The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I've been playing around with version 0.3 for a while and playing around with the code a bit to see what does what.  I love what you guys did with the game to make it playable on today's hardware.  Anyway, I was curious how difficult it would be to include a SC1 style tactical campaign to a future build of Ur-quan Masters.  While I love the SC2 campaign, I've been wanting to see an updated version of the SC1 campaign with the newer ships and all.

I would love to help out with this, but although I got a few years of C++ experience, I'm a complete newbie with game programming.  But I'll do what I can.  Is something like this possible?

it would be hard as all they did was compile the source and make it work making a new game inside of it would be harder. I also know some C++ but haven't done anything past pick a num between 1 and 10 in games :). in other words yes it can be done....when you are done send us the beta.

I'm working on twx : it's a different game, but it aims at creating an rts game in the SC2 universe. Perhaps you'd like to lend a helping hand on that, in case our ideas on an rts don't deviate too much ? It's in C++. PS. Arne is also working on a different rts, and he makes some nice art, so you're not the only one who likes the idea.

Okay I know in VB6 you plug in the direct X engine and program basically in Direct X, is there any difference in C++?

I guess it would be possible to do a non action version quite easily. You could basically just have the star map, which you play most of the game on, moving fleets around (sort of like how the fleet circles work in SCII). Instead of mining you use planets/systems as bases/factories/resources.
A 2D lookup table with all shiptypes could be used to calculate winning odds.
The fleet battle screen could use one static angle of each ship. Each side racks up the ships participating, and then they just explode away gradually until one side has lost all.

This would be relatively easy to code I think. Not much gfx or battle physics/ai.

Sort of like this for the battles.

(http://web.telia.com/~u48508900/battlescreen.gif)

Instead of giving the ships hitpoints and stats, the game just looks up the probability of winning for each ship against another. The amount of ships serves as hitpoints instead. It also makes the battles look big.

I think a much better idea (than the one on the pic) is to allow the player to arrange the ships in any order, and then the ships fight in that order. This way there'll be a lot of tactics in the way you arrange ships.

The ships could scroll in and annihilate as they meet on the middle. This would allow for fleets bigger than the screen.

I guess a weakness with having the ships in any order might be that you can put them in a chaotic order and not have a weakness. A solution to this might to restrict the mix to full columns (10-20) of the same ship.

I don't think that would be much fun.

Actually, my idea is simply just to add the SC1 style tactical campaign.  Where you just simply move your ships through a rotating 3D starmap and when they come in contact with an enemy, they go through standard one-on-one battle mode to see who controls the planet.  Kinda similar to how Archon is played.  Arne, while your ideas sound like a lot of fun, I do believe that taking away the actual one-on-one battles would take away from what makes Star Control so great.  What would be interesting is if you can actually get all of those ships in a real-time battle mode so you can see all of the ships fighting at the same time.  That would be really fun.

I guess for now, I'll just play around with the code.  It shouldn't be too difficult if I just put some time into it.

Ok... well enjoy yourself :)

Someone got started on this earlier... try a forum search, you might be able to dig up some useful code.

How about this for a game: Starcontrol Colloseum.

All your favorite races, without ships, fighting hand to hand, planetside.

Not exactly fair. Watch the Kohr-Ah and Ur-Quan tag-team everyone else into oblivion. Or you can let the Orz have their rifles, in which case they're going to wreck everything else first.

Perhaps the Ur-Quan would be very slow and would not respond real fast, especially on planets with high gravity.

Technology could only be used in limited circumstances. Like perhaps you could win the use of your species' ground vehicle/tank/powersuit etc. Or maybe there would be a few weapons siting in different places, waiting for you to take them over.

Poor spathi. :P
Same goes for ZFP..
...and Earthlings...

But still, the Quannies would "pwn em all", with their tentacles and MASSIVE size...

But not to get offtopic: I think a SC1-like implementation would be pretty nice, even though you can already play it in UQM!!!.. well.. You need a table.. and some objects that represent ships/planets... :P

I read something about the original wormies being predators or something so they would probably be dangerous.

I wonder what the Chenjesu would do, just stand there and shine?

Syreen would own them all though, literally.

My idea above was just for something strategical that's easy to code. Indeed it wouldn't be as much fun if you're into the whole arcade dogfight aspect of SC.

Some of us around here actually think that SC2 melee combat isn't all that great; It's more of a necessary evil. Personally, I can never get the hang of it. Being a fan of strategy computer and board games, however, an UQM adaptation of the SC1 campaign sounds promising. If it ever gets off the ground, that is.

Chenjesu shoot lightning. Earthlings are predators, too.

Remember, most of their ship is a psionic amplifier. They're not Dnyarri. And can we stop this topic drift? If we want to have Starchon, that would be another discussion.

What is Starchon?

Archon (http://www.mobygames.com/game/archon) in space. Starcon is not Starchon.

I'm not talking about a game where you order lifeforms around, at all. I mean a pure action game like super melee, only with the actual sentients, themselves.

Maybe some people would mistake it for a pokemon game or something, but it might be a cool new spin-off of this universe. Perhaps it could also have Starflight sentients (with permission of course).

Ah, I see. I'm more into the combat-part. But, judging from these posts, there are also people who might enjoy your idea, Arne.

The Orz Space Marines seem to indicate that the Orz have a leg up on the competition when it comes to ground combat -- what with their big exosuits and all. (As befits the way they apparently overcame the Androsynth.)

I don't actually imagine Ur-Quan being that great at hand-to-hand combat outside the right environment -- they apparently grew up in some kind of rainforest where they had a canopy to cling to. In an open-air environment they'd probably be a lot less mobile. In any case hand-to-hand combat with lesser species is exactly the sort of thing they'd think was beneath them.

Syreen psychic powers are probably a lot weaker without those psionic amplifier gadgets built into the Penetrator -- the fact that Syreen "hypnosis" seems a lot weaker and more limited than Dnyarri "mind control" is probably why the Kzer-Za didn't slaughter the Syreen as a threat.

And any ground-combat sim would seem by necessity to leave certain species out of the game. Mycon, for instance, would simply find it impossible (indeed, half their motivation in the game is the simple fact that they *can't survive* on most other people's planets). And I'm not sure the Probes actually *have* mobile units inside them, rather than just being a big mass of circuits. And the Arilou don't seem to be the type who would go for mano a mano fights. Nor the Pkunk. Nor the Spathi (though *literally* arming a single panicked Spathi with a howitzer would actually be pretty funny).

I don't know if Chenjesu can actually "shoot lightning" with enough power to kill people -- they use electromagnetic fields to lift stuff and move it around, but that's different from killing people. It seems like without a technological matrix around to work with the Chenjesu crystals are actually sessile, which puts them at a disadvantage in ground combat. And I do believe the SC manuals say the Chenjesu have a naturally pacifistic bent because they evolved as autotrophs, getting energy from sunlight and chemicals, and never having to compete with other living things to survive.

It doesn't really matter if you can't prove they could generate enough electricity to kill something in the original game. You simply make them powerful enough to kill in the ground combat game.

You would take every species' pros and cons and turn them into something. Yehat can fly but are somewhat weak, chenjesu are slow but are durable and possess a powerful attack, arilou have a long ranged telekinetic attack but it is not very powerful, pkunk have a more powerful closer in psychic attack and can run very fast, vux spit glue velvet worm style, mycon spray magma but have to retreat underground to recover after a short time (which leaves them vulnerable for some seconds while they dig through the crust), humans are versatile but lack any one great strength, ilwrath can launch a tarantula style hair attack, supox have an acid attack, zogs-fots-piks are weak individually but deadly when the three are combined, shofixti have extremely quick and ferocious attacks, etc.

And remember, just as in the original games, different species would be worth different levels of points, so they are not all equal.

Wasn't SC2 originally going to have a much more complex away team system for landing on planets, where assigning crew members of different races would affect how they survived on the planet's surface? Something like that would be an interesting way to integrate something like this into an SC2-like game.

One thing you could do would be to give the Yehat some sort of electromagnetic shielding or manipulating ability. The game does say that the Yehat somehow can naturally perceive electromagnetic fields, and that this ability somehow is linked to their ability to develop impenetrable force-shields for their ships.

Wonderful. Can we move this arena game into a new thread, and let this thread actually deal with the SC1 Tactical Campaign?

This thread has already dealt with the strategy game topic. There are one or two people working on purely strategy starcontrol games. I don't know what else can be said about this.

I don't know what to say either... but who would win, Skeletor or Chairman Mao, if they had to fight with chopsticks?

Does anyone know of any possible mod candidates for creating either of these two games? Especially from freeware games?

I give up...





*hands Arne a card* asking questions outside a point of order.

To summarize the actual thread topic.  At least two people seemed interested in seeing the old SC1 Tactical Campaign so I will do what I can to put it together.  I looked up past threads, but I did not see anything about anyone working on something like this so I'm going to start from scratch.  BTW, I just wanted to thank the programmers of this game for writing very clear and easy to understand code.  This makes modifications a lot easier.

Orz (the TW programmer, not the multi-dimensional creature) wrote the beginnings of a game called TACT using the specifications of SC1.

I'm guessing that most of the work has been in documenting the code then;  when I first looked, it was just as TFB left it:  a one-coder project (meaning little need for documentation and descriptive variable names).

I seem to vaguely remember this disucssion being up before. What I remember best was something that you may/may not have use of.

Instead of using the SC1 tactical simulation with the 3D map, there was talk about using the Hyperspacemap (or a part thereof) from SC2.

The basic idea was that all stars inside one cluster are accessible for any ship to travel between (even Shofixti), whereas the tactical part sets in when you want to travel to another cluster. There would be only certain mapped "safe routes" through HS between constellations available to smaller ships. That would include a tactical element, certain stars would be "gateways" from where you could set out to other regions of space.

An example. If you begin playing at the Shofixti homeworld as a barve rodent (or alliance officer) you could easily access all the Gorno starsystems and their wealth. However, if you wanted to contact expand the alliance to include earthlings, you would have to send your fleet through a safe route via the Centauri system, where the Ilwrath might be contolling the other end of your route.

This of course would only be a part of the game, but I belive the consensus back then was that this would be more graphically pleasing and easier to use than the old 3D system in SC1 whilst still retaining the tactical parts.

Hopefulyl this might be of some help. If not, I still like the idea.

The main element they were concerned with before was indeed to figure out a way of handling the starmap.  However, it was supposed to be completely random. I proposed a method for making a suitable graph of star-lines and then devising a graphical arrangement for them. I will try to dig it up...

On your search, remember that the default search period is only 7 days. This discussion is much older than that...

I'm actually thinking of a number of ideas.  Using the SC2 Hyperspace map was one of them.  Another had to do with using a simple chess board and play the game out similar to Archon.  But because of my relative inexperience with game programming, I just want to stick with the original version.  If I ever finish with the original, we could probably bump up the graphics to be more graphically pleasing or maybe apply the code to the SC2 Hyperspace map.

http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1046446680;start=0

also:

http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Gendiscuss;action=display;num=1061745418;start=0

practical discussion of code began on page 4.

That's actually very helpful.  Thanks for the information.  

I wish you good luck on making it :)

If you get discouraged on something, drop by and we'll see if we can help. Or if you want some more serious help, I'd love to do something. I could devise a strategic AI, for example.

Thanks for the support.  Star Control has been one of my all time favorite games and I don't think I'll get discouraged anytime soon.  However, it may take me a while before I start on actual code for the tactical campaign.  I'm currently looking at the source code now and trying to learn how it works.  I so far understand more or less how the code for the ships work.  I have been successful to a degree installing a tracker beam to the Umgah Drone and tweaking their AI making them a little more effective.  This of course is not going into the tac campaign since I just did it to learn the code better.  Next I want to play around with combat engine.  After I learn how the individual parts of the code works, I'll be better off figuring out how to add an entirely new mode of play.

Again, thanks for the support.  I will definitely be asking for some help and/or suggestions in the future.

I tried starting an SC1 strategy mode add-on a long time ago. However, I realized fairly early that my programming skills are nowhere near good enough. I'd certainly be happy to help with harth1026 though.

Spurred by the inadequacy of the real life 3d starmap I just encountered, I just thought of a possible way of reorienting a starmap that may be easier.

If you have 3 noncolinear stars selected, the map is fixed so that the view directly faces the plane containing these 3 stars.

I am not sure what should be done in the case of having 2 or 1 stars selected. Perhaps if 2 stars are selected, the map may be set so the view faces the line containing those two stars, and it can rotate as it did in the original.

If 1 is selected... ??

Either way, any 3d map should use the fading-brightness method of showing distance that was used in the original; it was fairly clear.

I've never had a problem navigating SC1, I just watched the star rotate about 1/2 around and could find the next few jump paths....

Yeah, it just took me a little bit at first to realize that the map was in 3D.  Initially I thought the map was in 2D and just swinging back and forth.  That part usually throws most people.

Here's a survey question, if and when I finish this tactical mode, do you want the map to be easier to see in 3D or do you want it to be more true to the orginal where the stars would merely just get darker as they moved to the background?

I think a view from infinitely far away would be fine... a full 3d explorer would be quite excessive. Start with the easy solution; the hard one can be added later if the easy solution is not satisfactory.

Boring. Play the recent Reach for the Stars if you want that.