Gaming Bullets

• Activision has released the cover art for Star Trek: Elite Force II, which is expected to hit stores this June. The artwork is available at both StarTrek.com and Ritualistic.com.

• Elite Force II animator Juan Martinez has described the lip-synching technology used in the game at Ritualistic. "We actually have two kinds of lip sync systems. Both which work with pre-generated files. The secondary characters use a volume-based system that is pretty easy to set up. One mouth morph target that opens and closes the mouth based on the volume of the MP3 dialog file. The results here are pretty good, and the best thing is the volume files are auto-magically batch generated." Read more from Martinez here.

• Continuing the Elite Force II news emanating from Ritualistic, character artist Brian Jones has spoken about the upcoming sequel's character models. "The characters in EF2 range from 1500 to 2500 polygons. They use a minimum of a 512x512 pixel texture for the body and a 256x256 pixel texture for the head (Some characters have multiple textures of various sizes in addition to this minimum spec.)" Jones gones into more detail in this post.

• A new patch for Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates is available in this post at Taldren's forums. Thanks to Blue's News for this!

• Trek CCG designer Evan Lorentz talks about the upcoming "Energize" expanison pack at Decipher. Here's an excerpt from the article:

  "This expansion is focused on developing the five affiliations introduced in the base set and expanding their gameplay possibilities with new affiliation-specific themes. For example, the base set developed a Resistance theme for the Bajorans, while Energize concentrates more on religious-themed cards. And we'll see more separation between the different Federation 'subsets,' with a teamwork/cooperation motif for the next Generation and more of the darker side of Deep Space Nine."

  The complete interview is available here.

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