The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Net melee is--let's be honest here--a thing of limited appeal within a small fan community dedicated to an obscure video game. Knowing well in advance that the pay-off would not nearly match the amount of effort required, what was I trying to achieve by overhauling it? Maybe a sense of closure. I'm not sure why I did this, really. There's no point getting sentimental about it in any case. Before I get down to brass tacks I need to thank a few people. This project would not have gone anywhere without extensive coding assitance from Elvish Pillager, fossil, Meep-Eep and McMartin. A few of the new features were either Elvish Pillager's idea or something he sat down and made at my request. I should also thank Gekko for hosting my files and playing hundreds of test bouts against me. A test bout isn't much good unless both players are very skilled and play their best, so these sessions could often be very gruelling. At least a dozen other people stopped in #uqm-arena and played a test bout with me at some point from the time I started months ago up until this moment, so thanks to all of them as well.

The balance mod could also be described as "Shiver's Bells and Whistles Mod" at this point because, holy crap, just take a look at the change log. Nevertheless, the focus of this project was to make every ship in the entire melee line-up useful. In order to accomplish this, the various ships were strengthened or weakened so that every last one of them would be moderately effective at a high level of play. This mod is not suited for Star Control's main game, nor melee against the cyborg. Game balance may be the goal of the project, but many adjustments have been made for the sake of aesthetics or continuity. This mod is probably not 100% perfect as of yet, though I am positive that game balance is better than in default Star Control 2. Expect a 1.01 release at some point in the future.

Ready to get started? All the information you need is up on the Ultronomicon:

• The Change Log (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Change_Log)

• Installation Instructions (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation)

MODERATOR EDIT: The current version is 1.22

Even though I've never been a big melee fan, I have to say that this looks really exciting. Kudos on managing to bring a big mod to fruition. Seriously, you've done an amazing amount of work here. I guess I'll have to download it and try the new Traddash out.

I downloaded your code, and compiled it on my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop, fired it up and started a test game against the computer.

Everything seemed to work well enough until the computer chose a VUX to warp in, and then the game crashed. Lather, rinse, repeat. Same thing. Other ships so far haven't given me a problem. No clue if this behavior happens on windows or whatever, but figured I'd report it.

That's curious. The AI is fine on Windows with any ship. Are you sure you've got the effects package in your game? The VUX Intuder has another sound effect which the code calls for. I'll see what I can do to fix that if others have the same problem. AI is the very lowest of my priorities, but crash bugs do need to be stamped out.

Good call. The effects package isn't getting loaded. Not sure why though. I'm launching it with the addon flag.


Anyway, I'll try figuring out why the addon is being ignored. Thanks for the help.

Edit: Hm. Tried unzipping the effects directly on top of the content directory, which gave the Ur-Quan green fighters (which it didn't have before), but the VUX is still crashing.

Ooh. This doesn't change the practical issues of my generally being unable to play, but these look like very good changes.

Hurrah!

Seems I've found a glitch - Thraddash's main weapon sometimes explodes in a white square about the size of a ship. All other effects seem to be ok.

I suspect you're using an old effects package and/or need to replace your .dll files. Gekko doesn't have the correct SDL.dll hosted anywhere, but I do: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?lm5kmjvq4n1 . Only people I've sent beta versions of the mod need to worry about faulty .dll files at all.

Finally, a download! I've been waiting so long!

Can't wait to see the new ships!

EDIT: I really like the new Ur-Quan (just as I expected), but I was quite disappointed by the sound you replaced the zap sound with. You claim it's more "intimidating", but I think it just sounds quieter and more like an engine than a laser weapon. The good news is, that was the only thing I didn't really like, besides the new Thraddash weapon sound and the new Ur-Quan fighter look. (In other words, the mod is great, I just don't like your selection of sounds and graphics.)

Replaced the old SDL.dll with yours. The glitch is still there :-X

Well done, Shiver. I like the new Chenjesu and Illwrath a lot. I've only played the mod for about 45 minutes but seems like a big improvement all around.

I can't wait to try Ilwrath against a human (in net melee, of course). It would be so fun, creeping around them like a shark and avoiding their shots until you get the oppertunity, and then, BURRRN!!!!!

Will have to give this a try at some point when I get the time. All in all, looks pretty interesting.

Love it; shrapnel spamming as Chenjesu looks REALLY COOL.

This is really good work.  The changes to the Skiff and Torch were really needed (and the knockback effect on the new Torch weapon is very fun!).

However, I do have a bug to report. I'm not entirely sure what specifically happens to cause it, but some ways into a battle with a Dreadnought, a sync error often crops up. So far, it's the only ship I've seen that causes an error. To the extent of my testing, it's always when fighters are deployed, usually a lot of them. It probably has something to do with the new fighter AI behaviour?

I wouldn't be too surprised if this turned out to be the case. The Dreadnought's code is stupidly complicated now. It may need simplifying.

Yes! This is great news. I'm not sure when I'll have the time to play the mod (more), but I hope it'll be soon.

--Eino

Sometimes when fighters are launched, they don't go anywhere for a bit, just stick around near the Dreadnought. I first thought it was the feature where a cloud of defensive fighters is launched, but I saw that you took that out. At a guess, it might be something to do with the alterations to the pursuit instructions, but it's your code so you'll know best what to do.

If you had read the Ur-Quan section of the change log or the Ur-Quan section of gameplay tips you would know that fighter idle behavior kicks in when the enemy ship is very far away. I can't really blame you for not reading either given that the former is an unbelievably huge wall of text and the latter is nonessential, but the question is still mildly irritating. I might possibly change fighter behavior at some point.

I don't think the fighters need much more tweaking. The behavior is great. One thing I really like is the fact that small, weak ships can't just evade fighters and shoot at them with their small guns anymore, lending some usefulness to the fighters against these ships. The gathering at the Dreadnought makes it harder for them to die because of time, which is good.

However, maybe a recall signal like the Orz one would be great.

In future versions of UQM will this mod be included?  If so, will we have the option to play without the mod if we so see fit?

If I understand your question, no the mod isn't in anyway an official part of UQM and it probably won't ever be. But you already have the option to run either base UQM or the mod with a single installation -- just run uqm.exe instead of the shortcut to uqm-balance.exe.

Whoa, how did this thread escape my attention for so long?  In any case, this is awesome and I look forward to playing it.  On a related note, I hope that the Macintosh version is not too long of a wait.

Congratulations to Shiver (and to all others involved) for this staggering achievement.

In reference to that mac (or other version)... I'll see what I can do. I've built uqm before.

Nic has the Mac stuff ready on his page (http://www.submedia.net/uqm/). This Mac build is error-ridden, though. VUX limpets will crash the game for reasons beyond my understanding.

I don't think I'm going to update the mod (fix the intermittent Ur-Quan desync, poke ship stats, etc) until post UQM 0.7.

Error-ridden?  Don't be so dramatic.

The lone crash bug reported so far has been found and corrected.  The game should be fully playable now.

http://www.submedia.net/uqm/

ZOMG.

The new Ur-Quan are scary. Those fighters sure take care of themselves a lot better. The energy drain is vicious.

The Supox are one tenth as hard to use as they used to be.

The Androsynth look substantially cooler.

I haven't played enough with the Thraddash to get a good feel for them in normal matches yet, but they sure look interesting.

Squashing the Ur-Quan desync bug was a stroll through hell (Even core team members couldn't figure out what was wrong with my code :( ), but it's done. I'm not going to upload a new official version just yet for there are a few things I'm experimenting with. For one thing, I want to make another viable counter to Kohr-Ah so that Utwig stops being a mandatory fleet addition. If anyone has any ideas, throw them out here I guess. For reference, Utwig is effective against Kohr-Ah because Kohr-Ah's primary weapon leaves litter for it to collect and recharge itself.

Whatever happened to Spathi as an effective counter against Kohr-Ah? And if it was found to be a bad counter, improving it would be a good place to start.

Spathi is still just as effective, but thing is, players never mindlessly chase you (unless it's me getting impatient). I've actually experimented with making the BUTT missiles faster, but it made the Eluder much too powerful.

Net melee happened to it. Spathi has already been given a good niche in the mod, but I will take this idea into consideration.

One possibility on making the BUTTS more effective without being broken would be introducing sway so they might get around blades. Might be ineffective, might not.

Unless you're on a Mac, the 1.10 update is ready. Although I don't think anyone is even familiar with everything 1.0 does, here is the list of changes from 1.00 to 1.10:



Chenjesu: Price has been lowered to 24.

Kohr-Ah: Special exceptions involving Mycon and Kohr-Ah weapon collisions rolled back.

Pkunk: Respawn chance begins at 75% and drops by 10% per respawn. Price has been set to 20.

Mycon: Top speed lowered from 27 to 26. Plasmoid energy cost returned from 21 back to 20. Ship price increased to 16. Special exceptions involving Mycon and Kohr-Ah weapon collisions rolled back.

Syreen: Special energy cost increased from 6 to 9. Special cooldown increased from 20 to 28.

Thraddash: Very slight primary weapon range increase.

Ur-Quan: The desync bug has been fixed. The fighter idle behavior that occurs when at long distances from the enemy ship has been axed. Fighter energy drain removed. Fighter launch cost decreased from 5-per-Fighter to (4-per-Fighter + 2).

Utwig: The extra energy boost from Kohr-Ah buzzsaws has been axed. Maximum battery size increased from 20 to 26. Starting energy remains at 10. Price has been raised from 22 to 24.

VUX: Price raised from 12 to 14.

Yehat: Price raised to 18. Twin Pulse Cannon projectiles are now partially affected by the Terminator's velocity. Shield timer increased from 10 to 11 and battery freeze timer which occurs upon shielding also increased by 1 point to match.

Zoq-Fot-Pik: Tongue length increased substantially. Acceleration increased from 10 to 11. Top speed increased from 40 to 44. Price raised from 6 to 8.



Enjoy.

Shiver, you act as if nobody likes your mod.

Personally, I think your mod is the best mod anyone has ever created. I never play vanilla UQM in favor of your mod, and it's not just because vanilla UQM keeps crashing on my computer ever since I created my stupid little UQM mods. Your mod makes the game a whole lot more fun. You (and whoever helped you) did an excellent job.

The only thing is, since I don't have an IRC client on my Windows computer, I am unable to connect for a Shiver mod matchup.

I'm not sure if I like the Utwig getting upgraded and priced up, it just doesn't feel right from a story standpoint for the Utwig to be the same value as the Chenjesu...though I know that's not a big deal.

I just want to say that I love the Dreadnought overhaul. The Ur-quan has always been one of my favorite ships but I knew I was handicapping myself by taking it instead of the Chmmr or Kohr-ah, now it's a good pick. The same is also true with the Mycon and Yehat, though I'm not used to the Yehat's new shield yet.

That Pkunk respawn change seems pretty big, wasn't it 50% before? It'll take two deaths before its chances drop below the original...but I haven't played online in a long time.

Now about the three little guys...it would be nice for point rounding if they went 4-6-8. I would rather the ZFP be made useful without pricing it up and the Umgah dropped to 4, but if you can't do that with the ZFP that's okay. The Umgah needs something though - a drop to 4, a cone range increase, getting its energy back faster, maybe a mix of those - I don't know. It shouldn't be buffed enough that it needs a price hike though, unless that's really the only thing that works.

http://www.mibbit.com/chat/

Online IRC client. Enjoy ;D

The Utwig are seen as a powerful, advanced species. It makes perfect sense that its ship costs as much as Chenjesu. If you think about it, Utwig's war technology is actually more advanced than Chenjesu's.

The Pkunk respawn is definitely huge. I like it. I tried a fleet of all Pkunk against AI controlled 300 Point Armada (which is really 290 points). Most of the Pkunk ships respawned at least once. It made the Pkunk respawn much more useful from the user's standpoint, but due to the chance decrease, it made it less irritating from the opponent standpoint. As a side note, it actually takes 3 respawns to drop the chance below (2 respawns drops it even). ;)

I don't think the Umgah should be dropped down to a price of 4. It takes a lot of skill to use, but the Umgah can be devastating in the right hands. Dropping it to a price of 4 would take away the balance. If you want Umgah to be useful, practice against AI zipping in close to them and firing (you will also want to practice with humans, but the AI should help you with aiming the retro-propulsion).


Heh... Thanks! I WAS going to look for one. I just didn't get around to doing it.

Oh, I haven't posted here yet.

Great job you've done there, Shiver. Loving the new(est) Dreadnought, and the Torch is loads of fun. I seem to suck with the Skiff though. :-\


Anyhoo, I calculated the chances of Fury respawning in both vanilla UQM and the mod:

Respawns	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9 or more
Vanilla	50%	25%	12.50%	6.25%	~3.13%	~1.56%	~0.78%	~0.39%	~0.20%	~0.20%
Mod	25%	26.25%	~21.94%	~14.75%	~7.84%	~3.17%	~0.90%	~0.15%	~0.01%	0%

So it looks like you'd respawn about one more time on average.

Hang on a sec, Shiver says that the changes of a respawn are 75%. You have it as 25%?

I figure it to be like so:

Respawns	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	>9/b]
Vanilla	50%	25%	12.50%	6.25%	3.13%	1.56%	0.78%	0.39%	0.20%	0.20%
Mod	75%	48.75%	26.81%	12.07%	4.22%	1.06%	0.16%	0.01%	0.00%	0.00%

With vanilla you get on average 1 re-spawn. With the mod, its 1.68

Actually, in vanilla you get an average of 0.5 spawns...

Interesting questions, Mormont.




Utwig gave the Kohr-Ah a bloody nose. That's pretty ace story-wise as far as I can tell. The Utwig upgrade is minor and only helps against two enemies it was already effective against due to their clumsy, overwhelming firepower. Those two ships are, of course, Chmmr and Kohr-Ah.




4 point Umgah is off the table. Other options are worth considering, though any upgrades to fuel recovery or reverse zip longevity bring a very real risk of turning Umgah into an Androsynth-killer. Currently Androsynth can tire out and whittle down Umgah by harassing it with bubbles. If it can't do that, it has to comet and probably wind up dead by cone + retropropulsion combo. I do not feel inclined to explain the mechanics in more detail but that match-up can go wrong despite small adjustments.

ZFP is going to be under scrutiny. It was useful before. I gave it some buffs to make it better against Mycon. That slight speed increase might allow ZFP to beat down a well played VUX, which is not desirable. If that's not the case, I'll be happy with it exactly as it is.



Resh Aleph's Pkunk numbers are right.

No you dont, you get an average of 1. Think about it

Okay, now I’m concerned. Is there something I’m not seeing here?

When you say the chances of re-spawning are drop by 10% each time, I figured you meant that 2nd re-spawn was 65%, 3rd 55% etc

So I’m guessing that’s wrong, and you mean that 2nd re-spawn is less 10% of 75%? Which would be a 67.5% chance?

If so how, does that translate into Resh Aleph’s numbers? Surely if the 1st chance of re-spawn is 75% why does Resh give 25%?

And what does that squiggly line mean?

Sorry to harp on about this but it concerns me that I don’t understand

The tilde (or as you call it the "squiggly line", or ~) means "approximately". Personally I am also curious as to how Resh Aleph's number's are correct. I also don't get how a 50% chance of respawn averages at 1 respawn for each ship.

Because every time you respawn, you have another half chance again of respawning.

Just grab a coin and use that to decide whether a pkunk respawns or not. there will be about the same number of respawns, as actual pkunk battles.

If you were only allowed ONE respawn, you would be correct. But there is no limit tto the number of times you can respawn

You are right in that 75% is the chance for respawning at least once. I should've clarified that what I calculated in the table (except the last column) is the chance for respawning exactly x times. So 26.25% is the chance for respawning exactly once: 75% (success at first respawn) times 55% 35% (failure at second respawn).

I'm not sure how to calculate the average case though.

Edit: I ran a little simulation. When examining a large number of Fury matches, the number of respawns appears to average at 1 for vanilla UQM and a bit over 1.68 for the mod.

Edit #2: Fixed 55% to 35% (thanks Luki!).

I guess I just don't understand how probability works.

If think you've got a slight misstatement there even though your math is right. For the benefit of jaychant (in case this makes it any clearer) I'll walk through it, as I understand it. The probability for resurrecting once is 0.75. The probability for dying after that is 1-0.65=0.35. So the probability of respawning once and then dying should be 0.75*0.35=0,2625 or 26,25%. But the probability of dying after your first respawn is 35% (you have a 65% chance of respawning), not 55% as you wrote. That might confuse people a bit, it sure confused me to begin with. Unless I'm wrong, in which case I suppose I'll eat crow.

Yes, if by "resurrecting once" you mean "resurrecting at least once", which I suppose is the intuitive interpretation of those words. The number in my table is the probability for resurrecting exactly once, which is a stricter interpretation.

Cedric's table has the correct "at least" probabilities (though he didn't do tildes, which might awake the wrath of the Gods of Mathematics...... or something).


Edit: By the way, I just learned how to find the "averages" mathematically. For vanilla UQM, the expected value for the first failure is 1 / 0.5  =  2, meaning 1 resurrection. For the mod:

0.2625*1 + 0.219375*2 + 0.147469*3 + 0.078427*4 + 0.031672*5 + 0.008974*6 + 0.001504*7 + 0.000079*8 = 1.680729 (approx.)

A nice exercise in probablity, this has been. :D

Yeah, sorry, that was badly formulated. The chances of resurrecting after being killed for the first time are 0.75, the chances of not resurrecting again after that are 0.35. Regardless, that doesn't invalidate my point at all. You either pulled that 55% out of some strange quasispace portal or I'm not understanding something.

Oh, sorry about that. Let's edit! I think I've edited every single post I made in this thread. :P

Edit: Editing this post too just to be consistent.

Edit #2: Man, we've sure made a mess of Shiver's thread, haven't we.

Isn't this EXACTLY what I said in my earlier post??

No one listens to me (except Jaychant who doesnt believe me)

I believe you, I just don't understand why.

Because, while 0 resurrections and 1+ resurrections indeed have the same chances, when you do get 1+ resurrections, you have a fairly good chance of getting more than just 1. So while the weight of the 1+ resurrections group is the same as 0's, its "center of gravity" is higher than 1, which raises the average a bit from 0.5.

Why is it exactly 1? Well...


Let's list all possible results for a match. I choose to represent each result as the number of the first resurrection attempt that fails. So 1 represents a match where the first resurrection fails (meaning 0 resurrections), 2 represents a match with a single resurrection, and so on.

The possible match results are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...

Their corresponding probabilities: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, ...


It turns out that if you want the average result over a large number of matches (the so-called expected value), you simply sum all possible results multiplied by their chances. Makes sense. Let's do it then:

1*(1/2) + 2*(1/4) + 3*(1/8) + 4*(1/16) + 5*(1/32) + ...   =

=   1*(1/2)¹ + 2*(1/2)² + 3*(1/2)³ + 4*(1/2)⁴ + 5*(1/2)⁵ + ...


Now, for reasons beyond me, it holds that for all -1 < p < 1,

p + 2p² + 3p³ + 4p⁴ + 5p⁵ + ...   =   p / (1-p)².

------------------------------
UPDATE - proof:

For all -1 < p < 1 it holds that

1 + p + p² + p³ + p⁴ + p⁵ + ...   =   1 / (1-p)

(Just your everyday geometric series.) Now, differentiate both sides as functions of p:

0 + 1 + 2p + 3p² + 4p³ + 5p⁴ + ...   =   1 / (1-p)²

And multiply both sides by p to get the equation.  Q.E.D.
------------------------------

In our case p = 1/2, so we get  (1/2) / (1/2)²  =  2.

So the average result (first-failed-attempt) is exactly 2, making the average number of resurrections exactly 1. Crystal clear now, isn't it? :D


By the way, the calculation for the mod is simpler:

1*0.2625 + 2*0.219375 + 3*0.147469 + 4*0.078427 + 5*0.031672 + 6*0.008974 + 7*0.001504 + 8*0.000079   =   1.680729

The match results I used here are the number of successful resurrections, not the first failed one. So the average resurrection count is approximately 1.680729.


(Talk about thread derailment...)

In other words, just toss a coin a few times

Pretty much, yeah.


(BTW, these probabilities we've been calculating are not exactly for resurrecting x times, they are for resurrecting x times out of x attempts. In practice you sometimes defeat the last opposing ship with a Fury, so the expected value will actually be a tiny bit less than 1.)


Aaaaaaanyway... Back on topic, I have a bug to report. The mod seems to crash quite often when playing Dreadnought vs. cyborg (happened once vs. cyborg Broodhome and then again vs. cyborg Terminator). I know the mod is designed for PvP games, but cyborg mode is still useful for basic practice.

Oh, and my fighters seem to crash into DOGIs and die. Is that supposed to happen? :-\

I had that crash, but it was a long time ago and hasn't happened to me since I applied something that might possibly fix it. I played a bunch of games against the cyborg and it isn't crashing at all. I don't think that's a cyborg-related bug, at any rate.




Yes. DOGIs and marines will smash a fighter apart if they get close to them.


Alephresh: Are you playing v1.10? Have you got the effects package working properly? What color are those Ur-Quan fighters?

Another reason for playing against the cyborg is there just never seems to be someone (active) at #uqm-arena. I've gone there at least 5 times in the past week, and was never able to play a game with someone. :(

I have noticed that when a Chenjesu finishes off a Dreadnought, the game often crashes (usually when the photon shard actually hits), but I have also noticed this in vanilla UQM and it has been happening ever since I made my stupid mod, so it doesn't look like it's really a bug in the balance mod.

Yes, yes, lime.

("alephresh" was in reverse order. I fixed it. :()

00:15 -!- jaychant [n=julian@adsl-75-45-186-9.dsl.sfldmi.sbcglobal.net] has joined #uqm-arena
00:16 < jaychant> Hey Elvish_Pillager, how about a game?
00:17 < jaychant> OK, roflcat, are you here?
00:17 < jaychant> How about you Gekko?
00:18 < jaychant> AmonX?
00:18 -!- jaychant [n=julian@adsl-75-45-186-9.dsl.sfldmi.sbcglobal.net] has left #uqm-arena []
00:20 < Gekko> ... I was going to play with him


23:06 -!- jaychant [i=4b2dba09@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-275131b01af3446e] has joined #uqm-arena
23:07 < jaychant> Shiver_ I don't suppose you're here?
23:08 < jaychant> OK then... AmonX, Gekku, TheMisterCat?
23:09 < jaychant> Oh well...
23:09 -!- jaychant [i=4b2dba09@gateway/web/ajax/mibbit.com/x-275131b01af3446e] has quit [Client Quit]
23:27 < Shiver_> If he won't read the topic, I can't help him

13:47:15 -!- Topic for #uqm-arena: Welcome to The Ur-Quan Masters netplay arena. Activity in this channel is low these days.  If you're looking for a game, ask and wait at least 10 minutes. || Visit http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Netplay_howto for information about connecting to other players. || Problems with netplay? The tutorial at http://www.gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/ may solve your problem.

I was going to play with you a few days ago, but didn't make it in time. It's not like we are staring at our irc clients, just waiting for games :)

Stay there a bit longer next time.

In other words: Patience, young padawan :P

I'll post here what I said in chat: perhaps a good way to improve the Umgah without pushing it over six points would be to make its cone like SC1. It wasn't any longer, but it was wider.

Zip attacks against slow long-range ships like the Druuge and Mycon would be a bit more effective, but the matchup would definitely still be against the Umgah. Except maybe the cruiser, right now it's not that hard to slip nukes around the cone and this would make it easier to block them - not sure how much it would actually tip the match towards the Umgah though. The Androsynth matchup would be longer, but bubbling would probably still work. Flanking ships would have a harder time, but again I'm not sure how big a difference it'll practically make.

I do remember finding the Umgah to be a respectable opponent in SC1, but I was an absolutely terrible player back then.

Here's the SC1 cone:
(http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a28/joeljermon/umgah_sc1_a.jpg)

For comparision, here's the SC2 cone (it might appear to be longer but that's just because of the resolution and the curvature, I checked to make sure - both cones are just long enough to completely cover the Chenjesu's length):

(http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a28/joeljermon/umgah_sc2.jpg)

To further drive the point home, quoting from the SCDB


So just wait a bit longer, eh?

mormont - I asked for that very thing in the equivalent SCDB thread... but your graphics really help.

Alright, I'll see about making a new Umgah cone for the next release, the one that isn't going to be made for a long time. Thinking about scaling up Chenjesu's battery size, regen and weapon costs so that they're functionally the same, but more resilient against energy drain too.

Wow, looks great, Shiver! Thanks so much for doing this, I hope it will make melee much more fun.

It wouldn't be a Star Control board without some whining however, so, while I have only played a little bit, I think that, as an avid arilou pilot, I would prefer if the "offensive warp" were activated with the down key instead of a key combination. When I'm behind an ur-quan, zapping it, things get hot really fast and I need to warp out. Usually while I'm blasting away, I have the thrust on. Taking the extra second to turn off the thrust before warping out is dangerous. I usually just end up accidentally "offensive teleporting" to get away, even though I want the defensive one. I think a dedicated key for this ability would be better.

Also, just a thought, having a little ghost icon indicating where you would be warping to would be awesome.

I will refrain from further commentary on your mod until I chat more extensively with you guys in IRC.

Oh, and wait... you didn't include 64 point targeting for the arilou? I was hoping you would, since we talked about it briefly. I find it annoying to waste shots since the arilou battery is kind of small as is.

Going to go rock the Ur-Quan with the Chenjesu now :)
God I love being able to do that...

So has anyone else noticed that it's ironically more cost-effective for the Ur-Quan to launch fighters at the Earthling now? Your fighters can provide a useful cover screen against incoming missiles, thus reducing your damage and justifying the risk of launching them. If the Earthling pilot is spending his energy on missiles (i.e. firing a double-salvo, like most people used to do), once your fighters get in, all they need is a couple zaps to drain all his energy and thus disable the point-defense system, quickly disintegrating him. The Earthling pilot now has to be very discerning in how he fires missiles (must in an arc away from fighters now) but also how many he fires (do you want to risk having no energy for the PDL?). It's basically a lot harder to hit the Ur-Quan now. 

Earthling just got nerfed.

Has anyone offered any reason why the point-defense laser should cost any energy at all, really, beyond 1? Its rate of fire is pretty slow, so regardless of energy consumption, it's mostly useless at dealing damage to another ship anyway. Blocking incoming fire is generally a waste of energy, too.

PsyDev> wasn't the energy drain supposed to be removed?

Nope. From the PNF thread on the subject:


Also, regarding the Cruiser:

Yeah, the energy drain is still there. But, the fighters now charge the Utwig shield normally.

Your suggestion would in turn make offensive teleportation less fluid. I'd rather have the escape teleport be somewhat unwieldy than the forward teleport. If a player does go forward when they wanted to escape, how often is that really going to matter? That hurts against Kohr-Ah what with the buzzsaws floating around all over the place, but that's about it. I guess it's a matter of personal preference. If the melee community were more active, I'd take a quick poll on this.



Ah, nope. Not that I dislike the idea, but that would be difficult for my meager programming skills and it doesn't have much effect on the game. Arilou's laser range has been shortened a touch for several reasons I won't go into at this moment. The laser didn't miss very often due to firing angle limitations before, and that comes up even less often now.



Fighters shooting down small projectiles was implemented to make Ur-Quan effective against Mmrnmhrm missile kiting. Earthling seems to have been caught in that, but I see it as more of a good thing than a bad one. I am not buffing the Earthling Cruiser to make it specifically stronger against Ur-Quan.



Game balance. You're asking for upgrades to your favorite ship, while I'm worried about all 25 of them.



Gah. So there's still a trace of that "no drain" fighter build left in my code after all. Gonna have to fix that for the next release.

The Cruiser was too effective against the Dreadnought before, considering both the point differential and story stuff. Even when the Dreadnought won, it would sustain a lot more damage than it should against a ship about a third its cost. Think of it more as a buff to the Dreadnought (which it definitely needed, it wasn't worth 30) than a nerf to the Cruiser. It still does decently against the Dreadnought, better than a lot of ships in its price range.

Making point defense cost 1is a really bad idea, are you serious? It would help it in a bunch of matchups. It's a fun and balanced ship as it is, it doesn't need a buff.

If you set the point defense cost to 1, you can fire it indefinitely without losing energy, because the secondary weapon delay and energy regeneration delay are the same. If you can use the point defense like this, it makes the Cruiser a tyrant. It's even worse if it costs no energy at all, because then you can use the weapon and still regain energy. In both scenarios, it becomes useless to reserve energy, so the only effective strategy would become "just shoot at the enemy until you win or lose".

I should also note that with such a low point-defense cost, it makes the Cruiser able to maul a ship at close range by continuously attacking the other ship with point-defense. It also makes it impossible for ships like Arilou to close in without getting heavy damage (because point defense never misses).

Oh, so it is. I'm not sure I like that, seems a bit overcomplicated. I guess I'm one of them purists.
Oh well...


Won't that make the Drone annoying to play against? I mean, it takes me a while to scratch its sides as it is (at least against the cyborg).
I really hate this ship, I suck both with it and against it.


I agree, but I also agree with PsyDev that activating the escape teleporation is a bit awkward. Perhaps it could be changed otherwise. How about... just hitting Down for escape teleportation? Or how about... using Special for both, and having the Skiff's position decide where it teleports? Only use escape if it's really close to the enemy, and/or not facing it. or something like that. I don't know, just throwing random ideas.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of adding more key combinations. I'd rather have a single Ilwrath firing mode (modified or not) and a single mode/key for Arilou teleporation. But that's just me.

What if you made it possible to thrust with either the up or down key? Then if we want to be defensive, we can use the down key and not have to worry about releasing the thrust first when teleporting away.

Shiver:
I'm not trying to "buff up the cruiser", we talked about the cruiser before and I agreed that in general, its weaknesses were appropriate. All I am noting is that the cruiser used to be a decent matchup against the Ur-Quan, since the damage it dealt was worth more than the ship value, thus making it a "risky soft counter" (cruiser can get caught in the fusion blast early w/o doing any damage).
I see that making the PDL a value of 1 would be making the cruiser too strong for its current point value. One possible offset of this would be to lower the firing rate, making the weapon not very strong but more useful vs. fighters.

With all that said, yes, the Earthling is one of my favorite ships (not my favorite in melee... tha'ts probably the Vux) but I'm trying not to be biased. I like ships that are challenging to use effectively but rewarding if used well or with luck.

I'm just noticing a very big difference in its usability vs. the Ur-quan now. The only reason I described the Cruiser as "nerfed" is that it was a pretty decent matchup vs Ur-Quan before, and now I think I would never pick Earthling vs. and Ur-Quan, even to finish him off if he was weakened. I also wonder if the cruiser is really worth 12 points...

Instead of a "buff-up", I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to a "re-imagining" of the cruiser. And yes, that's because I like it. I don't want to make it unfair, though. I guess that's for another patch, though.

This sounds very similar to an exchange Shiver and I had at SCDB...

I'm not upgrading the Umgah cone. Unlike the ZFP tongue, the cone scales almost perfectly in size between zoom levels, so if I alter the size of every cone image at one zoom level then I will have to do them at all three. The cone animates between three images at any given zoom level and angle, so there are 144 cone images total. Although I would not need to manually redraw every image, I would have to redraw 27 of them and do the rest by rotation. Then I would get to do hotspotting on these images so they appear on the correct part of the drone. It's too much work. The Drone will remain as a 6 point cheapo for the sake of my sanity.

Seems like some procedural generation would be in order for the cone. If not on the fly, once... Hmm. Specify a shape, and I'll see what I can do.

Death999:


(http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb278/SunBloom/Cones.jpg)

The cone on the right is Star Control 2's default. The cone on the left is the shape I'm going for; noticeably longer, a touch wider, and the exact same dimensions as the old cone at the very base. If it turns out that the new shape is too long, I can always go through and strip off a row of pixels myself from each image. Good luck.

I really don't get how Ur-Quan vs. cyborg Chenjesu matches crash on a pretty regular basis for me (20% or so), and yet no one else notices it. :-\

It seems to only happen when one of the ships loses its last crew and is just about to blow up.

I've noticed it. It usually happens when the photon shard (not usually the shrapnel) kills the last of the Dreadnought's crew. It never seems to happen unless the last of the Dreadnought's crew are being killed by the Broodhome.

Wow, I wasn't expecting the cone to get that big a length increase. Are you planning to keep it at 6 points (if you find an easy way to do the new cone)?

The only way I can get that crash on my computer is to set two AIs against each other and leave my computer for half the day (AI vs AI games restart automatically after a few seconds). Meep-Eep and Fossil have already looked at my code back from when I was trying to nail down the Ur-Quan desync bug and they didn't notice anything. How should I, a non-programmer, fix this problem? Supposedly the next UQM release has some kind of error report tool built into it, so that's really the only chance I have.



Going for a value of 8 points. The reverse zip is getting an overhaul too. If the new Umgah isn't fun or balanced, it's going back to its default characteristics.

We didn't see anything suspicious based on just the source code. A more effective way of debugging such errors is to look at the program while it is running. Which is where what you call the "error report tool" comes in. What it actually is, is some code to dump a lot of debug information, so you can easier find where exactly the sync loss occurs. In addition, with a little change to the code, you can force one side to always be one frame ahead of the other side, so that when one side detects the loss of sync, the simulation can be stopped, and you can step through the program on the other side, where the problem has not occurred yet.
It's still not going to be easy for a "non-programmer" to use, though.
An easier way to debug this code is to remove parts of your changes, and see if the problem still occurs. But that requires the problem to be reproducable, which it doesn't seem to be when you play on a single computer. Perhaps you could try something like VMWare to pretend that you have two computers. As I understand, you can even set things like latency and packet loss. Also, there's a program TMNetSim (http://tmurgent.com/Tools.aspx) which looks like like it could be used to simulate less than perfect network conditions, by acting as a proxy. That should be easier to set up.

It's a rare (in Resh Aleph's case, not rare) crash bug so I don't need an opponent to test with. The desync bug has miraculously disappeared through me arbitrarily rewriting bits of code until it went away. I am not keen on repeating that process again right now.

Hmm. I'm analyzing the distribution of colors... ah screw it... it'll look different but possibly cooler. Or really lame. Anyway, I have a plan. Like the cylons.

I don't find it to be rare either. In fact, because of this bug, I generally avoid matchups where the cyborg has Chenjesu and I have Ur-Quan. I think I'll make a video showing it happening...

GODDAMMIT!!!!! >:(

I just used a stupid thing called CamStudio to record the game crashing. I did, after about five Chenjesu vs Ur-Quan fights, but the damn thing couldn't save it. Plus the stupid error message it gave me was useless and made no sense. If you're wondering why I'm so mad about that, it took me FOREVER to do it. the stupid Chenjesu AI just kept launching DOGIs at me and just wouldn't attack. Trying to get destroyed was a real pain.

But anyways, it's more common than you think (the bug), and I think you should take a look at the changes you made to shrapnel. I think it could also be related to the fighters, i.e. if both a fighter and the Dreadnought are destroyed at the same time by shrapnel. Just my educated guess. I could confirm the fighter thought if I could only watch that video... STUPID CAM STUDIO! >:( >:( >:(

I have the code completed to recolor the cones, and it seems indistinguishable from the original. Now all I need are 2 ingredients:

1) I need to know what image size to use. Should there be some consistent scheme here, or should I just have each of the 3 distinct rotations have a particular size and you'll take care of the offsets when the time comes?

2) a painting program that does good pixelwise rotations. I've tried two programs which were simply inadequate.
Fortunately, we only need two rotations - 22.5 and 45 degrees. The rest can be obtained trivially by flipping.
I have another more promising one that I think will get the job done, but I have to stop on this for now.

One last thing. The umgah cone contains black pixels. Should I make these transparent so you can see shades of the covered ship, or should they remain black? I think transparent would be cool.

Hotspotting the images so they line up in the right place is awful, but that is better left to me. I've given you approximate dimensions for the new cone already. Remember that you need to do three animations of each zoom + angle combination.



Try Gimp I guess.



Use black pixels.

[!] Update v1.12 [!]


Balance changes:

Chenjesu: Regen increased from 1 per 4 frames to 1 per 3 frames, battery size increased from 30 to 40, DOGI cost set to 40, Photon Shard cost set to 7. As a result, the Broodhome is more resilient to energy drain.

Thraddash: Afterburner exhaust timer decreased from 144 to 140 frames. Weapon speed decreased from 90 to 80 for the purpose of lowering the weapon's range.

Utwig: Fixed shield behavior against Ur-Quan fighter beams. This issue was present in version 1.10.

Ur-Quan: Fighter cost switched back to 5 per fighter. Fighter return time increased from 13 seconds to 20 seconds.

VUX: Maximum warp-in distance from enemy ship reduced. Battery capacity increased from 30 to 34.


I believe I may have fixed the intermittent crash bug, but am not really sure. It doesn't happen on my computer when I try to replicate it. I'm sure I'll find out from you guys soon.

I have been slowed down by the birth of my son. I think I'll be able to do it the next time I commute, which should be monday.

Yeah sure, don't even worry about time constraints because there aren't any.

I'm starting to have second thoughts about the shape I gave you. I think I'd rather have 1.2x default length, 1.33x default width instead. Remember that the base needs to be the same width as the old cone or I can't use it.

As excuses go, this is a pretty good one. Massive congratulations on the new addition to your family! Guess we won't be seeing much of you around here, but we'll be thinking warm thoughts and wishing you and the family all the best.

How about I just send you the recoloring code? Then whatever you pick, the recoloring at least will be really easy.

I've got the random cone color generator working. A few gripes:

1) The program works one image at a time rather than in a massive batch.
2) It seems to leave some transparency in the cone itself.

Aside from these two things, it's exactly what I need and I'll set about making an improved Umgah soon. v1.12 is apparently bugless and flawless, so the next update will be devoted solely to Umgah.

Oh, about that...

v1.12 has crashed twice on my machine:

• Ur-Quan vs. cyborg Yehat
• Arilou vs. cyborg Ur-Quan

But it's much less frequent than before.

Well it's not bugged. There can be as many as twelve fighters and each of them has more instructions per frame than an Orz marine. Most likely UQM 0.6.2 doesn't handle that much activity well. The decrease in crashing is because I simplified fighter behavior. For instance, there used to be a special instruction for dodging away from Androsynth comets at a longer distance than other ships that was removed. Fighter behavior can't be simplified further without dumbing them down.

As an aside, I have nothing but contempt for those of you who still play frequent melee bouts against the cyborg and don't use #uqm-arena. You guys are the reason there are no more tournaments. I should strip the cyborg code right out of the mod just to spite you.

:D
But replace it with the code that connects you to a random player who is in #uqm-arena :P.

Yeah, netmelee doesn't seem to work too well over long distances. The game sort of loses its value when the FPS is a fraction. :P

Anyhow, it doesn't make much sense to me that the game crashes because of being "overwhelmed". That should simply slow it down. And my 2.67 GHz Core 2 isn't too shabby.

You have a bad connection. Other Israeli players are able to play online without much trouble. Gradient has been logged in or idling out in the arena for quite a while now. You would certainly be able to get a game out of him, maybe even some suggestions for getting decent connectivity with other countries.

What syntax would you prefer? Even with the code as it stands, In unix, at least, you can arrange batch execution with xargs. There ought to be a windows cmd equivalent.


Oh, I guess I didn't recompile after changing it back to the way you wanted. I can recompile and resend, after I find out what file specifying syntax you'd prefer.

I'm not aware of a windows equivalent built in, but you can download xargs for windows (along with find and locate) at http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/findutils.htm (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/findutils.htm)

[!] Update v1.15 [!]


Changes:

Arilou: Battery size increased to 22. Laser range increased from 80 to 88.

Thraddash: Energy recovery decreased from 1 every 4 frames to 1 every 5 frames.

Umgah:  Antimatter cone substantially increased in size. Battery capacity decreased from 30 to 20. Retropropulsion will consume energy every other consecutive zip, halving the ship's rate of energy consumption. Retropropulsion speed decreased from 160 to 140. Point value set to 8.

Ur-Quan: Fighter pursuit time decreased from 13 to 12 seconds. Fighters deploy with their weapons on cooldown.




EDIT: Up to 1.16 now. There was a defect in the Ur-Quan fighter fan-out code that made fighters sometimes move beyond 32 speed. Also raised the cost of launching fighter squadrons by 1 point.

I like the new Umgah a lot more. The new cone helps a lot, especially against the cruiser and flanking ships. The changed zip is nice too.

I'm glad somebody does. The game mod designed for competitive play sure hasn't seen very much of it. It's a little discouraging to see the community turn into a ghost town about the same time as my project finishes, but I knew this was coming.

Think of it this way:

On the GMC, there is a problem with the way games are noticed. The worst games recieve the most attention, in the form of constant flaming and criticism. The best games recieve a lot of attention too, in the form of constant praise and nerd discussion. However, the games that are good, but not super-awesome, get almost no attention at all. People don't criticize it, but not too many people praise it.

So the fact that your mod doesn't get a ton of attention means that it's good. Personally, I only didn't post about the new Umgah because I figured it would be a useless post. Point is, generally people will only post if they really have something to say. So don't think everyone is completely uninterested in your mod; they just don't have anything to say at this time. :)

...unless they're jaychant.

You're so predictable. ::)

You know, it really bugs me sometimes that there's so few smileys to choose from, like there's no lol smiley. :'(

The arena has been somewhat dead lately. It has been like a week without a single game played there. Maybe if we encourage people to show up on the NEXT SATURDAY 5TH OF SEPTEMBER TO A TOURNAMENT, something might happen.

A balance mod tournament would be fun, both with new players and top tiers.

I agree

While I'm not involved in the NetMelee scene, I'd be happy to make a news post on PNF and see if there are any old dormant SC players out there that might show up. I doubt it'll help much, but with the small crew  you currently have even one person might help I suppose. Give me a tournament date and some general info and I'll see what I can do.

I'll run a tournament if it happens, but am not organizing another one.

Hey Shiver - Haven't played UQM online for quite some time.  Nice to see this.  I played with it today at lunch and it looks really good. 

Whoa. Haven't seen you in years. You definitely need to stop by the arena soon. It'll be nice to play against someone good other than Gekko for once.

I will.  I will do my best to be there for the tournament tomorrow.  I may not be the competition you're looking for, as I've only played your mod for about 40 minutes. 

[!] Updates v1.17 through v1.19 [!] -- Bunched together into one post for the sake of simplicity.


Androsynth: Blazer energy loss occurs once every 9 frames rather than 10 frames. Note that vanilla energy loss was once per 8 frames.


Arilou: Ship cost lowered to 14 due to the threat of numerous cheap counters, these being Shofixti, Ilwrath and Earthling.


Chenjesu: Fragment speed increased from 80 to 92. DOGI cost decreased from 40 to 37. This ship needed an extra push.


Orz: Marine pursuit AI has been altered. Marines will now lead their target slightly. This was done because the ship was not performing well enough against Chenjesu and Ur-Quan.


Thraddash: Ship cost raised from 10 to 12 due to high general performance.


Umgah: Turn delay increased from 4 to 5. Battery size decreased from 20 to 18. Energy recovery delay increased from 150 to 168. Ship mass increased from 1 to 2. The new "big cone" Umgah was much more dangerous than antipated.


Yehat: Shield timer set to 16. Shield gap set to 8. Energy freeze set to 24. Shield energy cost set to 3. The mod Yehat from before was kind of bad in retrospect. Maybe this is enough to turn it around.

I've updated to v1.20. Periodic small updates will likely continue, but I will not be annotating every last change into this thread.

As 1.22 seems to be the final version I have copied the files to my mirror as well. You never know when the wiki is down, so it's better to have the files in multiple locations.

Windows exe (http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/balancemod/Balance_mod_windows_exe.zip)
Effects pack (http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/balancemod/Balance_mod_effects.zip)
Dll pack (http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/balancemod/Balance_mod_dlls.zip)
Source (http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/balancemod/Balance_mod_source.zip)

So, was there ever final resolution of the Ur-Quan? Sorry but I've been busy with real life and haven't been following. I came up with the following idea for the Ur-Quan the other day:

New Ur-Quan Weapon fire mode:

User can hold down a button to charge up the ur-quan fusion blast.
Total damage possible for shot is 21, by emptying full battery into shot. (1 damage per 2 energy invested)
Weapon must be discharged once battery is empty
I suggest weapon charges roughly as fast as Chmmr battery recharges but  opinions may vary.

----
I think varying strength of ur-quan fusion blast is canonical, fwiw.

The current Ur-Quan uses slightly homing fusion bolts as the main gun. Piloting the ship involves using fighters in such a fashion where you can keep the opponent on move and forcing him to either die to the fighters or face the fusion bolts. Gravity whipping gives a rather long range to the fusion bolts and this can be used in quite a few matches. It's definitely a 30 point ship now and people have used it very much on the arena.

I believe that Shiver commented on a suggestion similar to yours earlier. "We only want one Melnorme" or something similar. It's better to have each ship unique.

My understanding was that the homing projectile made the ur-quan too powerful, especially in particular matchups. For this reason, I suggested a new weapon that might be useful.

The difference between the Ur-Quan I proposed and melnorme is that the Ur-Quan can't hold a charge, and so the usefulness of the gun is different, especially since it drains the battery quickly. The purpose of the new gun was to reduce the time and energy cost of missed shots, while still penalizing the Ur-Quan for using the alternate, arguably more powerful weapon.

One example of where this might help is Ur-Quan vs. Chmmr, where the Ur-Quan has to fire very quickly to damage the opponent, but will probably miss a lot, and perhaps die before he can get all the shots off.

It did, first. Currently it's rather balanced after Shiver nerfed it a bit. Fusion bolt battery usage was increased, homing capabilities changed, fighters tweaked... Currently the 30 point ships usually fight evenly and Ur-Quan has about as many flaws as the other capital ships. I've played a lot of balance mod with Sideways on the arena lately. Orz has been performing well against his Ur-Quan, but this might be due to difference in skill. Orz was supposed to be a light counter according to Shiver's words, but it might be too effective against players who don't know how to get everything out from Ur-Quan. Chenjesu does well unless it warps in badly.

We are facing a problem once we find out that the mod is unbalanced. Shiver is gone and I don't want to tamper with his mod. It's his, not mine.

I like some of the changes shiver made in this and it's inspired me to come up with ai balance mod.

But coming up with ideas is far easier than implementing them yourself. Especially when you don't understand the code. I get the basics, I can change crew, battery, turn rate, ect, but the part of the code that tells the ship to chase or evade, shoot or don't shoot, that's where I need help.

Sample of what I had in mind:

The kohr-ah currently try to chase you down when they are far more effective if they stand off and shoot blades. I was thinking they should behave like the chenjesu in this respect. still using fried as a defense like they do.

Or Having each ship have one specific ai to counter one specific ship.
kohr-ah vs chmmr = the kohr-ah would close the distance to use it's fried, negating the chmmr's zap sats or try too, then switch, stand off and shoot blades.

Is there any notes, books, where I could pick this up? I want to learn but have no idea where to start.

The three main behavior types are constants - ENTICE, something like ATTACK, and something like AVOID.

Entice is like, swoop in front to try to get them to chase you so you can turn around and pummel them from a point that's within your range but outside theirs.

But... well... sometimes that mode is activated in cases when that can't happen.

hmmm not many options. I would be curious to see what would happen with everyone set to attack.

 I just wanted to say I've now clocked a lot of time on balance mod with my friends and it is truly awesome. Thank you.

I love the Thraddash and the Yehat, which now honestly deserves the name Terminator (as opposed to Vanilla's "Turtler".)

Thank you for your time and dedication. You guys have done a wonderful thing.

Are there any older versions of this available?  Or are there older versions?

In particular, I'm looking to do both UQM Extended Edition with this balance mod, but they're incompatible.  I was hoping an older version (if there is one) of the balance mod would work.

So far as I know, most (if not all) UQM mods are modified executables. You're either running the Balance Mod executable or the UQM Extended executable, there's no way to combine them without compiling a new executable from source code, with the changes from both mods. For UQM Extended and Balance Mod this would probably require a fairly skilled programmer familiar with UQM's source code, since UQM Extended is not based on UQM 0.7 final. For two mods that are both based on the same UQM version, it might be somewhat easier (you could probably just generate patch files for each mod and blindly apply them to UQM 0.7), but there's still the possibility that the two would try to change the same thing, again requiring a programmer to sort it out. Not to mention the fact that you'd still have to compile your new executable from source.

Bummer... well, thanks oldlaptop.  I have zero programming experience, so I'll just have to wait until they add the choose-a-mod feature.

There won't be a mod that includes the extended edition and the balance mod. The b-mod is intended for net melee, and the AI does not do well with the new ships. The extended edition is intended for singleplayer, and thus AI.

Shiver's Balance Mod version 2.04 has been released. It can be downloaded from the Ultronomicon (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation).

Version 2.04 chances:
- Mod built with GCC 4.7: After some months of debugging and testing we discovered that builds made with GCC 4.7 do not seem to cause any desynchs in online play.
- Pkunk respawn decrement changed from 15 to 18. Initial respawn chance of 80 is not changed. This decreases the chances of getting too many Pkunk respawns a bit. On average Pkunk respawns 1.578 times.

Reasoning: The UQM 0.7.0 version of the Balance Mod has been buggy in online play. There have been numerous desynchronization issues and this has required occasionally restarting the game in order to be able to play. Oldlaptop and I have been hunting this problem for a few months now, but ultimately did not find the cause. The problem was long suspected to be related to the random number generator, but the latest tests would state this was not the case. However, as we upgraded our compiling tools to use GCC 4.7 the bug disappeared. So far we have not observed any desynchs using our new builds. Anyone who builds the mod on Linux or OS X must use GCC 4.7 or a later version.

I am happy to see the balance mod coming along so nicely. It doesn't feel so much like a work in progress now, but rather a product that has found its groove.

It's nice to see the Ur-Quan has become worthy of being a capital ship, while keeping its flavor and not being radically altered. The rest of the ships seem like they are close to where they should be, and that the game is now basically balanced.

Since checking out the latest updates, I have started playing melee again. I actually have been enjoying it. It helps to know how to build a fleet to match up ships. It helps a lot more knowing that the game is solidly balanced. I think that if the game is made accessible to new players (having a net-melee server that facilitates online play), people will start to get involved. UQM is a pretty popular open-source download, I think.

Thanks so much for doing this! You have facilitated Star Control's legacy living on. It seems like you had the expertise to know what you were doing and made a fitting product. Yay for us!

Is there a thread to make suggestions for the balance mod?

I would suggest either discussing proposed changes on #uqm-arena or filing enhancement requests at the Github bug tracker here:

https://github.com/Roisack/Shiver-Balance-Mod/issues

Shiver's Balance Mod 2.05 has been released.

Download instructions (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation). You must delete any old effects packages and extract the new one. This will produce two new zips in your addons folder - do not extract them.

Bug fixes:
* Desynch bug fixed for real. Ilwrath's cloak caused inconsistent game states for the two sides of the net connection. Full story can be read here (http://jessekaukonen.blogspot.fi/2012/10/today-we-solved-dreaded-desynch-bug.html).
* Arilou can no longer safely land on projectiles. It still has immunity against planet and asteroid telefragging.

New features:
* Retreat mod: We have added a new game mode in which you can retreat each of your ships once during the match. This is a rewrite of the old retreat patch which Xaionaro wrote for UQM 0.6.2 Balance Mod. We'll be having this for vanilla at some point, but since majority of the arena folk prefer Balance Mod we are finalizing the mod for that first. To retreat a ship, press ESC. This can be done only once as the ships only have enough fuel to jump some distance away. Afterwards they either win or die if the rest of their fleet doesn't get the job done. This game mode is still alpha and may contain bugs.
* Mirror matches (like Thraddash vs Thraddash) now have player markers pointing out your own ship. At times it's difficult to see which ship you are piloting, so these markers were added to counter that. This was mostly implemented by Shiver long ago, but he never got them to work properly.

We are looking for OS X builds.

(http://plantmonster.homeip.net/uqm/balance_mod/bmod_205_markers.png)

Yay! And I'll be packaging this new version for the Pandora soon.

By "unextract", do you just mean it shouldn't be extracted? ("Unextract" suggests re-compressing to me).

Fixed. I mean of course extract :)

Good thing I asked, then, I assumed you meant the opposite of what you meant. :P So what, there's two separate addons it uses now?

The retreat mod requires its own effects pack, so two packages are required.

Ah, the retreat mod is separate. I guess I'll include it in the regular Balance Mod PND anyway, though, since I need to include the UQM content package* and having to redownload that just for this little mod seems unnecessary.

* I could also write a shell script that tells the user that they need to download the UQM PND in theory, but either it would also have to ungracefully tell them to run UQM before running the balance mod or it would have to extract the content from the PND, which would be overly complicated.

Note that two .zips are not strictly required, apparently UQM is quite happy with two addons in one .zip. Something like this (http://plantmonster.homeip.net/~oldlaptop/balance-effects-unified.zip) should work as a drop-in replacement for the single effects pack in older Balance Mods. (also note that a few nasty bugs have now been discovered in the version of allow-retreat shipped in the Windows .zip, they have been fixed in GIT (a new Windows binary is available here (http://plantmonster.homeip.net/~oldlaptop/uqm-balance-retreat.exe).)

Well, almost a month late because I completely forgot about this, but I finally packaged this for the Pandora:

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=uqm-balance.onpon4.03859134553942137

Shiver's Improved Netmelee Mod 2.06 has been released.

Downloads at Ultronomicon: Click (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation). You can also follow the modding at Github (https://github.com/Roisack/Shiver-Balance-Mod).

- The mod has been merged permanently with the retreat mod. The new merged mod has been christened as Shiver's Improved Netmelee Mod since the current version adds more than simply balancing.
- The retreat mod is disabled by default. It can be enabled in the game options "advanced" tab by toggling "S-Melee retreat" to "once".
- Bug fix (balance mod): Androsynth no longer gets limpeted in comet form
- Bug fix (retreat): Gravity no longer affects retreating ships
- Bug fix (retreat): Several issues with Pkunk fixed
- Bug fix (retreat): The game now properly finishes when one side loses all his ships
- New feature (retreat): Retreated ships have a coloured reticle around them in the ship selection menu that signifies their crew level.
- New feature (retreat): A timer showing how much time a ship has left before being allowed to retreat has been added

Future work:
- AI mod: The Netmelee Improvement Committee (Oldlaptop, Xaionaro and me) is currently working on improving AI. Right now Xaionaro's improvement for AI ship countering is already seeming promising.

And hopefully this time, I won't forget and fail to package this until five days before the next version. :P

Pandora package is now up to date:

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=uqm-balance.onpon4.03859134553942137

And I'm not late this time... unless another release happens this week. :)

I was compiling the source and I'm getting this error:

I would say your zlib install is probably not quite right - the error is being generated by the code which interfaces with it (if I'm not mistaken). As a temporary workaround you can disable it in configuration - but then of course your executable won't work with compressed content/addon packages.

Ok, got it sorted out. i did it in an unorthodox fashion though.

i noticed when I ran ..../build.sh uqm config
that unix output was different than uqm.7 output.
at first i tried changing out the build folders in the source code, but that made the balance mod crash when I tried to enter setup. so i guess that there was some needed code missing when i did that.
so I looked into what the difference was between the 2. I found that i needed the code in build.config, but everything else i could use from 0.7 build/unix folder.
so when i compiled it went through just fine.

which leads me to

i tried using the instructions for compiling done by gekko, but could not get it to work with the latest mingw. could someone look into it. im using an outdated setup i saved months ago. im guessing that's why i couldn't get it to work without changing some things. im on windows by the way.  either that or there's a bug in the balance mods source code that causes problems compiling under windows.

how much easier is it to compile a windows exe under linux/distro than it is under windows itself? and consider im not experienced at all with linux/distro what so ever.

Yes, there was. The current Balance Mod release (this has changed in current git) has an added configuration option to enable/disable setupmenu options related to retreating in Supermelee. Compiling with an unmodified vanilla build system will *work*, but the game won't have those setupmenu options, and will therefore complain when it sees extra options in its setupmenu strings.


That's possible I suppose. Recently the official Windows builds have actually been cross-compiled from Linux, since it's so ridiculously hard to actually build UQM under Windows (which brings us to...)


I've actually cobbled together a specialized Debian LiveCD (https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/) which contains a Windows cross-compiler all set up for building UQM. Unfortunately Github recently discontinued their file hosting service, so there's no high-bandwidth public download at present (I don't think Gekko would like me linking all and sundry to his home server to download a ~600mb ISO image :P). Apart from that... I wouldn't try to set a cross-compilation environment up from scratch without at *least* some basic Unix/Linux knowledge. Compiling natively for most Linux systems is very easy though, so you might like to try setting a Debian partition up or something and mess with UQM on that.

thank you. that sounds nice. my interest in modified uqm has it's peaks and wains.  since the release of the hd mod it has peaked again. thats when i discovered some compiling problems with windows and mingw. i'm glad i kept my old setup that worked. as for a setup on linux, i will pop in when i get the time. i just started a new job and my energy is going to be there. but i thank you for the offer.

There is now a public download again: https://sourceforge.net/projects/oldlaptop.u/files/uqm-crossbuilder/

It's really pretty easy to build UQM with that, there's a wiki page on Github explaining it: https://github.com/oldlaptop/uqm-crossbuilder/wiki/QuickStart

so how do i change the source code out with another uqm project or move the exe to my hard drive?

Shiver's Improved Netmelee Mod 2.07 has been released.

Downloads at Ultronomicon: Click (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation). You can also follow the modding at Github (https://github.com/Roisack/Shiver-Balance-Mod). New: Debian and Ubuntu users can now download .debs instead of compiling the source.

- Fix a bug with Pkunk causing early game ending due to a change made in the retreat mod. This also affected games which had retreat disabled.

This is a bug fix release to patch a nasty problem introduced with the retreat mod. Oldlaptop worked hard figuring this one out, and from now on the games won't end early if you have a Pkunk in your fleet and respawn a few times.

For some reason none of the mods work for me, is there some special file moving thing I have to do?

Shiver's Improved Netmelee Mod 2.08 has been released.

Oldlaptop did all the work for this update!

Download at Ultronomicon (http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/User:Shiver/Balance_Mod/Installation).

(http://plantmonster.homeip.net/uqm/bmod_208_partialcost.png)

Bug fix:
* Fix issue 31 (https://github.com/Roisack/Shiver-Balance-Mod/issues/31): The rectangles used for signifying your own ship in mirror matches no longer appear in non-mirror matches after certain events have happened.

Enhancement:
* Vux limpets are now different colour to separate them from floating crew. It was at times hard to see the difference between Vux limpets and floating crew in Vux vs. Syreen matches.

New features:
* When a game ends and the winning / losing fleets are displayed, the game now tells you two values of points left: Standard point value based on simple ship worth, and a fixed value that calculates the ship value after crew loss has been accounted for. A Kohr-Ah with 1 crew left is not worth 30 points.