The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Anyone ever tried looking for unusual or rare planet types or formations?  Just for fun, especially if you already know the solutions and are ready to kill the Sa-Matra in 2157, you might want to keep the game going for a while.
For example, I found a gas giant at Zeta Sextanis II which has what I believe is the biggest storm in the galaxy on it.  It takes up about a quarter of the planet.  Very impressive.  
Anyone else find anything unusual out there (not plot related)?

Heh...Interesting thread.  Nothing springs to mind, but I'm intrigued to see what other people come up with.

Hey, can anyone with the game working check out mars to see if it has Olympus mons?

Not sure, see if you can find it.

(http://www.hot.ee/unigolyn/mars.jpg)

Maybe that pink spot represents ridiculously high altitude (Olympus Mons is a mountain about the size of Texas and several times taller than Mt. Everest).

BTW I like your fleet. Go Thraddash!

Now, the second question is, are these randomly generated? i.e. if we return to mars, will it look the same?

Earth and Jupiter always look the same.  I don't see any reason why Mars wouldn't.  It'd probably be harder to code that way.

Yikes, I just noticed I have an Umgah drone in my fleet. WTF?

Time to head to the starbase. :)

Mars always looks the same. :)

well, I was nosing to through the role-playing resource (that came with the original game, I believe), and found these two entries:

Sculptoris Beta: (Suffered Mysterious Solar Implosion)

Corvi Alpha: (Victim of Intersteller Fatigue)

what I find most interesting is the mention of Intersteller fatigue, the first out side of SC3, I believe.  I guess the designers weren't totally on crack, then.

-Will    

Nope, that's not the only mention of Interstellar Fatigue. That's what the Androsynth were testing that made the Orz show up and eat them or whatever those crazy fishy fellas did.

I belive the Androsynth tests were reffered to in-game as Inter-Dimensional Fatigue...

although they could have changed the name as they fleshed out teh plot.

In SC3, is it Interdimensional Fatigue or Interstellar Fatigue?

I think dimensional, but I'm not 100% positive.

Actually, in one place it's referred to just as "dimensional fatigue" (and then appropriately abbreviated DF) and then somewhere else it's "inter-dimensional fatigue."

I'm almost positive that it's in a lander report that you see the former, but almost every other time it's referred to as the latter.

I got a good laugh out of this.  Here is a great example of turning a negative into a positive.  We actually didn't realize we had omitted some stars until we were making the cluebook shortly after the game released.

Instead of admitting our error we just concocted some simple, cryptic fates for the missing stars and let the reader's imagination run with it.

So the creators of SC3 did a quite good job. They even read your cluebooks and used one idea out of it to create a game which does not take part in SC2-regions of space.
Actually i think the SC3 creators made a good job, the game was in quality far above other genre-like games. Although they made it too easy (cheat here button ICOM) and they solved mysteries which ought to stay unsolved (although i had a good laugh at the idea of un-devolving and not just de-evolving). What i missed most was the comic-style caracters.

But to be honest. I`d say the SC3-creators are better people than i am. I wouldn`t have dared to stand against a game like SC2 within that storyline as a professional writer and such a fan-community.

CU,
Martin

The one who read the cluebook after a few times and missed that part about the missing stars.

The SC3 team turned out a game that was not so good.  It didn't measure up to the standard set by SC2, and it had a few severe playability issues.  But that having been said, it was clear the guys did their homework.  They had been ordered by Accolade to answer all of the mysterious questions that SC2 posed, so that Accolade wouldn't have to pay Paul and Fred any more money.  Within that constraint, they did a remarkable job of answering all those questions--I think all of their answers are, if not necessarily the answers I would have given, valid and interesting answers.

SC3 was a game that couldn't have been good if it wasn't done by Fred and Paul.  But that aside, it was better than people seem to think.

I didn't play SC3 - I do remember seeing it for the first time. I think my reaction was, "MIDI MUSIC?!"
And then - "MUPPETS IN SPACE?!"
The third one was something like "this damn super melee is totally unballanced! What happend to the Chmmr?! they totally SUCK!"

That's when I gave up on the game.

I guess I should try it again though, I know it's not as good as SC2 but I miss those mystery-quest games, they don't make 'em anymore (I'd say "like they used to", but I don't think I've seen any Quests lately)

I'm trying to play it, but am very frustrated by the interface, especially the starmap. Try as I might, I can't find any way to find a star by name other than moving the cursor from one little dot to the next. By god that's annoying. I've yet to see a 3D starmap done well. 2D ones work wonderfully (SC2, I-War 2 for example). However, I'm very Starcon starved, so I'll keep at it until I finish the damn thing :)

I can't remember quite how it works, but up on the top right there's a filter button.  It allows you to switch between viewing the stars by name or by another filter--i.e. what colonies are there, what ships are there, how much fuel is available, etc.  If you click the button once it will switch back and forth.  Also, there should be a blank black line below it--once you're viewing the systems by name, this line will allow you to type the first few letters of the star you're looking for, and it will take away the names of all the stars except ones that begin with the letters you typed.

Hope that helps.

Actually, i thought the SC3-3d Starmap was done quite well with the filters. Although i always stopped the rotation as the very first thing when i lookad first at the map. Using the rotation scroller, i've always set it to the first position and thus got used to the map.

i always found it very hard to judge any realistic distances with that starmap. I mean, sure your handy little line will tell you if you have enough fuel to go somewhere and return, but if you need to jump between three or four different systems, before refueling, it's quite hard to judge the distance, and how much fuel you need...

I had these problems too, until mz second try. In that try i planted at least one new colony in every starsystem, most of them only to synthesize fuel. Therefor i had fuel in nearly every corner of space.And a 2d-projection of space is not that realistic. You`d have to make a new one for every starsystem you`re in. For a 3d-Map i found it a very good solution.
Okay, i do prefer 2d-maps, but they are not that realistic in a 3d universe. Although flying through a starsystem in SC3 was still a 2d-thingy. (which matches physic reality quite well.)

I always got frustrated with how all my colonies abandonded me at one stage or another.. Half the quans, the Spathi, the VUX, the MYCON, all disappeared, and the rest always just became horribly ineffective like the Pkunk.. but it's a good idea, if I ever play the game again, I'll try that.. Doesn't it take a lot of time to get enough population to do this though?

And I agree, a 3d spacemap is much more realistic, at least in truespace, but it's not very user friendly. I wonder how a 3d-map of Hyperspace would look? Or better yet, a roating green Quasispacemap!. that'd really make for trouble judging distances...

That is one interesting point... what was the deal with QS in SC3?

It worked a totally different way; one portal went to one specific point.

Dunno, I was a bit confused by it to tell the truth. It's been a while since i played SC#, but didn't it work more like a wormhole? Maybe the arilou got tired of you romping through their space in SC2, and decided to make sure noone could get in anymore
:)

Quasispace Portals were mere Wormholes, sometimes just towards other dimensions.
It seemed to me like another Quasispace, or more precise, like a bunch of other dimensions. (QSF, QSM, QS...)

I just thought of a way to have hyperspace and Quasispace in a 3-dimensional map, well, Hyperspace anyway. It wouldn't look very much like the Starcon3 map, and I suppose it'd actually be 2-dimensional in a sense, but bear with me...

say we have a very large sphere, with planets dotted all over it. You can travel from star to star, but basically you'd be travelling on the inside surface of this spehere (not through it!) so going from one half of it to the other would take positively ages.

Now inside this TruespaceSphere there would be a smaller sphere, The HyperspaceSphere. It'd be quite a bit further inside, making it much smaller, and it'd be connected to the larger Sphere by holes leading from the stars into Hyperspace. So basically, when you enter Hyperspace you just climb one of these holes and end up in Hyperspace, on the inside of that Sphere. the only place you can fall back out to truespace would as usual be either these holes, or by meeting another ship (your combined mass creates a hole which you fall through...)

And inside this Sphere is the last? spehre, the Quasispace Sphere. This sphere is again a lot smaller, but it's also a bit crunched up, it's not a perfect sphere like the others. You could call it folded. That's why the exits are so close to eachother, and yet lead to places very fair away from eachother. Likewise, at the place where Qspace is most folded, it's become weakened, and every now and then it breaks open for a while, creating the natural portal(s)

On an off note, maybe Orz *below* is outside our TruespaceSphere and thus even larger?

Now let's really hurt some brains.

We could make the map 3D!  Just use hyperspheres instead of spheres!

The problem with the image above is that if you fold the inner quasispace sphere then it puts things further apart than they would otherwise be - a sphere is a minimal surface, to wit...

Anyway, according to this, you would have to cover 2/pi of the distance you'd have to go anyway to cross the sphere - and to go a short distance, you'd probably end up going much further using hyperspace. Maybe radial travel is faster???

Oh, so y'all are playin' da rest of us, oh??
dissing us sayin' we doesn't know freaky philosophy, eh?!
2/pi distance (n-1) ah?!?!


well, BAH!

;D

Umm, im not sure if I get what you're meaning, so I'll just try to go through it step by step, do point out to me were I'm wrong.

The largest sphere is Tryuespace. You travel on the inside of this sphere, but only on the actual sphere, like running around on the inside of the globe. you can't fall into the middle, you stay on the surface all the time.

The smaller sphere inside the bigger one is hyperspace. Again, you can only run on the inside of it, the area so tto speak. Now, since the the larger sphere has a larger radius and therefore a larger area, going from A to B there would require to travel further than going from A' to B' on the smaller sphere (A' and B* being the corresponding spots where you can fall down or go up) Also keep in mind that "jumping" into hyperspace requires no travel whatsoever, so you're only travelling the distance on either the smaller inner sphere or the larger outer sphere.

Regarding quasispace I can see your point. Perhaps, inside of Quasispace, you can move in 3D thus allowing you to "float" to any hole you want. Make Quasispace small enough, and It'll work....

Yes, but to get from one sphere to the other...

But getting from one sphere to another is instantenous, seeing as the "3D" map is just another way of painting it as well. I mean, you don't fly your flagship upwards to go into hyperspace in sc2 either, or drive it downwards to get to the system, even though we clearly see that there's a hole there, you just fall down, and tadaa, your in the system. So to get from one sphere to another, all you have to do is activate your hyperspace engnes, or enter a gravity well, and your there. Thin kof it not as distance, but an energy difference like between different electrons. apply more energy, and suddenly your there!

Anyway, it's just a nice way of simulating.. I think it'd look nice though :)