The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I found a link to a neat little save game editor for those of you that like to kit out your ship with shiva furnaces and hellbore cannons, without the tedious necessity of mining all those hazardous planets. (I should note that I have finished sc2 many times the honest way, in case anyone cares to say that cheating ruins the game experience..)

http://www.dickweed.0nyx.com/downloads.htm

Thanks to Kohr-ah Death for hosting it (and creating it??)

Anyway it doesn't seem to come with any instructions, and was a pain to get going, so here are some tips, read it to avoid hassles:

1. Download the file and run it, then copy the file from the desktop (or where ever it installs to) and put it in "c:\documents and settings\[current user]\application data\uqm\save. My ass was sore after trying to get it to work, first from the desktop, then from the main uqm directory, only to read the uqm manual and find that the saved games are saved in the directory above. [current user] is the name of the user logged in, probably your name.

2. Savegame "0" in the game is file # 1 in the editor, and savegame 1 is file #2, etc. Again thought it didn't work at first... edit file #1 but load savegame 0 etc...

3. The RU limit appears to be 999999999 (though why would you need that much?), and you can only give yourself as much crew and fuel as you have pods on your ship. Though you can use the editor to alter the pods as well as thrusters.

4. You can give yourself shiva furnaces etc. before you have the technology from the melnormne, but if you sell it, it doesn't seem to give you any rus and you can't get it back (without using the editor again or getting the tech). Don't know if they work in combat or not either I didn't test.

Well that should save you 15-20mins of frustration, if you find anything else interesting about it please let me know. Like how to edit melnorme credits...looks like i have to visit a planet or two afterall...

Have fun conquering the universe while leaving precious resourcses for future generations.

Why everyone would need save game editor? It is very easy to edit savegames with hex editor

For those of us who know hex, that's great. For those more familiar with
point-n-click than 0xB800h, I think  game edit is a good move.

is there a save game editor that can freeze the date?  You see, i'm the opposite of you.  Running around with planet landers is a favorite passtime for me. :3

sticky this please mods? it took me a long time to find an working editor and even longer to get it to work. Also to the creator of the editor, can you please put in a way to edit Melnorme credits?

Freezing the date completely would mess up the game quite badly; slowing it down a lot, however, is possible; try the time mod from the UQM mod (http://sourceforge.net/projects/uqm-mods) project.

Is there a version of that time mod for OS X?

I'm not aware of any OS X binary for it, but the source code is supplied (as required by GPL) and should compile just like the official source code.

Unfortunately, I lack the expertise to pull that off. I don't suppose someone could lend a hand?

Do you have the expertise to add in a way to edit the melnorme credits?

question to the first poster...

Did you find my site by search engine or by a link somewhere on these forums?

And i did not make the save editor, i just had it before gamespy started acting up with its downloads and uploaded it to my created site.

and alot of the code supplied in the mods on my sourceforge site aren't even my own, all except of a small bit of the fmv mod where i added support for the demo video, if i remember correctly Novus added support for the Ship Spins and i just marketed it, and the Death March mod was someone elses code i saw on the forums, implemented and marketed it.  ;D

You remember correctly. :)

If anybody has ideas for a mod i'm listening, the starmap mod i was working on bit the dust, i kept pushing it off untill it finally got deleted by a reformat.

I guess i could retry the starmap, but that was getting pretty dull moving stars around...

i wish i could code really well  ;D

lol dude the link's in your sig! :) I only found a post with your sig in it after much searching though.

And could you or someone please put some info on what the mods actually do in the "notes" section on the mods dl page? I assume the "decleansing" mod stops the kohr-ah attack and allows you to play indefinitely, but what about the others? Even a one-line comment would be great.

Cheers

Oh yeah ;D

About the comments, i'll see if i can get on that, if i remember my password, also in the readmes that come with the zip files it explains what each are.


.:: EDIT ::.

Actually i think it will be easier for me to create a small webpage that explains them, i picked out names that are pretty much self explanatory but i guess an actual explanation does better than the names.
I'll see if i can get it up and running by next week around friday.

If i had the source to the UQM editor i could.
At least i think i could, depends on what methods the editor uses, if it's just hex editing using a simple GUI interface then it'll be easy as adding it in.

hi,i have windows xp proffesionnal i think,and my documents and settings folder has no application data folder.

it has
favourites
my documents
user data
WINDOWS
start menu
desktop
cookies

it has these,but noting else that is useful,i have checked all of these and the save game folder is nowhere to be seen,can any of you help me please.

thank you

you have to goto  "folder options" then "view" then turn the option on to view hidden files and folders.

i just found them,thanks

but now i have another problem,i have placed the save game editor inin the save game folder,but when i try to open the editor it says UQM Editor has experienced an error and needs to close,before anything opens,i tried to open a file with it,but with the same effect,can you help me again?

When I download this AVG freaks out and tells me it is a virus.  How recently was this acquired? Have you checked the binary lately?

Yeah, this is a necro, big one almost, but I wanted to cite and explain a few things here and I think this would be the best way to do it.

I've been hex editing games for over 10 years, probably closer to 15 by this point, and it didn't take me too long to crack the nut that is UQM with my usual tool of choice, UGE.

One thing I DO remember is that Melnorme Credits are not something you can easily edit in the game, HOWEVER, there is a workaround to this.

Your cargo on your ship CAN be edited, and is actually not particularly hard, though the actual and exact addresses escape me at this time.  All you would need to do is make sure you have your cargo filled to the brim with bio-data, then just cruise over to your local friendly Melnorme to turn it all in and rake in some ludicrous amount of their credits, to which point you can now enjoy all the fruits of the skull sweat you spent finding that address that I've forgotton some years ago.

I finished mapping most of the "easy" addresses last night.  Here's the info:

Cargo:
0x14-0x15 = Bio Data
0x3A-0x3B = Common Elements
0x3C-0x3D = Corrosive Elements
0x3E-0x3F = Base Metals
0x40-0x41 = Noble Gasses
0x42-0x43 = Rare Earth Metals
0x44-0x45 = Precious Metals
0x46-0x47 = Radioactive Elements
0x48-0x49 = Exotic Elements

0x16-0x25 = Ship Modules (0x25 is the front, 0x16 is the back)
Values:
16 = Empty
0D = Point Defense
0C = Tracking System
0B = Hellbore Cannon
0A = Fusion Blaster
09 = Ion Bolt Gun
08 = Shiva Furnace
07 = Dynamo Unit
06 = High Efficiency Fuel Tank
05 = Fuel Tank
04 = Storage Bay
03 = Crew Pod

0x16-0x30 = Thrusters (14 = Empty, 01 = Installed)
0x31-0x38 = Turning Engines (15 = Empty, 02 = Installed)

0x39 = Landers (quantity = 0-0A)

NOTE (not sure if this goes without saying): all of the values for modules are in HEX, not decimal.

I did not care about the address for RES units - I just gave myself a bunch of Exotics.
Credits ARE really hard to hack in - I found the address where they appear in the savegame summary, but not where they actually are - as was mentioned, just give yourself a bunch of Bio data (not too much, as it can crash the game / make weird things happen / not give as many as you want). 

I also found the addresses of the ships in your fleet, but they too are only for the savegame summary, not for the actual game data.

If anyone else has been looking at this, I am curious as to the data storage for the credits and fleet ships it gets really interesting when you remove 1 crew member from an otherwise full ship then compare the hex of the two saves (there is an inserted byte at some point, with a ton of values being the same, but shifted).  I'm not great at C/C++ but I looked a little at the source...  Anyone have any insights?

Everything after the savegame summary is stored compressed. There's no one-to-one correspondence of data to location in the save file.

Super cool stuff.  :o Thanks for all the good information in this thread.

Have the savegame files been changed in the last patch/update?  I can't seem to find them to tinker with.

I think they have been switched to XML format?

Not sure about that, I did not check, just remember reading something alike quite some time ago.

Everything is still the same: the savegame format is, as is our intention to change it.

Gah, I'm retarded sometimes...not more than 10 minutes after posting the question I found it.  It looks like Vista has changed the order a bit.  Here it is for future reference

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\uqm\save\

now to figure out how to do some hex editing....

ummm, yeh...

i found out that my archives got a virus and had since changed them out, basically the virus attaches to just about every exe file that is run and is capable of severely slowing down your system, but the latest update to any antivirus can fix it.

Can I ask why certain areas of the editor are Read only? Or how to add a Chmmr ship?

Are you talking about the editor in this thread?
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4672.0