The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Don't know bout you guys, but I had lots of fun playing the PC version with the planet lander cheat.  I finished the game once without cheating, but can honestly say it wasn't as fun.

Will there be an RU cheat of some kind? ;D

There's an RU cheat right now.  Go find some bio-life, just a smidgen will do - the first moon Zeta Centauri 3 has a little, and the planet's not too harsh.  Sell all of your modules except for fuel tanks, but only fill with enough fuel to get to Alpha Centauri.

Meet the Melnorme there and ask for a fillup on fuel.  Instead of charging you for it, they'll GIVE you an extra credit.  Go sell your fuel at the station and repeat.

I have no idea whether this was a bug introduced in the conversion or was originally in the 3DO version.  If the former, it's probably already fixed in 0.2.  If the latter, well, probably after 1.0 is released.

Seriously, though, it is quite possible to play the game without the lander cheat or anything similar and dispense with any need to gather minerals for an extended period of time.

Maybe that is a part of learning the game that you should think about and explore?  Personally I pay very little concern to gathering minerals after I get enough for thrusters and fuel tanks / fuel to start traveling places...  The question is can I learn how to play the game more efficiently so mining isn't as necessary?

Something to think about.

That "lander cheat" is actually a bug and was fixed in a later release of Star Control 2.  And it was never in the 3DO version.

The 3DO version did NOT have any major game-breaking bugs.  I just can't believe how people would think that a released game would have bugs like this.  I believe I recall someone saying he wasn't sure you could beat the Sa-Matra in the 3DO version.

You sure couldn't.  Why, the 3DO version wasn't even a game!  ::)

/me chokes and spits up blood

/me looks at every game released since 1996 and all the patches they've had

/me looks at even EARLIER games and notices they even had patches to fix bugs in SP mode, not even for online issues

/me thinks that you're putting too much faith released products

Sure, there were no major bugs in SC2.  Still, you seem to be implying that released games are mostly bugfree.  Heck, even consoles have bugs in 'em--just not enough time to push out a game before the publisher requires it to be released.

Heck, even by your own admission SC2 was later "fixed" to not allow the lander cheat.  Then you say you don't understand how people would think a released game like that would have a bug like the one they fixed?  

???

Hey, it's a great game and seemed pretty stable, but I'm sure I can find some cases where it'd break.  Actually, recently I tried to run it on an NEC 486DX2/50 (overclocked to 66MHz) that had both a GUS ACE and an SB16.  And some old Western Digital SCSI card running the HDD.  With 64 MB of parity RAM.  The old SC2 just wouldn't work, the machine froze.  In an ideal world...

(and yes, I've tried to figure out WHY it's not working but have since gotten distracted with UQM)

Oops.  I was mostly talking about consoles, but I guess I didn't say that.

Isn't the lander bug where you just sell when you have zero landers and you get RU and the landers loop around to 65535?  If so, then even by today's PC game standards, that's a rather large and serious highly visible bug for a first release of the game.

Yeah, how come console games never need patches or fixes? Computer games are always released unpolished because of the ability to modify the game afterwards through patches and such. In short, this has become a crutch which I think has impeded the success of computer games (at least compared to console.)

Now if I'm remembering this correctly it's even told in the game manual: you can't have both SB & GUS installed. They tell you to remove one or the other.. :)  I'm too lazy though to search for the manual to verify it right now, the game is too well stored somewhere.

As a matter of fact I tried it with ACE "some" years back and it hung even without the blaster so I think the GUS support in the game is crappy. Again I'm not sure of my memories but I think it was known and to be corrected in some update which unfortunately never came. Try it with just the SB and I bet it'll work, the game wasn't that picky after all.

But hey, guys (going back to the topic), the game is so perfect fun that any cheats would just ruin it! ;)  I'm hooked. Again... And now back to Ur-Quan hunt. Again...

Tribes 2
NeverWinter Nights

Both games have had a dumptruck load of bugs, boardering the unfinished phase.

I cant figure out how to get the melnorme to give me lots of fuel, they only give me like 2 fuels usually :-/

It is much much much easier to ensure there are no bugs in a console release as everyone has almost exactly the same hardware and software.  The PC gaming market is already losing ground to consoles despite their inferior capabilities in all other areas (besides consoles being dirt cheap, I suppose).  I'd rather game companies not start factoring the massive amount of work and testing it would take to release perfect PC games for everyone's computer configuration past and future (assuming that's even possible ^^).

If you really feel the need to cheat, by the way, it takes about five minutes to type "memory search cheat" in google and download one of the many programs capable of searching out and tweaking resources/crew/fuel while the game is running.  Comparing and hex editing save game files for fun and profit also takes incredibly little effort.

In short, this game is open-source.  So if you can't figure out how to cheat on your own, then you don't deserve to.  :P

To get the Melnorme to give you as much fuel as you want, simply tell them to fill all your fuel tanks to maximum capacity (the last option except for being done buying).  This will work as long as you have any fuel; if you have no fuel in your tanks they'll tell you your tanks won't hold that much!  (So buy 1 unit and then the rest; just be sure you have at least 1 credit.)

Consoles don't NEED patches because they often CANNOT be patched.  So the developers have one shot to get it right.  It's easier to debug on only one static set of hardware and OS/drivers, so that's one factor.  I believe most console games are not released until they are done ENOUGH so that there are no crashing issues, though there are gameplay bugs that pop up from time to time in various console games.

PCs are under more pressure to deliver a product by X date from the publisher.  And, as you said, the ability to patch a game IS a bit of a crutch.  I wonder if consoles will have the same patchitis when they have their own hard drives (xbox, PS2, PS3?)  Plus, testing for often multiple platforms (PC and Linux) and a myriad of hardware (ATI, nvidia, older stuff like 3dfx, Matrox) and software (Win9x, Win2K, WinXP, various drivers from different vendors) makes this process a living hell.

To be totally safe and check everything by playing through a game entirely, you need one tester to play the game through once for a console.  For a PC, you need a team of testers on various machines trying things out.  That's a gross oversimlification, but you get the idea.  All of the sudden testing/quality-assurance goes from a group of, what, 5 people to a group of 20.  Costs go up, testing time goes up, pain goes up.

I hate that type of attitude.  I don't know if you mean it in jest, but that's the type of attitude I often see from elitist *nix programmers who can't be assed to make something more user-friendly.  "Oh, if you need to change something, just recode that part and recompile things."  Basically, a cop-out for being lazy while attempting to shift the focus onto the person asking for a feature or bugfix by implying that the USER should be able to program and compile source code to get a certain feature and also implying that a person who cannot do that is a waste of skin.

That being said, I hope someone just makes an external savegame editor as that will satisfy just about everyone who just wants to bump up their RU and credits.

Your attitude is wrong here. These people do the game for free. You can choose whether to play it or not. And yes, cheat is not a bugfix.

I personally don't see the point of cheating in *this* game, although I do in most others.  Starcon is half gathering/exploring and half interaction with other species.  Most people who ask about cheats are looking for infinite money....but that's like not playing half the game !

Well, maybe it's just me :-P

Well obviously I was joking.

But RU cheats are boring anyway.  What you can do with the source is so much more fun, like dodging between planets in combat as dozens of asteroids come knocking you off course, then firing a stream of Earthling Cruiser missiles out the front and sides of your Pkunk Fury, then dodging as the missiles last long enough to wrap around your enemy several times.

If you cheat without exploiting the source code, you don't know what you're missing!

Assuming this is directed to me, yeah, so?  Lots of people do lots of work for free.  Besides, I wasn't saying that the UQM crew had to treat adding cheating ability as a feature in UQM--I'm talking about the apathy of *nix coders in general (based on my personal experience with many of them) towards user interface considerations and ease-of-use.

I mean, it's part of *nix itself--for example, a case-sensitive file system?  What USER would draw a distinction between "my resume.txt" and "My resume.txt"?  To the user it's the same file, why should they bother with case?  That type of pain is fine for an academic or scientific setting, but for an end-user perspective it's pure hell.  And no, I don't expect *nix programmers who spend all day writing backends to medical simulations to have to care about user interface, I'm more referring to *nix programmers who try to make applications geared towards the end-user and then refuse to change a broken interface when the end-users complain.

Windows programmers run into this less because everything is pretty little windows--but there are plenty of bad UI designs for Windows.  Hell, even Apple screws up--QuickTime 4 broke their own UI guidelines, if I recall, and they haven't looked back from there.  

I apologize for the rant.

UQM is at .1 for the release.  There are some UI considerations from the PC version that I think would be a better fit for UQM and have somewhat stated that in a thread a while back.  However, I don't expect UI to be a large concern this early in the project and am certainly not harping on these poor overworked developers.  I've worked on collaborative online projects before and I know how hard it is sometimes to get content for the code, to get features implemented, to get quality assurance done, etc.  

I respect the work that has been done.  However, just because they are doing this on their free time doesn't mean we shouldn't post bug reports and constructive critisicm (key word being constructive).  Yeah, I can choose whether or not to play UQM.  But they can choose whether or not to pay attention to my posts or, if I get too bothersome, just ban me from the messageboard.

Burpmaster:  I think RU cheats are what most people would want.  I say this because new people often need help getting their ship to the point where they don't get ripped up by the Sylandro and sometimes older players just want to skip the outfitting and go right into the plot without spending a year getting your ship outfitted.  The mucking around with ships would be cool, a ship editor or something, but I don't know how easy that would be to pull off.  Heh, a 3rd-party ship editor that can mix-and-match pieces and abilities ala Impossible Creatures would be zany!

I'm not a fan of the "oh just get the source and compile it" mantra since I primarily use Windows.  If you haven't noticed from the posts in these forums from other Windows users, compiling things under Windows is like pulling teeth without anesthetic--it hurts and leaves you without teeth.  Errr... you get the idea.

If the intended audience for UQM is largely or only *nix users, ok, that attitude fits.  But Windows gamers far outweigh *nix gamers so you'd have to assume that you'd have more Windows players for the game--and their requests and abilities would be far different than, say, the typical *nix gamer.  I know about three *nix gamers who can also code up a storm.  Changing ships?  No problem.  I know about 30 windows gamers who like to play games.  Doing anything with the source code?  Hah hah!  I don't think so.  

Like I said, I think it's just a bad attitude in general.  Ok, you meant it in jest but that's just the type of attitude I run into most often with *nix programmers and proponents--if you can't edit and recompile the source, well, you're too stupid to live.  Blah.  If I wanted to be insulted I'd play Counter Strike.  ;)

Hi Everybody. I made a (windows) UQM save game editor.
I'm new here, is there anywhere I should/could upload it?

Hi Mu,

Welcome!  How well does it work and how much does it allow you to edit?  I can host at PNF if you are in need of webspace and it works well. ;D

It's nothing fancy, it reads a POKE.DAT file, which can be added to or modifed to add more cheats. I added R.U., Crew(flagship) , and fuel. It's a small MFC windows dialog, and works well enough as long as the user enters sensible values,(i.e. don't give yourself more crew than you can hold, etc.). It's ~14 kb zipped, be glad to send it.

It's an open source, I believe there shouldn't be any probs modify a small cheat like add unlimited ru.

Hi again. I made a new (version 2) save game editor.
You can change R.U., fuel, crew, landers, main ship modules,(weapons,fuel tanks, etc.), thrusters, and turning jets.
It's got a better interface and works well.
Be glad to share it, anyway.

Mu that would rock, could you send it to senor-barborito@zombieworld.com please?

Thanks so much!
--SB

yeah, and plz send it to me also  ;D
ultimate_goro@hotmail.com

Send it here, too, and I'll see if I can't host it on my little website thingy. I am painfully bored with mining and I can't stand to mine another planet.

fakeplasticdragon@hotmail.com

Hi. I sent it to you 3 guys above, forgot to mention it here.

I have hosted it for all who want to download it.

http://Aftermath36.homestead.com/fi
les/UQMEditor2.zip

CORRECTION: THIS IS THE ACTUAL LINK

http://Aftermath36.homestead.com/files/UQMEditor2.zip

OHHDEAR,  thank you very much for putting that up.

Hey Mu, great idea man send me a copy too!

anubis3211@yahoo.com
thanks man,
tttp

Mu,

I got your e-mail and I'll post this up on PNF too as soon as I get off my lazy butt!  ;)

Thanks Chad, that would be an honor.