The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hello,

A week ago, I decided to start up a blog dedicated to Star Control.  I know that there hasn't been a lot of updates in the name of Star Control, and I wanted to create a blog that is frequently updated where I share cool videos, pictures and reflect on anything related to Star Control.  So far, I've received lots of feedback about my blog and it makes me glad that I started it.

Please check it out.  starcontroller.com (http://starcontroller.com)

I recently wrote an article about continuing to support Toys for Bob and even some wonderful insight from Serge (Meep-Eep) about this topic.  Without his feedback, the article wouldn't have been the same.

I'll be posting more soon once I get the chance.  Enjoy!

I stumbled upon your blog earlier this week, and I have to say that I'm impressed. While it's still early days, you seem to be incredibly productive. I also like that you manage to delve into all the available sources, with material ranging from ZEX plushies to battle videos.

Thanks.  I'll try to squeeze in another "did you know" segment if I ever get the time to write one up.

I was wondering if someone could help me some website testing.  If you want to help, this is all you need to do:

1. Open a browser window.
2. Clear the browser cache.
3. Go to starcontroller.com and play any YouTube video there.
4. Is there sound?  Does the video play from start to finish?  Does the video work for you?
5.  Please post the results here, whether or not it worked out.  That way, I can investigate this issue more.  I tried 2 computers in my house and I'm just wondering if it's happening to anyone else.  Please list the browser you used as well.

Thank you so much, and keep checking the blog.

I've checked from work using IE , worked fine . Three of the bottom fanart pictures don't show up correctly - shifted to up and  left  , only the lower right corner is showing . I'll check back home from FF and append this reply .

EDIT : Checked in FireFox , all looks fine .

Using flash-player-9.0.124.0-10.1 (latest stable) on OpenSUSE 11.0, Flash videos usually do not work in MozillaFirefox-3.0.1-0.1 (with nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.5.99.20071225-22.2), opera-9.51-7.1, or Konqueror from kdebase3-3.5.9-65.2; usually I just get a grey box (white in Opera) where the Flash plugin should be doing its thing (on both Youtube videos and deviantART pics). Sometimes, the Youtube player Flash applet loads and its interface seems to be OK (but no video freeze frame and big Play button is shown), but clicking Play on the controls has no effect other than the button doing its "click" animation. Occasionally, everything works; the fewer videos on a page, the better it seems to work.

Also, most of the available video plugins for Linux Firefox seem to automatically play all the (non-Flash) videos on the page; mplayerplug-in-3.55-0.pm.1 is the only one I could find that doesn't (however, it buffers all the videos on page load!); the AVIs seem to play fine in it.

Flash on Linux has been in a constant state of "sort of working" for years; nspluginwrapper (http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/nspluginwrapper) at least ensures that Flash crashing doesn't take out Firefox like it used to (by running Flash as a separate process; it's primary task is to allow you to run 32-bit only plugins on a 64-bit browser).

Anyway, I'd put each video on a separate page or hide them by default; the layout is too cluttered for my taste and you have to do a lot of scrolling or clicking to see earlier posts.

I looked at the code that I used to embed the images from deviantArt and there was a useless field.  After I removed it, they started to work properly in Internet Explorer.  Thanks for point this one out Alvarin.

In the future, I'll start testing with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.  If Safari is stable enough in Windows, I'll start using that too.  I've been busy with other things and I'll try to stick with at least 1 post per day.

Thanks for your feedback everyone.  If there's any other issues that you notice on my blog, please let me know and I'll be glad to look at it.

Now for that YouTube issue...

I wanted to do something like this a while back, but never had your drive. One thing I wanted to do was review modern video games by the light of StarControl 1/2. Had this whole rubric involving story, bright colors, clever dialogue, and mixed genre's. I had basically decided that unless a game was StarControl 1/2 it would never get a perfect score.

I'm sure I still have the original document where I had written up the details.