The Star Trek Armada II Upgrade Project aims to increase the graphical quality of Armada II without making the game incompatible with other people running "normal" versions of A2.

This entire project started with me browsing around my computer. I came across my A2 folder and I was looking around inside the folders. I came across the textures folder and had a peep inside. A brainwave suddenly hit me and I changed the color of the welding beam in Photoshop. I then rushed into a internet game to see if my theory was right.

It worked. In an internet game I had a bright red welding beam instead of a blue one. The point of this was that I could change any texture without making my game incompatible with everyone else's. My next target was the Federations Photon torpedoes, I remade them into something that looked more like a photon than a giant orange blob. It was starting to dawn on me that I was onto something.

After some months had passed I had a small group of very interested people and I put up the first version of this website to help distrubute the first version of the project. At this point the download size was less than half a megabyte and it had been downloaded a couple of hundred times.

With all the fun we were having changing graphics left right and centre it was only a matter of time before the modding community woke up to the fact that there was a pack of high quality weapon textures turning up. A few people from the modding community stumbled across my website and started trying to persuade me to put them up on Armada II files. The sheer annoyance factor of people asking me to add the upgrade project to A2files is the sole reason it was added, early in January 2006.

After a glowing review version 1.2.1 had a hundred downloads (in under 24hours!) A month later I was surprised to see a count over a thousand, and the upgrade project stuck firmly in the top ten downloads. To fast foward to today, the various releases has been downloaded over twenty thousand times and the website has changed beyond recognition to when it was launched, almost three years ago.