The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hey guys, if anyone remembers my previous post about the Earthling nukes, they'll probably recall I have an affinity for the pokey little Cruiser.  There's no ship I'd rather take on a Drednaught in, seriously.  Anyway, I beleve that if the Earthling had one unit higher top speed, and possibly one unit faster recharge, it'd be utterly invincible, or at least one of the top ships.  Seriously.  I'd like to try this out, and create a mod where the Earthling's engines are one unit faster.  Unfortunately, I have absolutely no bleeping idea how to do this.  The FAQs aren't really that informative--shouldn't this be a relatively easy operation?  Which file should I be modifying in the Earthling folder?  Thanks in advance.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the content files that pertain to ship variables. If you really want to do this, I suggest that you tweak the values in the source, then compile it yourself.

From uqm-0.3-source\src\sc2code\ships\human\human.c

Set THRUST_WAIT to 3 (or should we be bothering with MAX_THRUST or THRUST_INCREMENT?) and TURN_WAIT to 0, and that should cover it.

On another note, I realize that editing the content files might be desirable for mods, but what about chunks of the source such as this? Is it feasable to have a similar system for source mods?

EDIT: Alternatively, if you don't have a compiler or know how to use one, you could try locating these values in the executable with a hex editor. Though I imagine this process would probably be a lot more involved and not entirely worth effort since the source is availible, for a reasonable sum of Credits.

If one wanted a melee trainer, it shouldn't be hard to do.  Actually, I came across one for the original SC2, that would let you change these values (mostly - there's some unwritten rules you need to follow).

It's fun to play with something like this for a while, but it does get boring quick...my thing was to make different ships that were totally invincible to the other ships, and then have those to play against.

Some ships you can do lots to by changing those values, and others you can't improve (or upgrade) upon much without tweaking the source.

The Earthling Cruiser is one you can make totally invincible.   Increase the recharge rate up to the Chmmr's, then reduce the time between firings and energy per shot, and you'd get something similar to Star Trek, and almost invincible...the point defense acts like the phasers, and you can let loose multiple nukes at once by doing this.  Of course, up the speed and you get something nasty to fight.

Or with something like this, something fun was always to give the Orz lots of crew and then reduce the "rate of fire" on the special...was always fun to get in front of a ship and let 8 marines loose at once with no chance of the opponent not seeing all of them.  Of course you can always turn down the energy usage on the cannon and make it rapid fire...

There's always loads of fun to be had with certain ships...of course, a ship like the Melnorme could only be improved much by decreasing the time to RED on the ball.   Although, rapid fire confusion ray is another fun mod you could do changing these values.

Maybe someone could come up with an editor like I'm describing?

Patching these values in memory is feasible, but I don't have the foggiest how to do it. I imagine if a spec sheet of the exe (or equivalent for other OSes) were put up, someone with the proper knowlege could make use of it and produce such a program.

It'd take looking at the source to figure out the type of variable and the value and then hexedit search the EXE to find numbers like that, tweak them, and then see what changes and taking good notes at which byte # you find that value.

It'd be tedious work initially but easily programmed once the notes were completed.

what about modifying shp files and using them in the addon directory?

The problem with this approach is that UQM changes all the time, and that it can be compiled in so many ways. Any editing method based on editing the UQM binary is probably only going to work with one specific binary (e.g. UQM 0.3 for Windows, official release). In other words, you'd have to look for the right offsets every time you update UQM, so CVS users can probably just forget about this approach.

The only really flexible approach to editing ships is to edit the source code. For basic editing such as tweaking numeric parameter values, reading the values from a separate file (e.g. a SHP file) should suffice.

Yeah, just don't get the one piloted by Captain Kirk...  ;D

It would be neat to have a mod with all the ships souped up to insane levels...

In the PC version of SC2 you could edit the .shp files. There was one for each ship, the cruiser was "human.shp." There are a few editors on TPNF, but none seem to work. I'm not even sure if UQM actually uses these files, but they are in the content.zip.

In theory, if they are still used, you should be able to extract them, edit the files needed and re-insert the editted file back into the zip file.

Well, if they're all insane, then can they all be said to be balanced again?

id have to say the ships are good the way they are. maybe make the chmmrs zap-zats less good so u could beat it by just shooting madly

I think the point is what it would look like, two insanely souped up ships going at it. :p

Luckily it is not. The human cruiser is what i always expected and supposed it would be: In combat a high turning rate, a point defense and a strong powerful rocket, which can easily be tricked or get rid of. It just seems to fit to humankind the way i feel it. The only thing which seems a little wrong is the recharge rate for the nukes. I thought the nukes should be able to blast off a lot faster (like 8 in a row, then a long pause to recharge). Even submarines can lauch torpedoes faster than that cruiser.
And the batteryusage seems to high for a launch. The nuke as an own propulsion system after all and does not seem like being slingshot out of the cruiser (which would slow the cruiser down a bit).
Just my two eurocents...

If you've ever played timewarp, it show some modified cruisers which are very interesting...

Yes i know Timewarp and i actually play it more than SC Melee. I like the challenge of fighting 2 opponents in the same team. The AI is good, but sometimes with several ships it just makes some stupid faults, faults humans would do. That's what i like about it. And the variety of ships. Although i always disable the ship Gaia. I just hate it when the planet (not gaia) starts flying around like crazy.

And the starbases are funny too... Especially when you use the Ostoks special near the planet... ;)

It's very easy to change the ship values in TimeWarp. You just edit the right ini file.

Hmm, for some reason, Timewarp won't let me play as Human or 'Synth ships.  ??? Wrong forum to ask about this, but still.  :P

bigfoot256, the following forum has been used the most for TW tech support, so that's become its unofficial role.  If you post something there, either myself, youBastrd! or GeonmanNL will see it fairly quickly (I think we're the three programmers who are present the most lately).
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~starcontrol/boards/timewarp/

I've never heard about your problem, but I hope it's easier to fix than the problems I'm having getting UQM to run on non-standard architecture (square pegs, round holes; where's my hammer?).

For those who are curious:

MAX_THRUST is the ship's top speed.
[THRUST_INCREMENT / THRUST_WAIT] is the ship's acceleration.
THRUST_WAIT is the level of 'precision' of the ship's acceleration - a higher THRUST_WAIT means you have less fine-control over the ship's rate of acceleration [since acceleration comes less often]. In this case, a THRUST_WAIT of 4 and a THRUST_INCREMENT of 24 means the ship increases speed by 24 pixels every 4 frames, or 6 pixels per frame (on average) - although you only get a burst every 4 frames.

Similarly, ENERGY_WAIT is how long it takes for the batteries to recharge, and ENERGY_REGENERATION is how many 'dots' of battery you get when a recharge happens.

So what you probably want is to increase THRUST_INCREMENT by 1 (to 4), and drop ENERGY_WAIT by 1 (to 9).

Have fun!

(http://www.oap-sloth.co.uk/forum/images/smilies/ttidead.gif)

Not really, since you just resurrected it back to the top...

HALLELUJAH!

Check the dates and see Hentai resurrected it.

*Hits DJ with pillow and shouts HALLELUUUJAH at the top of his voice.

I don't care who resurrected it, as long as it lives. Oh yes, my precioussss...

EDIT: This is meant to be a friendly and fun post, and in no way whatsoever am I trying to argue your point DJ.

I remember when i was looking for sc2 clones i fould one where you could set have fleets to attack each other in a melee screen.
and in that clone i loved to set up battles to see which side would win. i set both sides to auto.
the funny thing is when you set a equal fleetin points of ur-quan vs earthling cruisers the cruisers would Slauter the ur-quan.  like there would be 10/14 earth cruisers left and 0/10 urquan ships. those numbers could be wrong.


but if you want to make earthling cruiser godlike the replace the point defence with a cloaking device. could you live with yourself if you had such a ship? forget the mark 1, use earthling cruisers and rule the galaxy.

Screw the cloaking device. Put in an Afterburner.

In my weird 'fury' mod, I wound up making the Earthling Cruiser the most feared ship in the game just by providing a blast radius to its missiles - each missile was essentially a toned-down version of the Shofixti Glory Device, that did 8 damage at core and petered out to 1 damage at the edge. Then the missiles were given a 'proximity fuse' so they would detonate at their closest point of approach, if they could do damage. Fun, fun fun.

Any betas for the current version of uqm? (I have the beta for the older uqm...)

Nope, they're all still alphas :)

There haven't been any "official unofficial" releases to my knowledge; generally, we suggest that people who want to keep up with development as it progresses use SourceForge's CVS repository.  We try not to add anything to that unless we're pretty sure it works.

The only platform we directly support that can't do this trivially is Win32, but the only upgrade so far that would be worth an unofficial update build fixes a problem that only manifests under some versions of Linux, so we can just point them at CVS.

I talked about "uqm frenzy", not uqm.

No Frenzy release for awhile... I'm considering waiting until 1.0, but it all depends on how 0.4 looks.