Location: About USy

About USy

Intro

Univeral Shipyards (USy) has for over 4 years been an important site for showcasing new graphics for the game Space Empires IV (SE4) produced by Malfador Machinations. The main content are Shipsets, or Racestyles - a set of graphics representing an alien race or empire that can be downloaded and added to games of SE4.

Shipsets add huge depth to a game, personalising a great deal of the in-game graphics. At USy you can find many custom shipsets designed either by myself or by otehr artists from the SE community.

The Founder

Contact: johnbeech@mkv25.net
or markis.brachel@ntlworld.com

Yoshi, my Icon John Beech aka Markavian

I'm the founder, maintainer, developer, shipset designer, news poster and all round practical guy. USy has been a publishing tool for my 3D space ship art for a long time. Originally I began to collect together many different shipsets from all artists, but this soon became difficult to maintain as multiple versions of SE4 began to make shipset AI obselete. Of course, graphics are timeless, but the downloads would not run without suitable AI.

The past few years have seen a substantial dip in interest. Rise of the NeoStandard image has meant races are now shipping with more then the standard set of graphics to support various mod, something I've decided not to get involved with.

A Big Thank you

Thanks goes to the people who have helped me out in the past with USy.

Thanks to Christopher Bok for helping me out with HTML, javascript and PHP stuff in the early days.

. . . and also, many thanks to all the artists and programmers who have worked on racestyles/ai/fleets/shipsets and posted some very cool stuff to me so I could stick it on the site. Without them, I'm sure USy would never have reached the point where it is today.

mkv25.net