The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

(http://home.deds.nl/~megagun/sc2/title.gif)
The Human Masters is a little addon I'm making, which changes the Human side (the side you're playing in the original UQM) into the Ur-Quan side.

So far, I've only changed the original Commander graphics and music (the mod, not the OGG yet).

I might change the ship graphics, and the in-game text, too.. Voices, well.. I'm not sure about that one yet..

You can get the current one (0.1) at http://home.deds.nl/~megagun/sc2/humanmasters.zip
just extract the zip to your default UQM folder, and then use UQMloader to load this addon..

Have fun, even though this doesn't change much... yet.. ^^

edit: after some.. err... thinking (god, that's hard!), I thought about renaming it to "The Earthling Masters"... Might do that later on (too lazy to change the title screen.. If the author of the original title screen spots this.. *HINT* *HINT*.. :P) Currently working on changing the dialogue.. Not THAT hard.. Just need to rename things carefully..

Is this just a silly joke or are you really doing this? And to what degree are you doing this?

Simply replacing the Commander graphics with Ur-Quan graphics and Cruisers with Dreadnoughts in the game seems to me like it would be an easy task. Rerecording the dialogues in Ur-Quan and human voices to switch them around would be an annoyingly difficult task. Actually *rewriting the game* so doing this makes *sense* and isn't just disconcertingly odd-looking would be a monumental task that would hardly be worth the effort (so what's the explanation for how/when/why humans started wandering around conquering everyone? Are the Kohr-Ah a separate race of humans? How has the history of the Sentient Milieu changed to explain the Ur-Quan's current status as a slave-shielded world?)

No offense, but I think you'd be better off spending your time doing something else.

It's just a little joke, yup.. :P But I AM making this.. Why? Well.. Why not? Not really spending THAT much time on it, though..

As I mentioned in the readme, the mod/addon is supposed to be played without the voice acting..

And besides, are there any more addons out there? I don't see one.. So it'd be a nice exercize to try and mod Sc2, and to check it's ability to mod anything well...

Kohr-Ah? Umm... well... errr... uuh.... don't know yet..
Also, I'm not planning to change the story.. Perhaps change something in the dialogue to change Human into Ur-Quan, which I am currently doing..

If the Ur-Quan were enslaved by the humans, then maybe the Kor-Ah
are the Ur-Quan brothers who are coming to save them. They defeat the
evil humans, but then their blood lust causes them to kill everything
else? Only the Ur-Quan Captain can bring them back from the brink of
insanity, by blowing up their prized battle station.

*Que theme music.*

So.. I've looked a bit around.. and found out that the most important conversation data, is in the source of the game itself... Great.....
Fiddling with the source seems to be nice, though... I might do something to the actual galaxy itself.. hmm... At least I can give it a whirl.. :P

(and, I found out that it's actually hard to mod the game without touching the source... That's too bad..)

I still don't totally get it. Are you just doing a search/replace for "Ur-Quan" and "human", or are you actually rewriting the story?

Who are the Kohr-Ah going to be, then? What details are you going to give for the cultural Ur-Quan landmarks the humans destroyed? Are the humans going to be completely asocial giant caterpillar things in the Melnorme's description of them?

Let me sum it up again..

*Ur-Quan and Humans will be switched. so now you plas AS the Ur-Quan againt the Humans.
*The story will probably NOT be rewritten. Why? Because that's not that easy. I'm currently just doing the human/ur-quan alliance/hierarchy mixups in the dialogues.

If, eventually, I come up with an easy way to rewrite the core of the story (that is: the mechanics behind it. It's easy to change the dialogue itself, though, because that's handled externally), I might change that. But for now, I'll just rewrite the in-game dialogue (so NOT it's structure)...

-Who are the Kohr-Ah going to be, then?
Not sure yet.. If I'm able to remove them from the source, and compile the source, I might remove them. If I'm not able to remove them, I might make them humans with slightly different ships, or something like that...

-What details are you going to give for the cultural Ur-Quan landmarks the humans destroyed?
Errm.. no idea.. Might just remove that part of the story, if I'm not able to come up with anything (unless anyone else knows something?)


-Are the humans going to be completely asocial giant caterpillar things in the Melnorme's description of them?
Naah.. I'll just rewrite that part, too. Not sure with what, though..

I think I know what got you confused: the whole rewriting the story..
With rewriting the story, I mean rewriting the actual TEXT of the story: the dialogues..
With restructuring and rewriting the story, I mean completely changing the communication trees (dialogues), AND their text. I'm not sure whether I'm going to be able to do that, though...

Well, no, my questions assumed you weren't actually going to change in-game events other than the dialogue. I'm just saying that there's more to rewriting the game text than running a search/replace for "human" and "Ur-Quan", unless you want Ur-Quan to have cities named Moscow and London, for example. This isn't a coding problem -- as you say, changing the text files is a piece of cake -- this is a story problem. Actually rewriting the story, even if *all* you do is change the dialogue text files, is a big task, unless all you do is change "human" to "Ur-Quan" and vice versa for the joke value.

I would humbly submit that the limited changes you're making will make the dialogue a big confusing mess and the story really inconsistent. I would also respectfully ask what's so cool about this idea, besides the five-second joke value of seeing the initial Ur-Quan drone speech coming out of Commander Hayes' mouth or hearing about the "Human Hierarchy". As you say, the structure of UQM's file handling is simple enough so that doing a "mod" like this isn't particularly interesting, any more than replacing the image of Hayes with a bitmap of Britney Spears would be.

I especially like how you're just going to compile the Kohr-Ah out of the game without particular thought for what that does to the plot or gameplay.

You know, I might totally flip out, and change the structure of the dialogues itself too... If I just get the hang of compiling the source, and editing it..

Also, just think of this as an experiment to see if it's possible at all to mod the game well...

Also, I might come up with stuff to add to it later on.. But I guess you're lucky; I'm not quite able to compile it.

Oh, and:

I didn't say I'm going to remove them or anything like that. I said "might"..

Possibly replace the Kohr-Ah with the Androsynth?  That'd be even better if you could do two things:

1)  Replace conversations in the game
2)  Get a graphic image for dialogue with them

It would definately be interesting to see them in-game.

Megagun: You have too much spare time. Give me some.  8)

As you say, the structure of UQM's file handling is simple enough so that doing a "mod" like this isn't particularly interesting, any more than replacing the image of Hayes with a bitmap of Britney Spears would be.

Please, Art, For all that is good and green in this world, DON'tT EVEN TALK ABOUT IT! =p

I'd replace the Kzer-Za with Britney, and the Kohr-Ah with Christina Aquilera- That'd really be two terrorizing froces in the galaxy. Then, just to give you a chance against these grim forces, I'd switch Hayes for Eminem. sure, he's a bastard. But he's our bastard.

Now all that remains is to figure out which three Spice Girls will replace the ZFP. I think it's pretty clear that the mask changing Ultrons could be played quite well by Michael Jackson. "Let me just put on my nose of sadness".

Heh.. :P

Okay.. not quite related to THM, but I figured out how to compile UQM now.. :)

The result? Two funmods!

Asteroid Melee and Hostile Hyperspace!
Asteroid Melee (http://home.deds.nl/~megagun/sc2/amelee.zip)
Hostile Hyperspace (http://home.deds.nl/~megagun/sc2/hhyper.zip)

Please read both text files, especially if you're not using Windows.
Asteroid melee, well.. I think you'd know what it's about: melee in an asteroid field :)

Hostile Hyperspace is a bit different. It comes with a savegame (for fun's sake, that is) and makes it so that all races have the center of their Sphere Of Influence set nearby sol. To play it, just enter Hyperspace (ooh! Blue!) and wait.. ^^

I'm not responsible for any PC crashes, escaping Fwiffo's or superb-Slylandro probes.

Gaha Luki, your post had me laughing.



I'd rather suggest Destiny's Child. They have only three members, and their hit number "I'm a survivor" would fit pretty well with the ZFP being nearby hostile Ur-quan and the like.

Anyways Megagun, I'm pretty much in agreement with others here. You might to try expanding on the story instead of just swapping the race names and graphics. I think if you could possibly edit the story, the idea could turn out pretty well. I also like the mentioned idea of the Kohr-Ah being the Androsynth. It would be better than just removing the Kohr-Ah frome the code, if you could find a usable graphic for them in-game.

I think I'll do that, now that I am able to compile UQM... :)
My initial thought about this WAS to change the story, though. But it's kind of harder than it seems, really... It would be nice to have things like this straightened up in upcoming UQM versions, like having the conversations completely handled with files, instead of how it's now (parts of it in the source itself)... Makes it easier to make mods, too...

If you could get your own forum, I'm sure there are those who would be more than willing to help with story and script.  I'm one of them.

Not funny at all :-/

I thought it was funnier than your avatar.

The androysn as the Kohr-Ah is a brilliant idea, but for the love of all that is good, leave SC2 completely removed from Pop =p

...cool idea! I'd love to chip in some script writing =)

and, um... I think it would be fun to blow up Christina Agulara... =(

Ok, You've got me with that one, if anyone deserves to be shot out of a cannon, its her =p

yea, about switching kohr-ah with andro, you might want to give them the same motives of the kohr-ah to the andro. like "teh omg human enslavers, and other aliens mus die B00M BL@/\/\ K00 P0W" and so on and so forth. :D