A huge overhaul is underway with the Federation Database. The new module will consist of everything we can think of... That's a lot of stuff. It truely is a monumental but highly rewarding task.
The first image to the left is a very famous cartograph of the Alpha Quadrant, the home of the United Federation of Planets.The image to the right is a database file containing information pertaining to the Akira class starship, one of my favorite classes. There will be a file on every single starship class ever seen in Star Trek, every shuttle type, every escape pod design. Needless to say, it's gonna be huge. We won't be adding fan made stuff though but we may add selected noncanon ships like the Valiant class as well as ships from certain games like Activision's Falcon class (Romulan). We'll also use commonly accepted noncanon names for ships with no official name (where no tech manual gives it a name), like the Venture class scout seen in Star Trek: Insurrection.
The third image is something Stefan and I both worked on. He wanted to add this image since it has a ton of details.
Now, onto the really cool part...
A new, bigger Federation musical database. I know that you've all Googled a particular tune you heard in Star Trek, from Vivaldi to Sousa (pictured, right). Why not have it all in one app—available whenever? This will also include timeless Trek-unique pieces such as the already included Inner Light (but improved score). Federation Anthem? You got it!
There's only one minor problem... all the music (and the recording) must be either in the public domain or fall under a Creative Commons license. It's a minor problem, but it's one we have to respect. Having said that, I've found a ton of public domain works and I, myself, play the piano... so you'll probably be hearing more of my hammering on the black and whites.On a quick side note, yes this database will be big. So it will not come with the main installer, but as an addon installer (much like the ever delayed Drydock plugins).
Wow! I can't wait! Have you considered making a prerelease available?
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice, but there's a lot of work to do on it and by the time we have anything working, we'd be releasing it anyway. Version 6.3 is scheduled for release on April 5. We still have loads to plan out, such as file structures and working on some more backend stuff.
DeleteYour program is well designed. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
ReplyDeleteHere’s an idea you may like, or not. LOL
What about a music type (Windows media or iTunes) and path (C:\Users\USERNAME\Music\) in the launch pad that allows the user to play their music as well.
We are working on implementing a basic user set media player, but "working on" and actual "implimantation" are very different things... it'll be a while yet :D
Deletehttps://soundcloud.com/twobob
ReplyDeleteI happen to know that guy quite well. Being him and all.
I feel he could certainly muster up an ambient ditty or two..
Well, basically I can probably make anything you would need.
Feel free to get in touch.
Twobob.
A wonderful feature, apart including some redistributable music from the big Jamendo collection, might be keeping the audio database structure "open" enough for people to play their existing audio files by linking/importing them in sort of a playlist, *if* technically possibile.
ReplyDeleteUsing the LCARS style as a good-looking display for real-world data of any other kind is a task currently accomplished by Bill Morris and his team with the LCARS24 project, written in C language for good ol' DOS and still available on Sourceforge. It can be set to a blue (VOY/Nemesis) color scheme and can, therefore, be a good companion aside LCARS47 computers in a Trekkie/Trekker basement, especially because it allows to recycle otherwise underpowered computers.
Apart a few amusement applications (it starts as an alarm clock), a file manager(!) and a couple of integrated text editors, they have implemented from scratch some programmable graphic rendering with a markup language called SFML, did a bunch of MSD schemas with it (both Star Trek and actual data like the MIR station, the Orbiter shuttle and the Apollo), and allowed the plotting of line graphs and histograms (with provided examples).
That was C language, allowing you to program whatever you want by sheer definition. I'm completely unaware of the capabilities of Flash, but for sure having LCARS47 "open" to the display of more user data, not just text and images like in the roster but actual raw data like a nice rendering of CSV contents (tabular shape; SQLite would be heavens), not to mention a little graphing, would be a big leap in the direction of using LCARS47 as a (very very nice) presentation tool, too. Which probably was *NOT* what you meant in the beginning (as from the introductory file within Prolixus), but the only other application capable to do so still runs on DOS (or DOSbox, also suitable for penguins). :-D
Back to text files, in the LCARS24 project were included the (known) Ferengi ROAs and the original text written by Roddenberry for the TOS intro, eventually revised before the pilots production. A set of remarkable facts, ordered by calendar date, seems to have been included only to remember that real-world data might be accessed from anywhere. In the hypothesis of growing up that set of files, one would use, the same way, other public-domain data like a full list of the U.S. Postal Codes, international dialup prefixes and ephemerid astronomical data, only to have them therein.
Probably a public call for freely available data to include in the LCARS47 database, if ever issued to the users, would have you buried under several Gigabytes of whatever already is under the sun, whether of Trek interest or not. My first thoughts about such contents would be the CIA Factbook, a humongous amount of metadata from the RPM packages of a pretty high number of Linux distros, and the CVE database; and do not forget the Gutenberg (and national counterparts, like the italian Manuzio) Project, as everybody know Starfleet personnel used to read classic (e-)books in their spare time. For sure, everyone has "favorite" data to "want" displayed in a LCARS style, no matter what they are.
So. the consequent question becomes: "how much" can we (the users) add without bothering you?
Is that just an impression, or the Database Encyclopedia could become a hot topic in the future of LCARS47? The more it will be open for user customization, the greater will probably be the resulting effort.
Meanwhile: thanks, to you and the whole LCARS47 team, for the results already achieved. Someone had to, really. Thanks, again, for anything to come in the future.
Sayonara.