No image this time. I am doing some more work over of the tutorial mission right now, tweaking and refining some dialogues and scripted behavior. I decided to re-color the fighter crafts by making them less dull in the same fashion as the merchant vessels are. I can’t remember why I made them so different from the rest of the fleet in means of color, but I think that the fighters look better now.
Cheers lo-tekk

Star Chasm is not dead. We are still working; in the moment at slow pace because of summer holidays. And this years summer hits us pretty hard with high temperatures we are not really used to. Beside of the whining, we are still reworking the missions we have so far, change the look of a few commodities, model some new ships. I have changed the main menu background scene to show traffic coming through a jump node and we changed the mission selection screen to a sort of station BBS, where mission proposals and local news and stories are mixed together. I promise, I try to write relevant news updates more often.

Nothing new for the ordinary earthling, but a great improvement for the Star Chasm pilots: radar is available as standard technology built into every vessel. With a quick view the pilot is able to recognize relative position, distance and attitude of surrounding contacts.

This new technology will become available very soonish throughout the usual sources.

After receiving some feedback we decided to redesign the dialogue ui. The story dialogues are now centered within the screen obstructing the view, so the player will now focus his attention more on the text. I added some animation to the ui to make the look a little bit more interesting.

Currently I think about a radar like feature that shows ships surrounding the player.

Hi folks, I just received this alien transmission with my satellite TV dish:

—Begin Transmission—

Dear Earthlings,

the Xorix Overmind, Alturb III, extends a welcoming hand to the inhabitants of earth in form of an invasion fleet… just kidding. We have no intention of using vast economic resources to build an invasion fleet that, by the time it reaches earth, will be completely outdated. Instead our great Xorix Overmind sends you peaceful greetings and the Alpha demo of the space adventure “Star Chasm”.
In game you will be a free trader flying through a 2,5D environment trying to make a buck by free trading, flying generic mission and succeeding in several scripted story missions. The game features a storyline in which course you earthlings will come to admire the sheer awesomeness of our Overmind Alturb III and his peaceful ambitions.

Your in-game space ship can be equipped with various weapons as well as you can equip your in-game avatar with various space ships. With your ship you will encounter friendly characters as well as unfriendly ones (which you will probably have to shoot – but remember its all in the name of interstellar peace!). There will be dozens of star systems to explore which will feature space stations, asteroid fields and the already mentioned friendly and unfriendly characters.
Our Overmind, in his tremendous wisdom, has decided to give you earthlings the power of control through the mouse and the keyboard.
If you, after playing the game, feel the urgent need to obey orders from our insanely incredible Overmind Alturb III, please be assured that this is a perfectly normal side effect and nothing to worry about.

You can have a first glimpse of “Star Chasm” here:
http://www.lo-tekk.de/files/starchasm_demo_681_setup.exe

—End Transmission—

This is a first alpha work in progress release of the demo, so be patient with us. Despite of this I encourage all, that are interested to share their thoughts and opinions regarding this game demo. You may also register with the forum at http://www.lo-tekk.de/forum .

Thank you and have a nice day.

——————————————————
Some requirements for those who need this information:

- WinXP/Vista/Win 7
- 2 GHz CPU
- 50 MB of harddrive space
- 64 MB RAM
- 64 MB Directx7 compatible graphics adapter

As the title suggests, we are working on releasing the first alpha of Star Chasm. As far as i can see now, there are three missions ( or should i say quests ?) playable. The preview is almost complete gameplay-wise, but lacks in the content and unexpected bugs and glitches may arise.
I will made a further post once the preview is available for download.

I decided to change the font. The new font is a monospaced one. Some would say this is a step backwards, but we think it looks better now with increased readability. Furthermore we are reworking mission descriptions and dialogues. Maybe it’s time to think about a sneak peek version sort of ? Not yet.

This is the second attempt for the chemical goods. Looks much better than before.

Today i completed the reworking of the trade menu. It turned out to be a bit easier than i thought before. My team-mate is currently creating the item-descriptions.