The Magic of Bridge Commander

[@bensmith1689]

This was the first game I ever found an easter egg in. I have not seen it mentioned anywhere but, IIRC, in the mission where you are supposed to flee from 4 Cardassian ships, if you instead fight them all and destroy them, you will get a message congratulating you, as well as a bunch of Quantum torpedoes. It is a hard fight though!

[@azordash_games]

I know that fight well! I always warped away. It certainly would be tough, but I would have loved some Quantum torpedoes!

[@georgeallison3264]

Nice find but what's the easter egg?

[@bensmith1689]

@@georgeallison3264 you get a little message upon doing it.

[@MBKill3rCat]

I fondly remember playing Bridge Commander as a child on an old Windows Vista laptop, I'd downloaded a big collection of pirated Star Trek games from god-knows-where, with Birth of the Federation, Armada, Armada 2, Elite Force, Elite Force 2, and Bridge Commander. As an adult, I still go back to enjoy (legitimate copies of) these games even now.

[@Chocomint_Queen]

"Using stylized graphics instead of photorealism was a good choice" "But also how come the characters don't look better than the digitized photo from Final Unity?"

[@Warmaker01]

This game was one of the very few Star Trek games where you're seeing the ships behave just like the shows and movies. In Star Trek Online, the gameplay changed over time to the point that they start flying like X-Wings instead of a Star Trek ship. Even Klingon Academy the ships behaved more like fighters. Starfleet Command series, especially the first two games, were very serious tactical games but there was no 3d movement. I do remember getting frustrated at the Romulan attack segment that you mentioned. Fun times.

[@Optimusx1]

I would recommend playing this game with the Bridge Commander Legacy Mod. It updates the graphics without changing the combat mechanics.

[@Majvfb]

I remember playing this game as a kid! Or rather trying to play it. I never got very far and got frustrated. Very nostalgic.

[@gemmareid7929]

You mention the voice actors seeming very comfortable with the trek universe, and that may be because some of them are experienced. Larsen is voiced by Martha Hackett who was Seska on Voyager and Miguel is played by Johnathan del Arco who was Hugh in TNG. Bridge Commander is a very fun game, and i love how it still receives new content and support from fans. I recommend the channel RetroBadgerGaming, he shows off some of the new ships and out them through their paces in the combat simulator.

[@GreystarSTBC]

yeah, this game is pretty fun to mod, it allows for much versatility, but because it runs off of such an old engine, models have to be pretty low poly in order to work inside the game. If its above a certain tri or vert limit, it wont load model pieces and might just crash the game (then again, what doesn't crash BC when you have KM active anyways). Some models might be in the limit, but the game doesn't like them anyways and decides it either wants to crash or not let them vox correctly. The engine is VERY picky about models sadly. Another thing is that the models have to be in an extremely precise form of .Nif object, to which certain properties such as texture animation and mesh transparency through use of texture alpha nodes are applied. This model has to be loaded and scripted with certain name attributes to read the baked in glow textures and the specular maps. Then the hardpoints have to be written and placed on certain points on the ship with beam textures and pulse scripts added into the hardpoint as you go. The ship must also be told where to appear in the menus and what technologies or immunities it should implement onto the ship to negate or add other scripts. You can also get a bit creative and generate custom race scripts to import and add custom warp sounds as well as a custom cloak autoload to add custom cloaking. Each projectile script is also its own individual entity in game as well which is what leads to some crashes when too many exist in the same simulation. You have to program every attribute of a projectile and plug in textures you want it to use. Unfortunately, the texture plugins are a bit busted in the current KM mod, but we work with what we can get. Now I'm no master scripter, but there are a few people in our communities that can confidently create and debug techs and some of these people are working on two modern projects for BC. The first, BC REP is re-writing most of the game to allow for more versatility with techs in many ways such as custom shield textures, techs and so on. For that one, the scripting will be much simpler to avoid conflicts, but with more overall techs and abilities. This allows for more without overlapping conflicts. The second one is known as BCMM. It is the successor total conversion mod to KM with debugged scripting and more options while also keeping all the original dependencies and techs to allow for an easy transition. Honestly i cant say I'm excited enough. What's even funnier is that BC was never even finished. The original plan was to finish it, then release it, which would've led it to be far more difficult to mod, but overall more stable. The creators of BC wanted to rush the production to try to get it out for Christmas, but that ultimately failed. They then tried to release it ASAP, which led to it being incomplete for its initial release with plans to finalize it and get out a full version as an update, but the project was just never returned to after that. Another thing unfortunately is that we cannot crack the .exe source code of the game, so we are stuck with what we have sadly, though someone did once make a 4 gig patch for it, so maybe somewhere out there the source code exists. Anyways, cheers and thanks for the video!

[@theramblingmillennial3770]

NIF 3.1... just shy of a NIF version capable of so much more.

[@gbrading]

Still my fave Star Trek game! Even with Commander Larsen nagging you all the time. A remaster/remake would be so good, with modern graphics and gameplay improvements. The space combat in Star Trek Online is heavily inspired by Bridge Commander.

[@Tuskin38]

yess, I was waiting for you to get here. I was in (though not a modder myself) during the height of the modding scene. If you want to see what that looked like, find the Kobayashi Maru mod pack, that came out in IMO the height of high quality addons. High quality addons kept coming out after, but I feel nothing has peaked since then. Just seems to be mostly model ports these days. A lot of the actors in the game have also played characters in the shows. Brex's actor played an unrelated Bolian in DS9, your XO is Seska from Voyager, and also played a Romulan in DS9. Rom's actor from DS9 plays a handful of characters.

[@Ryoku1]

Several of the actors had been on Star Trek before with the Commander being Seska on Voyager. Also Start Trek Bridge Crew non-vr is very much the same game and obviously intended for VR. It gave a friend of mine and I the same VR nausea that VR games give me. ST Online has some really good ship combat as you mentioned with the added benefit of customization. But yeah this is one of the games that I'm surprised never had any imitators and is beloved. There are only a few Star Trek games besides this that stick in my memory: Unity I had forgotten about until I saw videos on recently Birth of the Federation I get the itch to go back to every few years but never do Star Trek Borg and Start Trek Klingon were essentially episodes of Star Trek in full live action (Including Q!) that I adored until they stopped being supported in modern Windows.

[@brian1056]

Did you know if you disable the Romulan Warbird using a shuttle you can fly through the middle of it….. the voice of someone who spent way too long with the game to find that out.

[@azordash_games]

Wow, that’s dedication 😀

[@megavolt67]

3:34 That character (Felix, was it?) looks so much like Dwayne Johnson/The Rock. And he even did his sideburns exactly like that around 2001. Also, Admiral Liu reminds me of Michelle Yeoh.

[@BrianD0313]

4:40 - I wish you'd explain a few examples of this. I really enjoyed this game a lot. To this day it's still probably one of the best space combat sims out there. I like how if you're a big enough dick, you get court marshaled :P On that note, I really hated the XO; she was soooo annoying and bossy. This game (along with the Elite Forces) needs a Remaster and re-release on Steam. It would also be nice if we could get a sequel to this game.

[@TAURON85]

Have you done videos of the FPS games, Klingon Honour Guard and the two Elite Force games?

[@Jan_Strzelecki]

I _hated_ Larsen _so_ much. Most of the time, she'd cut into captain's competencies, acting as if _she_ was in command 😑

[@theguydan006]

Star trek legacy too.. not that I would recommend that

[@azordash_games]

Oh I’ve never actually played it… for some reason I thought it was an RTS :/ Might have to check it out…

[@Tuskin38]

it's fun with mods on PC, but yeah outside of the gimmick of having all the captains back, it's pretty boring by default.

[@AshesToVices]

Legacy is a shittier version of bridge commander without the bridges