The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

First of all, because I'm new here, I want to say hello to all the people on this forum, tnx for letting me join. So hello. :D I'm playing UQM for some time now, and I must say that I'm impressed with it. The game simply put kicks @$$, and is on its way to reconfigure my top 5 for best games ever and claim it's rightful place side by side with Fallout2, Heroes3, MoO2 and Arcanum. Piece of art. But unfortunately,  two days ago I encountered a problem - the game failed to start and this warning popped up:

"The Ur-Quan Masters encountered a fatal error.
Part of the log follows:

The Ur-Quan Masters c0.6.2 (compiled Jan 15 2007 13:56:34)
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY;
for details see the included 'COPYING' file.

Netplay protocol version 0.3. Requiring remote UQM version 0.5.4.
Couldn't initialize OpenAL: 40961
Sound driver initialize failed.
This may happen when a soundtrack is not present or not available.
NOTICE: Try running UQM with '--sound=none' option"

does anyone know how can I fix this problem?is this some common game bug or not?anyone else encountered it?
I reinstalled the game like 5 times, sound drivers too. I wanted to disable sound but failed to find any config file:p Each time I try to start UMQ, it  just happens again. Over and over. And I can't find the reason, except that my computer hates me more than usual. I don't know how to solve this problem. And I REALLY want to play this game through. Several times. At least. Please help.

Second, I was wondering - is there some sort of game editor? Like for putting new races, ships, tech, text/speech  and such? As an eternal fan of Master of Orion saga (but not MoO3) I came upon idea to make Star Control mod with MoO backstory/plotline/universe, but dunno where to start:P any bit of info would be very much appreciated!

tnx for reading this trough, and I hope that someone will help ;D

p.s.-I apologize for errors in grammar/spelling my english is not all that good

The OpenAL library is not without its problems. It has been known to cause problems for some people. The easiest way to turn off OpenAL mode is to just throw away your config file. See here (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/The_Ur-Quan_Masters_Technical_FAQ#Where_are_my_settings_stored.3F) on how to find it.
 
As for making your own mods, there is no easy way. You can do it, but you'd have to dive into the source code itself. If you decide to do so, I'd be happy to give you some pointers.

As meep-eep mentioned, standard OpenAL fails horribly on some systems. We're looking into replacing it with a more stable version (see bug 1031 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=1031)).

By the way, uninstalling or reinstalling UQM doesn't affect settings, saved games or anything like that. Making that an uninstall option could be a good idea.

This is really a side effect of bug 676 (https://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=676); the user is expected to disable sound from the command line. This made sense in 2005 before you could change settings in-game (and with a primarily Unix hacker user base), but it's really annoying now.

Many tnx  Novus and meep-eep, you helped me a lot. I was able to start UQM successfully by erasing '--remix pack' from the command line and inserting '--sound=none' and resetting it later. The game works as before, but unfortunately with no dialog sound (gamespeak?) :'( ah, well...:P

Me and some friends (also HC fans) are seriously considering to start modifing UQM -> MoO2 universe so any advice is welcomed! Btw, could you point me to some threads that discuss novice and advanced game modding? tnx again.

This either means the voice package is missing (if so, just put it in the same directory as the base content package), or voice is turned off (try increasing speech volume in the sound options in the setup menu).