The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Ok, heres what I'm thinking. 0.5 is pretty much a version 1.0 in its own right, so a 1.0 version probably isn't that far off.

In order to make further improvements to the original game, we are going to need to start changing the way the game actually works, adding feauters, and changing portions of the game which were poorly done.

IMHO there are only two really major flaws in the game.

1. The idea that crew basically only amount to hitpoints is stupid (uh oh, here comes the flames...)
and
2. Planet terrain is basically a dozen recycled low rez bitmaps, which makes all the planets feel the same and basically ruins exploration.

Now 1 is very easy to fix. Give each ship hitpoints, and have crew affect repair rate. Crew would also occasionally die when you get hit, but the hit points would almost always determine when the ship blows up.

Point 2 is harder to fix but also more important. Basically, just use the Starflight method. Fractally generated planet terrain, and an actual convincingly sized spheroid (as in, one that you could explore). Starflight is basically SC2's better for this reason alone.


Now, after point 1 is implemented, the next logical step would be to actually support some more tactical combat. You command a fleet of ships, so you should be able to actually command that fleet in battle, instead of sending one ship in at a time.

After point 2 is implemented, and you have huge fractally generated worlds to explore, you should work to populate them with interesting locations, species, artifacts, cities, pre-warp civilizations and the like.

Now, these ideas are a huge change, and will probably put some people off, but we've pretty much done all that we can to recreate the original game. It's time to start changing and improving, and we need to start by removing the flaws of the original (yes, it does have flaws, and some gaping ones at that). Sure, we might make some sweeping changes to gameplay, but I beleive its something that needs to (and should be) done.

It is kind of silly, but it works quite well gameplay-wise (keeps things simple).

Last time I checked, each planet has its own unique fractally generated terrain. They're all quite similar, though.

The problem with changing this sort of thing is that it would either have little effect or you'd have to rebalance all the combat again (not that it was too carefully balanced to begin with).

The problem with Starflight is that exploring a planet takes ages. While this is realistic, it doesn't really fit into the UQM style of sweeping through dozens of star systems. It also distracts from the plot.

The current combat system is heavily dependent on battles being one-on-one. You'd essentially have to redesign the whole thing from scratch, and you'd end up with a completely different game.

Again, all this would change the game completely.

As far as I can tell, your suggestions would change gameplay to the point where we essentially have a completely different game; keeping the same plot with all these changes would be hard, too. This sounds more like a sequel than a revision of UQM to me.

The goals of the UQM project were to make the game available to modern platforms, and to make modifications (including translations) easier. The first goal is pretty much achieved, the other still needs plenty of work.
The UQM gameplay will always remain faithful to the original, even when 1.0 is done. Spinoffs would be released under a new name (and even now, people have been doing just that, in small ways). But don't count on the current UQM developers to be making spin-offs after 1.0, as none of us seems to be interested in that.

I don't think that your suggestions will be able to exist anywhere outside of an unofficial mod. There are too many purists to let this happen to the trunk- and one of the design principles of UQM is that players should be able to experience the game as it was in its original state.

Planet images could be part of the "graphics expansion pack" idea that has been kicked about- a graphics equivalent of the precursor remix packs. The engine would need some overhauling before this is possible though- it still thinks that it's running at a 320x240 resolution AFAIK.

A lot of the work being done is going on under the hood. The project was close enough at 3.0-4.0 to be "released as 1.0" by your standards, but the game requires further development to meet its goals of modularity and extensibility.

What if after 1.0 2 official versions were maintained? One being the version as close to the original as possible, and the other which focused on fixing the flaws in the game and improving gameplay. IMHO having a multitude of spin-offs will probably amount to nothing more than a few failed attempts at drastic gameplay change (due to the work involved) and a large number of projects which make very small gameplay changes (think duct tape mod for doom3) which no one will care about.

meep-eep stated that the other goal of UQM is to "make modifications (including translations) easier", but what is going to be done after that? Shold the project grow stagnant?

I think that it would be wise to make a secound *official* branch (like 'UQM 2X') after most of the work has been done leading up to 1.0. Sure, gameplay and balance would need to be changed, and the game may end up looking completely different, but it would provide replayability for vets, keep devs interested in coding, and very likely make a great game a true masterpeice by fixing the flaws that it admitably has in it.

Aftermath, Starflight 3, and Black Sky might be more likely to include the basic planetary and/or fleet combat ideas you mentioned.

You assume your "major flaws" are automatically agreed upon, though.  Unless there were a vast majority sharing a common complaint, I don't see how it could ever become an official modification.

Besides, if the "crew as hitpoints" is the ONLY breach of logic you can complain about...need I remind you that the planets are only MARGINALLY larger than the ships, and these same ships can collide with said planets and, more or less, go on as they were?

Yeah, crew as hitpoints is infinitely more logical than that. ^_^;

Flaws? What flaws do you speak of. So far all you've stated are the preferences of a space flight simulator fan-boy. Perhaps what you are talking about as flaws in the game play would be flaws if they weren't inherent to the gameplay.

The debate between crew / hit points is a point of disussion on this board for, oh, as long as I've been around at least, which is shortly after SC2 was released. I don't see why it's such a sore point to younger players. I mean, you think nothing of stepping on a first aid kit and immedately feeling better without all the actuall first aid going on. Reality = distraction from gameplay.

So relax about the first point.

About the second point, the planets being pretty much the same, again, what does it matter? You land on a planet and it doesn't matter if you're driving over land or sea or a bed of hot boiling lava. So long as it isn't flaming, your lander can handle it. What do you want? Individual images for each planet so that you could find one the developers nested in there around some remote star that if you land on it you're lander map resembles a giant wang? Amusing as that may be, it doesn't affect the gameplay one iota. Granted it's a novel idea that I don't think I've heard mentioned on these forums, at least not for a while.

Let me address this somewhat. The reason I would like to see large fractally generated planet terrain (think starflight) isn't just because its a cool feature or idea. I want to see this feature because it could potentially fix the most major flaw in SC2: that basically 95% of all that you do is play a bland mining mini-game that isn't fun, and use the majority of the resources you gather to buy fuel in order to get more resources. The joy of exploration also gets chucked out the window because all the planets seem to be overly simplified and monotonous. Add in Starflight style planets with realistic resources, and perhaps throw in a few random artifacts or bonuses on those planets, and you don't need to spend 95% of your time strip mining systems, and systems suddenly become fun to explore.

It pretty much comes down to this. In a lot of things, Starflight has a better implementation than SC2, and vice versa. If we could somehow form a marriage between the two, using the best features from both, I beleive we could make the greatest game in all history.


In any case, I meant this topic to be not so much "Here are some changes we need to make!" and more "What are we going to do to improve the original game once we've accomplished all of our goals". If you want to continue working on UQM after all the goals are complete, you're either going to be doing endless polishing which doesen't mean a thing for the end user, or you can start changing gameplay to make it better. I'm talking strictly about coding here.

Incidently, if anyone else can think of a positive gameplay change for a possible 'official branch', shout it out.

I don't think there should be any official changes to UQM except for making it as much like the original as possible for a variety of modern platforms.

Now as far as unofficial mods go, I'm all for them. If anything they can be viewed as a sort of grand gameplay experiment. You never know where a really awesome idea will come from.

I like the idea of adding hit points to ships and having the repair rate depend on the number of crew present. I don't view having to rebalance everything as a problem so much as a challenge to be overcome. With that said, I have absolutely no plans to participate in such a project, I just think it'd be neat if someone tried it.

EDIT: Maybe I'm just really unobservant, but were all the planets really the same? I mean a lot of the bitmaps used were similar, yes, but I don't recall where any of them were actually recycled. Now there were standardized planet types, yes, and I don't see how adding more variety would be a bad thing provided it's well implemented. I'm actually looking forward to the results of such experiments!

For some reason I thought they were, but.....

That's what I get for skipping over that post.  ;)

Personally, I'd be more interested in seeing modifications to the game aimed at providing a higher difficulty level while changing the basic gameplay and plot as little as possible. For example, improving the combat AI (and possibly handicapping the flagship by e.g. decreasing weapons range) would give single-player melee a new lease of life and require the player to use different types of ships in the full game.

or how about making it so you can't really upgrade your precursor tug to full on battlecruiser.

like say only 1 gun can be mounted at a time
you can still have dynamo's and shiva's but only 1 tracking module can be mounted
and to me the point defense only came in use for the ur-quan and their "autonomous" fighters.

i wonder if there was a way to really implement that without changing the code completely?

I actually rarely, if ever, used my Precursor ship in the single-player game, despite arming it to the teeth.  Ships are replacable; precursor tug is not!  Sure, there are SAVE Games, but where's the fun in that? >_>

Reminds me of when my bro tried to play the original Wing Commander "realistically."  ie. if he was about ti die, he ejected, as opposed to getting blown up and loading a save game.  (Those not familiar will note ejection resulted in an automatic loss of the mission, sending you down a harder/less pleasant mission path.)

I love using my beefed up Precursor vessel, it makes melee so easy. I never worry about losing my ship because I'm good enough at the game where it's not an issue. I'm also a save nazi.  ;)

Amen, brother. UQM is stable enough to play "Iron Man" (http://www.stratosgroup.com/features/columns.php?selected=200011imnn) style, which in UQM is simply implemented by only saving when you quit the game (and deleting your save after loading!). As long as you have enough thrusters on your flagship (and don't go blundering into hostile homeworlds with 0 flagship crew like I do), UQM is actually quite easy to play this way.

I typically go repeating this one...if this is the case, you haven't mastered the game and need to rethink how you are approaching the mining aspect of it. 

If you do the mining aspect right, you only really need to spend maybe 5-10% of your time with it.

First, strip-mining every single planet you see is a waste of time and fuel (landing may even cost you more than you gain!). Stick to mining interesting-looking planets instead of every single dustball you see (Hayes has some good advice on this). Planets near hot stars tend to be cool but not cool, if you see my point.

Second, there are other good ways to get RU. Mining is seldom necessary except at the start of the game.

Third, I may be missing something (I haven't played Starflight that much), but in my opinion, Starflight is the one with the "bland mining mini-game". Actually getting from A to B takes positively ages (on the Amiga, at least), and exploring through a whole planet takes forever minus 1 day (or so it seems). In UQM, you can at least get back to the plot quickly enough without leaving lots of minerals behind. On the plus side, the feeling of "there's a whole great big universe out there" is a lot more intense when you realise that you can literally spend a lifetime exploring!

Of course, the precursor vessel can be beefed up to the point that if you can't win with it in all circumstances you'd have problems.  There's a reason I call the properly beefed-up precursor vessel "Death Star."  ;D

"Third, I may be missing something (I haven't played Starflight that much), but in my opinion, Starflight is the one with the "bland mining mini-game"."

Hehe, I don't think so, not compared to SC2's.


"In UQM, you can at least get back to the plot quickly enough without leaving lots of minerals behind."

That might be because in the Amiga version (as in the PC version) that you played, minerals are completely unlimited. Land, mine everything on site, take off, then land again in the same spot, and more minerals are there.


"Actually getting from A to B takes positively ages (on the Amiga, at least), and exploring through a whole planet takes forever minus 1 day (or so it seems)."

That's sort of the thing with planets, they're just really big. You have to understand though, that in Starflight, you're tactics are a little different. You don't just search every single square inch of a certain world. You use the clues you've obtained through communications, records and messages, and in some cases, navigational artifacts, to show you where the important sites are.

It's not the same as simply flying overhead, running over a few glowing things and zapping the half dozen lifeforms on the world, planets are meant to be vast worlds that are natural, diverse places- helping you complete the main storyline is not their only reason for being. There's storms, diverse lifeforms, unlimited natural resources concentrated in different places (if you can't find many minerals, try looking in the mountains of worlds with high mineral densities,) and secret ruins. Of course, this was done in '85, not '92, so the technical capabilities were far less. But worlds and general (non-plot-driven) exploration was still a much bigger part of Starflight, than Starcontrol 2's 1 minute strip mining approach (basically as you said, mining and exploration was only for the early game, later on you'd only land to pick up a device someone told you was there.)

Of course, just because some of us really what to see planetary exploration made into all that it could be in space games, that doesn't necessarily mean it would fit SC2, whose focus is almost entirely on combat and story development. Loyalists would maybe find it to be too much of a distraction.

OK, so the problem is that I'm expecting Starflight to be like UQM; my expectations from UQM may be preventing me from seeing Starflight as a different game where different rules apply (and thus, I end up trying to play Starflight like UQM).

I'll have to have another go at Starflight some time.

If I recall, the Sega version of Starflight is more similar to UQM. Though I think the Amiga version beats it to the sub-atomic level, star control fans might find the Sega to be preferable.

Now that I've played through the game, this is true. But I find it hard to beleive that someone on there first run would only spend 5-0% of their time resource gathering. Probably 50% at the least.

Probably. SF for genesis had prettier graphics a completley different approach to mining (minerals were underground and needed to be scanned for), and SC style control of your ship (planets had gravity and you're ship had momentum).

If you didn't want a challenge, then why play the games in the first place.  That's the worst kind of game to me, the one that I can sit down with for the first time and beat within two hours.

Besides, after a while, one should learn to go after profit and not hoard minerals.  After all, it does approach common sense.

See Terragen (http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/), software that renders landscapes.  Set the camera to look straight down, save the parameters for next time, use Gimp/PS to get it to loop reasonably.  I remember trying to do this way back when and it was there was a reasonable technique to doing this.  For high res you might have buy the software. 

Best o' luck!

Hm. Well, the big differences between the mining systems in UQM and Starflight can be easily resolvable: simply let the player choose which system they prefer. It's open-source, after all.

If the more advanced exploration functionality were to be included as an option, here's how I see it being implemented:

Land on a planet and fly around, as usual. When you go to pick up a deposit, it instead zooms you in to a really large, pseudorandomly-generated area where you go around and look for smaller, well-hidden deposits within that area. Alternately, the player could just forego that aspect altogether and just have the lander pick it up as normal.

I agree completely. 2 official versions would be best. One would be closest to the original as possible and the other would be newer versions with enhanced gameplay features. This is probably the best way to go.

That only lasts until they realize what the true nature of the game is, I think... Also, if they get good at melee they don't need as many resources.

Or good at using their resources efficiently.   I know I've found that one can get through the game with often much less than you think (Sol, and Beta Chandrakeshar, for mining, usually).  Then it's often more economical to buy fuel from the Melnorme instead of the station.

Like I say, usually the people that complain about mining are the ones that haven't learned the game.

First, I would like some improvements to the user-interface:
* Show complete location with moon-number, as in "Planet VIII c"
* More contrasting images for minerals (in the scanner and on planet):
 common & base-metals look very much the same, and also corrosive & radioactive
* position Pause-sign higher on screen, to allow a better view
 when pausing in a planet-system (don't cover the planet-tracks)
* Nameable savegames
* More savegames (00-99)
* Quicksave / load (say to savegame00)
* When first opening load-game-dialog, position on highest used savegame
* Dialog-option to request re-telling prior information
 (e.g. all the infos you already purchased from the trader)
* Shortcut from Scan-Menu to Manifest/Cargo-Menu, to allow
 quicker checking / jettison of cargo
* In-game Quest-Log / Mission-Diary, so you dont have to switch
 back and forth to an external editor for keeping notes
* Markers for Starsystems, e.g. "visited / mining complete / Homeworld / Waypoint #1, #2 ..."
* Combat: Checkbox for cyborg-setting right next to the ship-selection
* Some in-game help-pages
* Additional keybindings: Fire on LeftCtrl and Keypad-5, Secondary on Space
* Search starmap/next: when cursor is on a star but no query was entered,
 use the name of that star, i.e. jump to the next star of that cluster.

All of this wouldn't change the plot or the gameplay, but improve the handling.

Second, for improved gameplay / better replayability:
* Super-Melee: Include the flagship (with selectable configuration)
* Better gas-giant images, so you can tell them apart from normal planets from outside of orbit
* Fuel-Purchase on allied homeworlds
* Starsystem-Scanner, to report minerals/bio/specials from the point where you
 enter a solar system. Should be expensive, say 1000 credits / 5000 RU ?
* Option for randomized content of starsystems (starmap unaltered)
 This would need changes to the savegame-format, to store the random seed

-HaJo

Some of the improvements that don't change the game experience are on our todo list for the official branch.
In particular:

This one I'm in favour of, but while it's been mentioned before, we haven't discussed it:

This one sounds like a good idea to me, and hasn't come up yet:

you could link directly to the Wiki from in-game.
or copy-and-paste the relevant pages..

In-game help would make the game more accessible to new players and ultimately improve the experience. A lot of the information needed to play UQM was only contained in the SC2 manual(s), and that information is only available through online walkthroughs these days. This means we might also have to change Admiral ZEX's hint about the location of the VUX Beast.

Mouse support would be nice, too.

Now that v0.6.2 is out, what is planned next on the way to v1.0 ?

-HaJo

One big thing I will be working on is the resource system. Once we have a decent resource system, with resources stored in human-readable text files, we'd like to move as much in-game constants to those files. This will make modding the game a lot easier.
Also, there's room for a lot of improvement to netplay, like some lobby, UDP instead of TCP (makes the game playable even with a bit of packet loss), concurrent selection of the first ship, pre-fleet-building game setup,
voice chat, pre-recorded voice taunts, to name a few.
Then there are some rewrites planned of other subsystems I know little about, like graphics (finally making other native resolutions than 320x640 possible). The possibility for video cutscenes (requested by PR3 himself) is another thing. And then we've still got a big list (http://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr&long_desc=&bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstr&bug_file_loc=&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailassigned_to2=1&emailreporter2=1&emailcc2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&order=bugs.bug_id) of various sizes of bugs in our bug database (many of which depend on other tasks, in particular the resource system).

So there's still a lot to do, and chances are that some parts will never be done.

I'd like a Family-circus-style trace of where I've been on the starmap. Not with footprints, obviously. That covers most of the really tedious log ideas, without having to come up with a cumbersome UI system.  If there was some special world, note it yourself. The ship will just keep track of where it's been.

Uhm ... QuasiSpace to HyperSpace maps? Anyone? I don't really enjoy alt-tabbing my way all the time ... nor do I wish to load the game all the time.

And just because I'm suuuch an annoying PC purist ... choice to make the flagship's engine green again? 8)