The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

In the orignal StarControl 2, when I started a new game my first step was naming my captain and ship. T.U.M. starts out with a pre-set name and captain name... I have to find the options to change them. I know it's a minor detail and not a bug, but could it please be changed back to the original for v0.5 Thanks :)

Like 3DO SC2, UQM doesn't require the user to enter the names of the captain and flagship. On the 3DO, the reason for this was that entering names on a joypad is hard work. Also, the original PC behaviour has been considered to be a usability problem as it is not entirely obvious what the game is waiting for when you start a new game and nothing appears to happen.

In other words, the UQM behaviour makes it easier to get into the game if you don't care about changing names. Changing the captain and flagship name is easy enough, anyway, as you can find it in the Game/Settings menu. For this reason, it is unlikely that the (default) behaviour will change in future versions of UQM.

I guess it's that same general reason one can not title their save files. Playing on a computer I would very much like to be able to name my save files :)

The lack of save game names also stems from the 3DO version, but there are plans to add support for naming saves (see bug 291 (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=291)). The save system needs to be overhauled anyway (see e.g. bug 44 (http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=44)), so there has been little interest in fixing this temporarily.

Despite usability issues, it'd be nice to have the default PC version just in case --PC and --3DO meta-parameters are instituted.