The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hi all,

I haven't played the 3DO version, so I don't know if this is a bug or if it was always present. Whenever I fight an Ur-Quan Dreadnought using a Spathi Eluder, I am sometimes unable to see the Ur-Quan fighters. My guess is that the code used to scale the objects in the melee screen sometimes erases objects that are very small.

I am using yesterday's (12/18/2002) CVS build on Win32.

Thanks,
--OldShofixti

I see this as well.  Any opponent.  It seems as though they hit a certain angle or something and BOOM can't see 'em.

I'm in 1024x768 OpenGL mode with bilinear smoothing.

I guess a check to see if this relates to SDL's scaling or something is to play it in software 320x200.

I have the same bug too, but it is not only the Ur-Quan fighters, at least also the Utwig's bullets occasionally disappear as well.

Running with default settings on the windows executable from these forums (dated 12/12/2002) and cvs content from 12/13/2002.

Utwig bullets, Yehat bullets, Ur-Quan fighters... all have this problem.  Basically anything small seen at large zoom out will be invisible.

And now that I'm looking for it, at longer ranges and when you're at a certain angle, the Orz ship has parts disappear as well, I believe.

Definitely a result of scaling. I don't know how straighforward the graphic code port is, but I would at least expect the 3DO version to contain some sort of mipmapping-like algorithm to prevent this sort of thing, otherwise the game would be unplayable.

As you know the PC version does not suffer from this, because it merely has several zoom levels; UQM should probably feature a "trilinear filtering"-like method of scaling, where you have several versions of each sprite with varying sizes, and the scaling interpolates between them as it scales the battlefield. This would definitely adveresely affect performance, but since UQM is 2D, I don't expect there to be a big difference on modern machines; moreover, since the code uses OpenGL (at least as far as I remember from the last time I had a look at it, which was in my last proper vacation in September...) this should easily be done in hardware...?

Melee scaling problems are known and we'll try to fix them eventually (current routine just scales 8-bit surfaces using nearest neighbor method, etc).

It cannot be done directly with opengl with our current pipeline for various reasons.

probably resolution problem.