The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Has anyone here played Timewarp? If you have, what did you think?

The melee is ok, the game itself is coming along rather slowly in my mind (nothing personal). I like the fact that there can be many ships in one battle.

Lol, there can be twenty ships at the same time in a standard melee-arena.

I like the graphics, the new music is cool, not up to precursor standerd in my opinion, but its a nice change.
I think the ships that they made are lame.... but I like to play the melee with old ships.

The menu interfaces are extremely ugly and counterintuitive.

Gameplay seems OK.

The 'bots are pathetic.

Quality control on new ships is poor.

Have you seen the menu on TW Lite?

where do u get this game?

HERE (http://timewarp.sourceforge.net/)

~DEFIANT

I haven't played TW lite yet, since I lost my internet connection, but I hear that it's grown past Yurand's initial intention (a small version of TW). It's now an attempt to cull lingering code out of the TW source (why the TW CVS hasn't changed in forever).  It's also removing many ships.  QC wasn't a goal early on since any idea was accepted for a ship, and the ship could be polished later.  There was (is?) a group playtesting and combining ships into cohesive, hopefully balanced groups.

One interesting note:  before I lost my internet connection, GeomanNL had updated the networking code for more than 2 players.  He set an artificial limit of 8 connections, but I compiled a version for 19 clients/1 server and tested it on a 100Mb switch with 20 computers.  It seemed to work flawlessly (the only problem was I had just three people testing, so who knows how it would have performed w/ more input data).  I know youBastrd! was looking into using the robust Raknet for TWlite, so I can only imagine what it looks like now.

I'm one of the Mac UQM users, and when I saw on the Timewarp page this statement:

"TimeWarp is written in portable C++ and is known to compile and run on Linux, Mac OSX..."

I was ecstatic! Then, I downloaded the only thing I could find "You can download it as a precompiled binary..." and found a bunch of windows .exe files. Is there something I'm missing? Do I have to download and compile something else? Thanks in advance...

I've played SC2 a lot of years ago..I just watching this Time warp project....
Is it true? It's some kind of StarControl 2,5 ? :))
FEATURES :
"...1) All the races from SCII. 2) Bigger and expended Starmap.
3) 13 completly new alien races. 4) Development of the Arilou, Orz and Precursor mysteries. 5) New interesting quests, mysteries and quesions. 6) The MarkII.
7) The origin of the Mmrnmhrm. 8) Dangerous Space Monsters. 9) Many special missions and boss fights.
10) Modular flagship (like SCII) and Precursor upgrades for normal ships. 11) Bonus quests and hidden surprises.
12) New characters that help the player during the game. 13) Your chance to develop your relations with the beautiful Talana to the next level!  14) And so much more... "

Is this the same game, like the Urquan Masters, or this TimeWarp is even more ???

Or i's it just a meele game ?

where can I find the  80 MB type of the download of TW ?
Thanks in advice !
Takimate

Time warp is an entirely different game.  Sort of like a SC 2.5 ... UQM is a remake of SC2 and a very good one i might add.  Wish i knew how to help the project out (no computer knowledgte on how to do that stuff).

Timewarp (well, I tried TW-Light) looks pretty good.  I hope they release a public net-playable version soon.

How do you fight with more than three ships when you are not online, in timewarp?

Its in fleet.. change none to wussybot or something

I've done that, but I'm not sure how to start the battle, after I've selected those things.

If I start melee, I'm back to three ships.

The interface in TW and TW-Light is pretty confusing.  Have a look at the user's guide (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=User%27s_Guide) on the TW Wiki (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=TW-Light).  It explains a bit about the interface, at least.  There may be a few other tidbits of useful info there as well.  

Hope that helps!

Alright, it works now, thanks.

I forgot to give each of the 20 fleets their compliment of ships.

FEATURES :
"...1) All the races from SCII. 2) Bigger and expended Starmap.
3) 13 completly new alien races. 4) Development of the Arilou, Orz and Precursor mysteries. 5) New interesting quests, mysteries and quesions. 6) The MarkII.
7) The origin of the Mmrnmhrm. Cool Dangerous Space Monsters. 9) Many special missions and boss fights.
10) Modular flagship (like SCII) and Precursor upgrades for normal ships. 11) Bonus quests and hidden surprises.
12) New characters that help the player during the game. 13) Your chance to develop your relations with the beautiful Talana to the next level!  14) And so much more... "

Where is that stuff in the game? ??? All I see is melee combat.

Most of those features have not yet been added.

Hmm, lovely critics. Anyway, I have made a new full release for Timewarp today. This applies only to the melee-version, as the TW-light version is being developed by other people. The changes to Timewarp are mainly bug-fixes, but nevertheless quite an improvement.

The interface is still just as crappy as ever, I'm afraid.
However, I've personally taken care of a lot of bug-fixes for the ship and game in general.
It is more stable, also the internet play.
The AI is improved, although you don't have to worry that it will ever beat you.
Also, there are a few new captain graphics.
Many (b-class) ships have "improved" gameplay.
There are 2 new ships (Korvian), submitted by a friendly person.
Some may find this interesting: I have also added a game mode in the spirit of Star Control 1, namely, where you play melee with pre-defined fleets. Not just the alliance and hierarchy, but actually a lot of other fleets as well.

If you are interested, then you can find it here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/timewarp/tw_full_2005_08_11.zip?download
It's a big download, about 78MB of data.

Note again (in case you've missed it): this is the melee-version only.
If you have questions or remarks, please visit the Timewarp forums.
http://timewarp.sourceforge.net/forum/index.php

I'm confused, which one is the main one, TW or TW-lite? Which one has the best melee / is the most stable?

And why are there two separate projects? ???

Over the years, TimeWarp grew bloated. TW-Light was a code fork intended to create a faster, more stable codebase. That effort is headed by Yurand and youBastrd. GeomanNL is working on patching up the old TW code itself.

So, two different and simultaneous approaches to rectify the same problem.

There is no "main" or "better" project, although my personal preference goes to TW-Light, especially because Yurand is loading it chock full of new features like the scriptable adventure mode.

Thanks for the explanation Halleck :)

A small correction is needed, though (in defense):
"to rectify the same problem."

Patching up to correct for some bugs (old-style Timewarp), plus a couple of minor code tweaks, is not the same as re-writing the game and adding entirely new features (tw-light). The latter is far more difficult and time consuming.

Also, Timewarp used to be a relatively simple, but a nice game in itself, with several melee mini-games and a lot of ships; I happen to like most of the ships, I wrote several myself, yet many of those ships will probably not appear in tw-light (since that develops the adventure game, which requires only a small subset of the ships). Also, having too many ships, adds a *lot* of code to the project, which makes the game hard to develop further, so cutting down on ships and non-essential features is essential in order to create something new.

That's why some people prefer tw-light with new features, and other people might prefer the older-style game over the newer style, at least on the short term while tw-light is still in development stage. That's also, why it is a useful effort (imo) to have an updated older-style melee game.

"And why are there two separate projects?"

Because the goals are different, and putting them together will be messy.
You could compare it to 2 people writing a story together, and one wants a long, adventure story, while the other wants a short, simple bed-time story. That is just impossible. Reality is not as extreme as this of course, but writing code for 2 different goals, by different people with different opinions, will get messy in the end.

Might as well add my two cents.

I really like Timewarp (not TW-Lite.)   Maybe TW:L  will be fun someday, but for now I enjoy playing with all the custom ships and editing them myself (adding music, sounds, etc.)    TW:L  just  feels deflated to me.   I'm hoping that at some point the makers of TW:L  will include most of the "good" ships, maybe some with updated graphics, into their game, at least just for the melee portion.   TW is fun just for melee fragging, and thats what I like :)

I welcome any game which gives the Arilou an extra ship :D