enough keys to make this work, distinguishing between normal and special disrupter. Might I recommend perhaps making the advanced disrupter a special type of torpedo instead, that way one would have fine control.
* (nitpick) the Galaxy-Bridge's dedication plate reads "U.S.S. Enterprise" instead of Dauntless
* (nitpick) Prometheus's hint-text recommends multi-vector assault but your mod does not support this feature

I am curious on how you solved the special torpedos (was it transphasic?) you obtain later in the campaign, now that the quantum torpedos are basically a disrupter on the Akira...

[Nebula]

Woo Woo!

[Lurok91]

Congrats 

Screenshots look great.   Any chance of any more?

[vonfrank]

But what about 1024x768? That's a mode that the vanilla game comes with, yet this build refuses to play at that resolution.

Ya, that is a bug I'm trying to track down. Its a tricky one though because the game just completely crashes instead of throwing up a python error window.

*the torpedo-spread feature is broken, looks like a speed issue to me. Easy way to re-produce: Start the main campaign, fly to Haven, approach a stellar debris fragment and park the ship 30+ units away. Engage Full-Spread of the Torpedos, line up the ship perfectly and fire. Am getting flashbacks to this, just that it affects most (stock) vessels in the mod.

I assume you're referring to how the torpedo spread function seems to always overshoot the target, wait for a second delay, then suddenly start tracking. This is not really a bug, but is, unfortunately, a built-in and hardcoded limitation of BC's engine. The spread function has a 'delay' that cannot be modded (or at the very least, has a timer that no one in our modding community has ever found). As a result, the faster and more screen accurate torpedos in my mod tend to overshoot a target at a close or medium range when using multi-spread. That delay is something I will change immediately if I ever find out how.

*the Vorchas' large disrupter spawns "somewhere", but certainly not at the nose of the vessel as expected. This one is difficult anyway, because the game simply does not have enough keys to make this work, distinguishing between normal and special disrupter. Might I recommend perhaps making the advanced disrupter a special type of torpedo instead, that way one would have fine control.

This is a bit of a visual bug caused by the size and slow speed of the Vorcha's Ion Cannon projectile. It does spawn from the correct place (the middle launcher on the nose) but because the projectile is so large, the tail appears to spawn inside the vessel. The same thing happens with the Neghvar which has 2 of these launchers.
As for the option of changing the projectile to be a torpedo instead of a disruptor, this has always been a point of contention since BC's engine cant support 2 torpedo properties. Overall, I feel leaving the Ion Cannon as a disruptor is the better option because it gives the player better control over being able to use both it and regular photons at the same time. If they were grouped under the torpedo property, you would have to wait the full 30 second reload time to swap between them (which is annoying enough) but most importantly this would mean that the Ion Cannon would have 4 forward and 2 aft launchers when toggled, which is vastly overpowered compared to the single forward launcher (plus 6 independent photon tubes) the vessel has in it's current configuration.

* (nitpick) the Galaxy-Bridge's dedication plate reads "U.S.S. Enterprise" instead of Dauntless

I forgot about that little detail.  . Adding on top of that though, the entire Galaxy class model is also painted in the registries of the Enterprise as opposed to the Dauntless.  The dedication plate is a relatively easy fix, but the hull registries are a bit more complex. Regardless, ill add this to the list of things to fix! 

* (nitpick) Prometheus's hint-text recommends multi-vector assault but your mod does not support this feature

That's probably a carryover of when i was going to include MVAM but decided against it because it required too many scripts that destabilized Single-Player. This is another easy fix. Thanks for letting me know!

I am curious on how you solved the special torpedos (was it transphasic?) you obtain later in the campaign, now that the quantum torpedos are basically a disrupter on the Akira...

Yes, the Sovereign is given Transphasic Torpedoes for it's special torpedo after the victory at Starbase 12. Only 3 of them though, since they are so powerful. The torpedoes function by swapping ammo types with the ship's Photon Torpedoes. Since you only get 3, they are loaded in the 3 forward tubes. Be careful with them. They one-shot almost anything that isn't a starbase 

Congrats 

Screenshots look great.   Any chance of any more?

More screenshots? I could always take some more. I'll post them on the forums if I do. 

[FekLeyr Targ]

*the Vorchas' large disrupter spawns "somewhere", but certainly not at the nose of the vessel as expected.

This is a bit of a visual bug caused by the size and slow speed of the Vorcha's Ion Cannon projectile. It does spawn from the correct place (the middle launcher on the nose) but because the projectile is so large, the tail appears to spawn inside the vessel. The same thing happens with the Neghvar which has 2 of these launchers.

If that projectile is using the stock disruptor projectile, which is a 3d model:
Could that issue be fixed by moving the pivot point at the tip of the tail?

[Vidmaster]

Or simply scale the projective down somewhat  , I mean where exactly is the giant Ambassador-Class-sized visible in the show? Since screen accuracy is a primary goal of your mod, I would like to know that I am missing...

Correct me if I am wrong but the blob is supposed to be this thing, correct?

[Vidmaster]

Got various problems when playing E7M3, in which you have to destroy the Resupply Outpost. I selected the Mission directly from your nice Mission Selector 

Run1: Destroyed one sensor station, then warped to the supply outpost, a Keldon and a Galor in pursuit. Defenders appeared.
Then, the outpost suddenly became transparent, then the interface glitched out and finally, the game's rendering window froze entirely while the gameplay seemingly continued, since sound continued playing.
Run2: Warped to the supply outpost directly, again three Defenders appeared as supposed to. Ship got pretty beat up, then the game crashed hard to desktop.

Probably, your mod is not to blame, but I wanted to report it nonetheless. Could still be a scripting bug.

[vonfrank]

Got various problems when playing E7M3, in which you have to destroy the Resupply Outpost. I selected the Mission directly from your nice Mission Selector 

Run1: Destroyed one sensor station, then warped to the supply outpost, a Keldon and a Galor in pursuit. Defenders appeared.
Then, the outpost suddenly became transparent, then the interface glitched out and finally, the game's rendering window froze entirely while the gameplay seemingly continued, since sound continued playing.
Run2: Warped to the supply outpost directly, again three Defenders appeared as supposed to. Ship got pretty beat up, then the game crashed hard to desktop.

Probably, your mod is not to blame, but I wanted to report it nonetheless. Could still be a scripting bug.

I tried but could not replicate those bugs... The mission is incredibly difficult if you warp to Ascella directly, but i dont get any of the glitches you described.

Based on what you described, this sounds like it might be the game running out of memory. Try running the 4GB patch included with the mod download (should be in the main Bridge Commander directory). Select the STBC.exe to enable it to use 4GB of your RAM instead of just 2GB. This will probably solve the problem.

[Lurok91]

Yup.  When I was working on the Maelstrom Mod,  some of the latter missions really suffered from the memory leak. 

[pho]

In E3M1 when you undock from Starbase 12 in the beginning the ship just explodes in the leaving cutscene and it's game over

Edit: fixed it by disabling the collisions.

[Wintersfrost]

Hmmm, when firing up BC remastered for the first time, the resolution expanded beyond the display borders. So I edited options.cfg for 1600x900 and fullscreen in notepad++. But the game will crash and I get a D3D render creation error. If I don't run it in fullscreen, the videos are very small and the game is boxed to one corner of my display. Stock BC runs normally in fullscreen at 1024x768

[vonfrank]

In E3M1 when you undock from Starbase 12 in the beginning the ship just explodes in the leaving cutscene and it's game over

Edit: fixed it by disabling the collisions.

That is very strange.... It seems that if you manually fly out the door there is no issue, but if you tell Kiska to fly out, she runs into the door frame. 

This is something Ill have to fix. Probably just a matter of adjusting the starting position of the Sovereign.

UPDATE: I've fixed the issue by adding a few lines of scripting to the E3M1 file that disables collisions between the Player and the Starbase during this particular undocking sequence. The collisions are re-enabled again once you leave the base.
I have no idea how this problem cropped up when it wasn't there during my initial play test of the story... but it will be fixed for the next version of the BC Remastered Project.

Hmmm, when firing up BC remastered for the first time, the resolution expanded beyond the display borders. So I edited options.cfg for 1600x900 and fullscreen in notepad++. But the game will crash and I get a D3D render creation error. If I don't run it in fullscreen, the videos are very small and the game is boxed to one corner of my display. Stock BC runs normally in fullscreen at 1024x768

Editing the Options.cfg file manually typically corrupts it and leads to the error. As for the 1600x900 problem, I did not include support for that resolution. It was tricky enough to get 1920x1080 to work, but achieving that kinda messed up a lot of the other stock resolutions. I'm not sure why, but its on my list of things to try and fix. I just assumed most people used at least a 1920x1080 display by now....

[vonfrank]

Upon further testing of the resolution issue, it seems that manually typing a resolution in the options.cfg file DOES work IF your "Display Width" is at least 1601 pixels. Essentially the width has to be at least 1 pixel larger than BC's stock largest resolution of 1600x1200. If it is equal to or less than 1600 pixels, the game engine assumes the closest built in res and overrides your input. However, if you want a custom width to work without quickbattle crashing, you need to modify the WeaponsDisplay.py file to accept your new desired width.

For "Display Height", modifications to the in-game menus and fonts for the purpose of this mod mean that anything equal or less than 768 pixels will cause a crash. BUT, 769 pixels works just fine, meaning only 1 line of pixels is cut off form a 768 screen.

So from what I can tell, any resolution between the following values will work:

WIDTH: From 1601 to 2048 are acceptable and work as long as the "WeaponsDisplay.py" file is modified accordingly.
HEIGHT: From 769 to 2048 are acceptable.

So users with 1600x900 displays can use 1601x900 as their custom resolution after modifying the "WeaponsDisplay.py" file to accept 1601 resolutions. And any other resolution within the above ranges can be adjusted accordingly as well.

I've tested this on stock BC as well as my mod and the same rules apply.

[Wintersfrost]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. My new laptop arrives tomorrow which I believe is 1080p. So I won't have to fiddle with the resolution on this laptop with 1600x900. Hopefully, it will work fine on the new 1080p laptop.

There is also a video here of resolutions that work with Bridge Commander. The uploader went through many different resolutions. The final resolution in his video works with width 1280 and height 720 in full screen,  but the ships are scrunched up. Maybe this will help narrow things down.

Bridge Commander Widescreen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n5rlp4sq_w

[Wintersfrost]

Runs fine now on new laptop with 1080p. No problems. But I have a couple of questions. It's been a while since I've played Bridge Commander, and my memory is a bit foggy.

How can I disable the intro movie and logos? I was also wondering who made the Sydney-class. I made a model request for it ages ago, but never saw it released. I was surprised to see it in game. Is it available for download as a stand alone ship? For planets, are there better planet textures? They all look like moons. I remember Artus 3 being like Earth.

[King Class Scout]

there are always new planet textures available.  there were even a couple people working on a project to uprez and clean the stocker textures at one point (it turns out the stock textures are damn nice one they're depixelated), but projects have been abandoned and people have disappeared.
planetary textures and a separate Sidney may now be impossible to find.  many mods have disappeared after the restart of mod archives due to them not being claimed by their original authors, and have been either deleted or locked out of availability.  a lot of mods will only be available from people's personal archives (my own included, as I saved almost everything I've downloaded), or the linked Dropbox here at the forums.