The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

I am making a very simple UQM mod. It's almost finished (I just need to finish the Yehat). It's a very simple mod, I only adjusted basic values, but the changes I made make gameplay rediculous. Here's the changes:

Ur-Quan: The Dreadnought's power has been flipped around from banana-boat to seriously overpowered.
General: Energy recharge rate doubled
Primary: Is now faster (comparable to a Druuge cannon slug), costs only 4 energy, and inflicts 8 damage instead of 6. The speed increase also increases its range.
Secondary: The fighters have not been made any less fragile. (I wanted to, but couldn't find where to do that.) Instead, they have ridiculous speed (comparable to the Slylandro), increased rate of fire, and increased range. Besides that, they cost no energy to launch. Fighters in swarms of 4-6 can now decimate almost any ship, only excluding the Earthling and Chmmr (which can easily be defeated by the Fusion blaster) and the two shielding ships.
Oddly, when the Ur-Quan fights against the Kohr-Ah, the game freezes (it doesn't crash, it just stops doing anything).

Mycon: The Podship was also reversed in power. It is now extremely difficult to defeat the Mycon, although the big shielding ships still have an advandage.
General: Increased crew compliment
Primary: Is now ridiculously fast
Secondary: Now costs only 10 points of energy.

Thraddash: The primary's weapon has its range decreased from excessively large to excessively small (about the range of the Shofixti gun). This makes Thraddash utterly useless.

I made some other little changes, but these are the big ones.

Why?

Why not?

Maybe because I enjoy the ridiculous changes?

I mostly did it because I feel the Ur-Quan and Mycon were seriously underpowered. Mostly, I really think the Dreadnought should be a super-ship that can defeat almost anything. Also, I wanted to fix up the Yehat shielding so it isn't so wasteful of energy.

What did you do to the Yehat shielding?

So far I've just changed SPECIAL_WAIT in hopes that it would work, but what happened wasn't at all what I expected. The default value is 2. When I changed it to 10, by pressing the secondary, the shield forcefully drained all the energy in the shield and kept going a little after that (as if I was holding the secondary down the whole time). When I changed it to 0 or 1, the shield became costless (It went forever as long as you held down Secondary; it also didn't play the sound. Interestingly, when the Terminator had low energy and was hit by a DOGI, the shield disappeared for about a half a second).

What I want to do, though, is make it so it doesn't reactivate the shield if the shield is already up. That way a human would be able to easily abuse the shield in the same way the AI does.

Yeah, I'm kind of with Death 999 on this one.  Is the point now to simply get dominated by the Dreadnought and Podship?

That might actually be pretty fun, although the Slylandro-speed fighters would make the battle very un-fun.

And why did you make the Thraddash useless?

To take away the abusiveness... and because Thraddash isn't fun...

EDIT: I have made an observation. The Thraddash don't become entirely useless. The ideal strategy simply changes from "Stay a huge distance away and fire" to "Charge in from behind. When you get within range, blast the opponent and then zip out before they can hit you. Then recharge your batteries and repeat". Actually, I think I might double the damage that the Mark 6 blaster inflicts (so, 2 damage).

Also, keep in mind that the Thraddash is still strong against Ur-Quan fighter vessels (although it's still difficult to outrun them, being only slightly faster, you can still fry them).

I've just updated my mod and I think I'll post it here.

New changes from the original UQM:

Ur-Quan: Energy regeneration is now twice as fast.
Primary: Now inflicts 10 damage and has twice the lifetime. Only costs 2 energy to use.
Secondary: Costs no energy to use. Fighters are slightly faster and have a longer range (a little less than half the range of the VUX laser).

Chmmr: Now has 6 zapsats instead of 3.

Mycon: Now has more crew
Primary: Is now twice as fast
Secondary: Now costs much less energy. This means that the only way to beat Mycon is to put it under continuous fire.

Kohr-Ah: The limit for shurikens has been increased from 10 to 40.
Secondary: Now has ten hitpoints instead of 100 (Ur-Quan fusion bolts can now defeat, and even penetrate them).

Spathi:
Secondary: Is now twice as fast, making it more reliable

VUX:
Secondary: Now costs no energy. Also hase twice the lifetime.

Thraddash:
Primary: Range has been cut in half and damage has been increased to 2.

Syreen:
Secondary: Range has been extended

Earthling:
Secondary: Now costs only 1 energy and is really fast (like EP's mod).

Druuge:
Secondary: Now charges the battery almost completely

Slylandro:
Primary: Range extended slightly

Orz: Crew compliment increased from 16 to 32
Secondary: Max marines increased from 8 to 16

Androsynth: Crew compliment and battery raised.

Umgah: Now has normal energy regeneration


Download:
Just the important stuff (must be put in your existing UQM directory) (http://www.rocketsoft.gm-school.uni.cc/uploads/uqm-jaychant_add.zip)
NOTE: For some reason, it seems you have to use an argument when starting the game. I personally use the fullscreen argument. In that zip file is a shortcut that does this (just replace the directory with whatever directory yours is in). Or you can create the shorcut yourself. If you do this, right click the shortcut, go to Properties, and in the Target box add " -f" to the end.

Actually I like what you'd done with the Thraddash primary. IF you'd just remove its ability to scoot across the screen with the secondary I think I think you'd made it into a very worthy ship.

A way to fix the Thraddash might be to make the Afterburner cost its entire energy bar to use and last for a longer burst instead of individual puffs, possibly increasing the rate of energy recovery to compensate. You've got less running around all over the place with an empty energy bar and a bit more pure monodirectional speed. Add that to what jaychant's done to the gun and you've got a decent hit n' runner right there.

Its the hit and run nature of thraddash that made it horrible. It should be a medium speed vessel that leaves a trail of fire but cannot scoot across screen.

From what I gather it's the fact that the hit and run doesn't work properly that makes it horrible. This way it would be able to rush in and try to do some damage but also put itself at risk whilst doing so instead of hanging back and sniping, and would have to wait to recharge (ie not firing) to get out at full speed again.

Hey Shiver! If you're reading this (which I doubt) it looks like we've come up with a great Thraddash solution:
1. Range halved
2. Weapon damage increased to 2
3. Afterburner activates when you press up, but it shouldn't be as fast.
(Of course I'm not going to try this because I don't know where to look and I'm too lazy to figure out how to do this)


Thraddash would be useless without its afterburner. Maybe I could make it a little slower, but it would have to stay fast. I probably would only adjust the top speed.

I skim practically every post on here, so yes you can probably get my attention by leaving a message like that. That Torch doesn't particularly impress me. It's going to come out being too weak to be useful. The problem with the default Torch is that the one particular abusive tactic is the only right way to use the ship in PVP. If you try to do anything fun with the ship then boom, you're dead. A more extensive overhaul is needed. I'll get on it myself eventually, but not soon.

The ship tweaks listed in here are all idiotic, but you seem to be at least partially aware of that so I won't lecture you.

I understand it's an idiotic mod. I just wanted to overpower some ships, particularly the Ur-Quan. And I also thought it would be fun, which it is. Besides, I couldn't wait for your balance mod to power up the Ur-Quan. ;)

By the way, I experimented with someone else's idea, to have the shot remain in place like a horn on the ship. (I also, knowing that it would likely die on its first run, made it inflict 8 damage.) I was overall not impressed with the results. A whole armada of 14 ships could only defeat 3 Cyborg-controlled ships. I think the problem is the crew compliment is so low. I think I'll bump up the crew for my mod, maybe to max.

BTW what does DISPLAY_TO_WORLD mean in the source code?

Good.


Bad.


Wrong.


If you can't find that out by yourself, you don't even deserve to look upon UQM's source code.

I had to ask that question, along with many other stupid ones. Then again, I make no secret of being a terrible programmer.

I didn't appreciate that at all. You must be retarded. BTW, I meant the mod is fun to make, not fun to play, though I think it is fun to play as well.

For those of you who aren't just here to say "This is stupid. You're stupid." (which is most of you), I've updated the mod. You can download it here (http://www.rocketsoft.gm-school.uni.cc/uploads/uqm-jaychant.exe). Here is a list of the changes since the previous version:

Thraddash: Crew quadrupled (was 8, is now 32)
Secondary: Max speed has been reduced, while acceleration has almost been tripled (If you're at a dead stop, it takes only 2 flames to get you to max speed). This makes Thraddash extremely useful for a "Blitzkrieg" strategy (use afterburner to charge past opponent and shoot him as you pass) and hit 'n' run.

Chenjesu:
Primary: 16 shards instead of 8 (16 is the max; any amount larger freezes up the game. This is also true for the Kohr-Ah gas clouds)

Mmrnmhrm:
Secondary: Now costs no energy (this was copied from the old version of the Transformer from EP's mod)

Slylandro: Now has more crew

Chmmr: 8 sats instead of 6.

Shiver, how do you like the new Thraddash? I've only tested it against the cyborg, but I find it quite useful now.


I don't think asking what a variable or constant or function means is a stupid question, it just means you don't really want to shuffle through the many text files and thousands of lines of code to find out yourself (especially if you don't know what you're looking for).

I've read a lot of dumb comments on this forum. That must just about make the top ten.

Having bravely tipped my toe into the source code with no programming experience, I can say that having someone point out the seemingly obvious can save a LOT of time and be very helpful.

Jaychant: I wish I could actually answer your question, but I suspect someone else could answer it right off the bat. It would take me a while of ferriting around.

Oh, in case you're not aware in C++ you should be able to right click on a variable or constant and select "go to definition".

I don't. My advice to you is to stop trying to conjure up a Thraddash that's good enough for the balance mod.

Oh well...

Anyways, I forgot to mention something about the VUX that was there since I first put up a download: it now spawns even closer.

I also forgot one more change in the newer one: the Kohr-Ah clouds have returned to normal (I found that the Ur-Quan was too much more powerful than the Kohr-Ah).

Has anyone tried using the Ur-Quan against a particularly fast ship? How about fighting the Kohr-Ah? Both of these are really interesting. Against Kohr-Ah, the whole arena is filled with shurikens.

Hey, sorry for that comment; I tend to lash out when I'm in a bad mood.

Just chiming in to say that I think your mod is pretty pointless, but I think it's great that you'rte poking around in the source. The more people who know how it actually works, the better the cahnces for Cedric and potential other modders to get help. Knowledge is always a good thing.

Personally, I think this is great. Not the mod it self per se, but the fact that jaychant is actually doing something.

Most people who saunter into the forums looking to make a mod/sequel want someone else to program it for them. At least here, jaychant is taking the time to poke around the code and learn something. Perchance it may lead something great down the road -- for UQM or elsewhere.

Good job, I say!

DISPLAY_TO_WORLD is a macro that converts from Display units to World units.

While I figured that out fairly quickly upon examination of the source, it wasn't entirely obvious what all of the various unit systems are. I knew, once, but forgot about five hours after I stopped using it.

Just out of interest:  What IDEs (if any) does everyone use? 

Jaychant, a good IDE can make life much easier particularly if it has some sort of jump to definition functionality.  I'm not sure if you're using one (or can easily use one with the UQM codebase) but I'd suggest Code::Blocks or Visual Studio.  Both have very good navigation and both can handle - sort of - custom make files.

This is the sort of stuff that makes me happy I'm not a programmer.

I "try" to use MinGW for most anything that has to do with programming.
It challenges me better than a GUI operated compiler, i prefer to do things the hard way  ;)

So I guess the next silly question would be: "what is a world unit and what is a display unit"

It sounds like a world unit would be what the game counts in, and a display unit would be pixel on the screen. So when the game has done it's part it has to change the values to display them on screen to the world. But seeing as this is programming, I'm guessing it's much more annoying than that.

Notepad++

You have put your finger upon it.

Dec 12 08:11:44 Elvish_Pillager   There are:
Dec 12 08:12:19 Elvish_Pillager   - 32 velocity units to a world unit
Dec 12 08:12:28 Elvish_Pillager   - 4 world units to a display unit
Dec 12 08:12:36 Elvish_Pillager   - 4 display units to a max-zoom-out pixel
Dec 12 08:12:58 Elvish_Pillager   - 256x240 max-zoom-out pixels to a max-zoom-out view
Dec 12 08:13:13 Elvish_Pillager   - 2x2 max-zoom-out views to the space

A display unit is also equal to the width of a max-zoom-in pixel.

Well if it's also what we use to edit the main files I guess my main program is Notepad2 from sourceforge, not that other one that can't associate it's own files.

Shiver, just curious: what is the new Thraddash design you have that you're not satisfied with?

I always understood your reason for writing the mod, I assume you (jaychant) wanted to explore changing around the ship designs and such. I was confused because there wasn't really a rhyme or reason for some of the changes you've made, aside from creating an ideal Thraddash and a super-powered Ur-Quan.

In particular, the change to the Nemesis is way out of proportion to say, the Druuge ship change. Doubling the crew and max marines of the Orz makes it extremely powerful, (or giving the Chmmr 6 zapsats), and making the Druuge secondary charge up to max energy isn't a very extreme change.

I know the title of the thread is "ridiculous mod", but for any mod to be really fun to play, all ships should be near balance.

I will answer that question along with every other question you have as soon as this migraine headache I've contracted from reading your posts goes away.

The reason I made this mod in the first place was actually because I wanted to be able to abuse the Yehat shield like the Cyborg does. Unfortunately, I still don't know how to do that. I tried increasing SPECIAL_WAIT from 2 to 10, but all that did was force the special to activate like five times in a row before stopping. So I tried changing it to 0 and then 1, but both of those just made the special make no sound and cost no energy (?), although if the energy was extremely low (i.e. 2 and under) and the Yehat was hit by a Chenjesu DOGI, it momentarily lost the shield. (POINT: Does anyone know how to make the Yehat shield only reactivate if the shield isn't already up (i.e. remove the wasteful shielding that occurs when you hold the secondary)?)

On a side note, I wasn't really exploring changes at first, I just think that there are some fundamental errors with the ship designs:

Ur-Quan: The ultimate rulers of the galaxy driving those banana boats? Please. ::)

Yehat: If the Cyborg is able to shield without being wasteful of energy, why can't I? Shouldn't that just be automatic, considering this is the starfaring age?

Mycon: I can regenerate crew, but what use is that if it costs so much? Besides, the damn weapons are much too slow to be of any use!

Thraddash: I don't think the Thraddash generally use a long-range strategy. So why the excessively long range?

My original intention was to fix these errors, but I decided I'd upgrade the rest of the ships as well.

There is merit in fixing the Yehat shield, down-powering the Thraddash and up-powering the Ur-Quan.

The Yehat shield was made next to redundant when SC2 came out. SC1 was played on much slower systems (like 8086) so you didn’t need Jedi reflexes to use it effectively. With either game played on modern/fast systems (i.e post 386), the shield is nigh-on impossible to use. 

Shiver: I’d love to see you address this somehow in your balance mod. The Yehat Terminator should be a powerful ship.

Yes.

Tip: the shield is up when the ship element's life_span is greater than NORMAL_LIFE.

He did address it. The only thing I don't like about it is he also added a penalty. Basically, there's a gap between each shielding 2 frames wide, from what I gather. (This means the Yehat can't shield consistently anymore.)

So, wherever it puts up the shield, I should add an if/then statement, like this?

EDIT: I tried that, but MinGW says that life_span is undeclared. I put that code up there that I guessed in yehat.c, lines 228-251.

EDIT2: I've been looking through the code trying to find out where the effect of initializing the shield is. Unfortunately all I really have to go by are the small amount of comments in the code. Can someone tell me what exactly preprocess and postprocess are? (All of a sudden I don't really want to just be told exactly where I need to look and what to put there. This is rather fun.)

So you want a constant shield when the special is held down?

Meaning you don't like it when it "sputters"?

you could just make it so the energy regenerates faster

I did consider doing that, but there are some things:
- It wouldn't feel the same
- the Cyborg would still be able to abuse the shield much more easily than humans; In fact, it will be able to use the shield indefinitely.

So no. I'm not doing that.

EDIT: Can someone point me in the general direction of where it activates the shield? I can't find it anywhere.

Bounce the Special Weapon cost to 1 and you get the same effect but with sound and it goes off as soon as you let off the button.

those are the 2 easiest ways i can conceive.

the idea that you could use, although it'll take some coding, is making the shield not so invincible, make it so 2 shots from anything will achieve the same as it being shot once without the shield with whatever weapon shot it.

EDIT

I believe line 156-201 deal with the shield activation, but i could be reading it wrong

I don't think you understand: I don't want to change the behavior of the shield. I just want to allow human players to be able to realistically abuse the shield in the same way the cyborg can.

EDIT (in response to your edit): Thanks, I'll look.

EDIT2: Maybe I'm mistaken, by the title "yehat_intelligence" I got the impression that that had to do with the AI. I also see a bunch of statements like PERSUE and the like, which sounds to me like decision-making.

i knew i was reading it wrong  :)


EDIT

Line 324 is exactly when the "SPECIAL" is activated if it helps any  ;)

Also I believe preprocess and postprocess is the entire programming for the shield itself
Preprocess i think is the main and post process is the implementation

again i could be way off

Thanks! I've got it working now! Hooray! ;D

Awesome, glad i could help in some way  ;D