Star Trek Online official site come up with a holiday story and a brief summary of the latest happenings with the STO development team.

Holiday Story:

Greetings, fellow Trekkers, -ies, -ites, and -ezians!

I¡®m Mike Stemmle, Glen¡®s new "story lead" on Star Trek Online. Some of you may recognize my name from my fourteen-year tenure at LucasArts, where I poured blood, sweat, tears, and other various bodily fluids into games like Sam and Max Hit the Road, Star Wars: Jedi Outcast, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. If you recognize my name from Afterlife, then you have my sincerest apologies.

These days, Perpetual is paying me actual real American money to sit at a desk bouncing story ideas off of Glen¡®s head until he sees something he likes. Speaking as a lifelong Trek fan raised in an extended family of Trek fans, I have to say this gig is sweeter than a sack full of jumja sticks.

But enough about me and my fantastically lucky life.?? More...

Development Update:

Here¡®s a brief summary of the latest happenings within the STO development team:
The engineering and art teams have been working together to see how close we can get to photo-realistic, real time ship interior renders. They¡®ve started with the TNG era Galaxy class since it is so iconic and also happens to be the setting for at least one major hub. For this particular exercise, they modeling and rendering a hallway, turbolift, and the observation lounge and rendering it all in real-time with next-generation lighting & material effects. Their results are stunning. Once we¡®ve completed look development for our other two environment types (space & ground), we¡®ll release some screenshots - figure sometime before summer...

We have our first character modeled, which is a female Vulcan. Though we¡®re not ready to have a character walking around in the game yet, we went ahead and built her so that we¡®d have at least a static character to pose in our interiors so we could better judge proportions and evaluate how to render characters within our environment. The new uniforms look even better in 3D.???? More...