Perpetual transfers Star Trek Online assets

Warcry reports that as of today, Perpetual Entertainment – or P2 Entertainment - has transferred control of the Star Trek Online MMO to a non-disclosed “bay area developer”. Bummer. While I didn’t see that one coming, judging by the recent development progress reports on the game, it was clear that not everything was running smooth at P2.

In October 2007, the studio has put his other MMO title Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising on indefinite hold and latest issues of the STO DevLog didn’t look to promising either – consisting primarily of chitchat but lacking substantial information about the game. On October 10, 2007, Perpetual Entertainment Inc. transferred ownership of all its assets to Perpetual LLC, for liquidation and distribution of liquidation proceeds to creditors of Perpetual.

According to Warcry, only the game’s license and content (such as artwork and models, one presumes) were transferred but not the code. If the code was not handed over because there is no substantial or usable code base or because of legal reasons – we don’t know at this point. But what’s for sure is that the new development team has to start from scratch.

Being a developer myself I know that sometimes it’s just better to start over with a clean slate than continuing to beat a dead horse. And considering that until today, the only proof of existence of a game behind the “Star Trek Online” name is a single character screenshot released a couple weeks ago, the new development team might share that opinion.

Related story.

Update: Jester at w00tstudios claims that “thanks to anonymous sources that Cryptic Studios has aquired the license for Star Trek Online.” Thanks Massively.

Tags: License, Perpetual Entertainment, Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online Devlog Entry 5.0

Entry 5.0 - “Interactions in Action”
Stardate 61390.2 (December 4th, 2007)

Hola, STO fans, and welcome back to the DevLog! There’s something darned cool lurking in this entry, so let’s skip the endearingly goofy banter and get right to it…

Over the past few DevLogs we’ve primarily focused on a sampling of the low-level processes of STO development, taking a peek at terrain generation, object design, and version testing, among other things.

Today we’d like to seriously shift gears, and start revealing a little bit about the actual game systems themselves. We’ll start with a deceptively simple game mechanic that’s deucedly difficult to nail down: the Interaction System.

What’s the Interaction System you ask? In a nutshell, the Interaction System controls every non-combat, player-to-NPC interaction in the game …

Read the rest of the article …

Tags: DevLog, Star Trek Online