The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I'm trying to find out which source file handles the music filenames and directory, the closest thing i have found so far is "imusicre.h", and if that is the file, how does it work?

Files are historically referenced through resource numbers, such as the ones in imusicre.h. They are explained in doc/devel/resources, and there are files like starcon.lst that map these numbers to file names.
Since 0.5 these index files are in a plain-text format.

thanks man :)

i'm just gonna hijack my own post with another question...

 would it be possible to actually create my own stars?
and have star systems of my own?

of course i usually figure things out by trial and error (thats how i made the fmv mod) but this seems something that you guys would know for sure.

and if theres anything specific i might need to know, please tell.

If you don't care about the contents of the systems, the plandata.c file holds the star information.  Moving stars around is pretty easy; you might have Issues with plot elements or the creation of new constellations, offhand.

i'm actually thinkin of adding my own system just for fun, to see what i could do and how far i could take it.

Like adding an earth starbase to other contellations for the benefit of not having to travel all the way back to sol for crew or fuel.

i would also love to find a way to edit the contents of the system and the mineral deposits too

or make a star full of rainbow worlds  ;D just for the hell of it

or another reason to learn how to edit the systems is to add more moons to some of the planets in the sol system to reflect reality

Incidentally, I just had a crazy idea. The content of star systems is generated based on a pseudorandom number algorithm. Where is the seed that determines what kind of planets are where? If we change that seed, we might change the way the game is played in very profound ways. Imagine having to relearn all the best mining spots, for example.

I do that every time I play the game!

well i gave pluto a moon  ;D

and i tried to make it's information show up as correctly as i could, but incidently Charon and pluto share some of the same aspects, like day length, temperature, the mass is hard to get down but thats because i have no idea what "e.s." means.

i also removed earths slave shield and landed on a black surface  :o
aparently there is no planetmap for earth landings  ;D

i was thinkin about a way to remove the earth's slaveshield for after you beat the game, but that's too complicated for me to "code". i also slaveshielded a gas giant to see what it looked like  ;D

alot of things to keep me intersted for a long time...
and i dont think the stars are completely randomly generated, just the planets in them
cause in plandata.c it has the stars already written down, but so far the only things that are not generated are major areas like the mycon egg cases to the melnorme locations, to starbases to the vux beast.

i even tried making my own star, but the game crashed every time i tried to enter it, it showed up as "alpha sol" on the map. lol
i just love toying with things ;D

Yeah, the stars are all hardcoded; the star's location is used as the seed, IIRC.

Therefore: randomly shuffle all the non-plot-related stars, and you'll be left with a vastly different game. Infinite replay value!