The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Well, I hope this belongs here. It's a polite suggestion for a feature that I need, and I guess some others do too.

I've tried UQM for the first time today, and I'm greatly pleased. I played SC2 in my PC many years ago and I can say this port/remake is great. Kudos and thanks to the developers who brought this to life on today's computers. However, as with many other games, I have a very little handicap.

I have a kind of color blindness (named chronic educational daltonism), so I can distinguish colors under certain conditions but not under others. My main gripe is in the mineral planetary scan, I can't get too much of each little dot colors. I'm wondering if you can add an alternate way of designating the mineral types with other stuff like numbers or pictograms. That would be awesome and the final thing which could make this game perfect for me. As I know there are other people with this kind of problem, I'm sure many others would appreciate this feature.

Thanks for reading and I hope you consider this suggestion seriously. Thanks for this great work and excuses for my poor english  ;D

Well, I think you can, but I'm not sure

The gfx is just images, you can find them in the content files (maybe named *.uqm now), which you need to unzip.

The mineral gfx can be found in lbm/ under the names miscdata*

Modify those and zip them into your own package that over-ride the normal content.

I'm sure there's some more detailed info about making your own content packages somewhere? Ultronomicon?


I'm not sure what requirements the game has for palettes and sizes. If you make them large they might collide easier with the lander, if the game checks collisions with the bitmap.

I think it's a good idea to make the mineral read easier, maybe the value could be placed in a 3*5 numeric pixel font to the right of each dot?

Edit : Well it works to make custom mineral images, but there's a lot of them to edit. The program makes a bitmap collision check it seems, so if they're made bigger it's easier to pick them up. I tried placing a single pixel some 10 px away from the mineral blob and you could collide with that.

To make the modification, you need to edit close to 70 images, put them in a lbm folder, zip that, name it z_mineral.uqm or something, put it in the packages dir along with the official content.

Hmm... having letter or number reprentations would make a nice accessibility feature.

Arne: I think that if you make a normal folder in /content/, whatever files are there over-ride files of the same name in the content .zip/.uqm file. For example, /content/lbm/title.png will ovverride /lbm/title.png in the zip file. This might be a more convenient way to test files without having to edit the zip file each time.

Your method would certainly be best for making an accessibility add-on package, however. (I think if you put it as /content/packages/addons/accessibility.uqm, you could then tell ur-quan masters to load it up with a command line switch like you would do for a precursors remix pack).

AFAIK, the graphics are of minerals of various sizes.

You can make an addon, by zipping your new graphics up and then putting said .zip in a seperate folder in the "addons" folder.

My idea? Edit the graphics and put numbers over the minerals.. 1 meaning bad, 8 meaning best...

When I get home, I'd look into this a bit better... :)

We've talked about this in our IRC channel, and we'll probably make an option for something like this in the future.
To make sure we won't forget about it, I'd advice you to make an entry for it in the bug database.

Bug #565 (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=565) is already in the database, and asks for nearly the same thing.  So everything should already be in place to make this happen, except of course, for the code and graphics.  :)

Okay, so this isn't so easy, because I don't know which images are exactly which mineral, and which aren't a mineral at all.. Some pictures are like 3x3 or so in size, and I can't make up what they are..  :(

If the pictures have to be that small, maybe they could flash with a frequency based on their value... That would require even MORE coding, but it would actually help, and not require a large number of obscure drawings.

Made some test minerals, but they're kinda big.

I'm having difficulty telling the diff. between the silver and grey original mineral gfx, and the reds too. It's the sizes that make it kinda difficult to see what color a mineral is sometimes, so I made mine one size. I also tried to pick colors that represents the value.

Diamond on the end, gold should be obvious, radiactive get to keep the obnoxious red, noble gas is blue for noble and air, corrosive is brown as rust, metal is grey.

The brightness somewhat works as an indicator for value too.

(http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/minerals.gif)


PS hack. The outlines should be toned down I think.
(http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/mineraltest.jpg)


Not sure how this method works with the different views for the planet map and actual surface. If they use the same mineral gfx then this method is wonky.


Arr, so much for my bars.

Maybe something like this?

(http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/minerals2.gif)

i like that. looks good.

After reading this thread, I've decided to make my own ugly version of an accessibility add-on only for the elements. You need to modify miscdata.8.png to miscdata.47.png. Details are inside the txt, if anyone bothers to read it.

I preferred to kept sizes and glows proportional and just add a letter. Without black borders, to make it smaller and thus, harder to harvest. I didn't want to make the elements too big, like in Arne's idea (which IMHO is really good, but too big for me).

Be warned, it's *ugly*, but it works for me until someone does something better. Grab it while it's hot because I'm moving my homepage and it will not be available from there anymore:
http://www.euskalnet.net/pits/accessibility.zip

Just a 30kb zip, put the .uqm in content/packages/addons/accessibility and call UQM with "--addon accessibility".

In the scan these would work well.  When on the planet running around with the lander perhaps the resources should be a semi random splat/vein of color and animation (twinkle, shimmer, etc.) based upon what kind of matter it is.  Hell, superfluids should move around with wind, quakes.

And 25 kilotons of antimatter would devastate a planet.  Obviously, we can't include the physics of the exotics.

But-but-but... that would be *so* cool.

And, of course, on a planet low-density enough not to have tidal forces that would rip your lander and the humans inside into little bits, any little bits of degenerate matter would promptly sink through the planet and into the core.

Let's not even get into what Reisburg helices would do to a planet. (Let's not get into it, because we don't know what the heck Reisburg helices are.)