Back in 2001 (yes, the date was an intentional pun), I worked for a company named Muckyfoot Productions, and we made a game called StarTopia. I joined the project about a year before it shipped (it had already been in development for about two years at that stage) and took over the graphics engine. It turned out to be a delightful game where you ran your own space station and built facilities, hired aliens and fought battles. Its template was very much a cross between Bullfrog's "Theme Hospital" and "Dungeon Keeper", since many of the people who worked on StarTopia previously worked on both those games, and indeed went on to make Lionhead's "The Movies".
Muckyfoot is now no more, and I have moved on to other places, but you can view various pages about StarTopia at the WayBack Machine's archive (June 10th 2003 is a fairly good date to start with).
There are also some good fan-sites out there, including what is probably the hub of them all - StarTopia Post and for discussion, the Eidos forums.
The latest recommended patch is the 1.01 patch, and once you've installed that you should probably grab the latest CardID.tom file and copy that over the one that's already installed. These days I don't have time to test all the new graphics cards out there, so if you have a newish graphics card, have a look for the "yourgfxcard.txt" file and if it says something like "Didn't recognise this card. Please send this file to webmaster@muckyfoot.com" - well, don't do that, because Muckyfoot doesn't exist any more, instead send it to me mygfxcardisleet@eelpi.gotdns.org and I'll give you a nice new CardID.tom file which should make your game run even smoother.
Anyway, recently I wanted to do some research into shadowbuffers - a way of rendering realistic shadows (see the GDC 2004 paper here). And while most shadowing techniques look fine in small demos, they have a habit of not working too well when people put them in real, working games. So I thought I should put them into a real game to prove they work. The game I knew best was StarTopia. And thus, a new StarTopia "patch" was born.
So, you'll obviously need to have the game installed. You'll also need to have the 1.01 patch installed, as that fixed a lot of silly bugs. And then you need to download the HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL 1.02 patch and install that. I'm sorry the 1.02 patch isn't a clever executable and everything - but if you read the readme file in it, I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Please please please remember to keep the old copies of your files if you actually want to play the game - did I mention this version is HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL?
You will also need a fairly meaty machine to run with shadows on. Annoyingly, StarTopia is really badly designed for doing these shadows, and it spends a lot of its time doing daft things like re-animating each character multiple time a frame, so it's quite slow. So if you actually want to play the game, I recommend switching shadows off again! But fixing that would take more time than I really have to spend on a side-project.
Have fun - here's some pictures of the shadows in action.
TomF