The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Not sure where to ask but I was looking at the general itnrest of a Java port of this game.  I was just kind of messing with it right now (Creating a class to access the uqm files, finished making a global flag class, etc) and wondering if there is a good need for it?

I mean if anything it will make the code smaller and easyer to manage and be easyer to port on other platforms.  Just like to hear some thoughts.

You can't create a Java port without basically starting over. That is a lot of work, and then some.
I also doubt that it would make the code smaller, though that shouldn't be an issue.

The UQM code is very unstructured in many places, and it would be nice to have a more structured code base. But in my opinion, starting over isn't worth it.

I have seem proposals, requests, and attempts regarding ports or remakes of UQM for various platforms. Personally, I would most like to see a version of UQM for web browsers. JavaScript or Flash would be the obvious choices for that, but a Java applet would be another option. But I have very little hope of any of that ever happening.

I fail to see how JavaScript is an obvious choice...

But yeah, I don't think there'd be much interest in this.

Flash port using Adobe Alchemy (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/) might actually be doable. People have already ported Doom (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/470460) and at least parts of SDL (http://github.com/emcmanus/flashsdl/tree/master) with it.

Well, it would be for me. I prefer to avoid proprietary plugins. You'd need HTML 5 features though, so it may not work on every browser, but that will only get better over time.

Hmm... that looks interesting. If I had the time, I'd give it a shot.

I'd want to do it in Javascript also, just for the universality of js. Of course, these days I use GWT for big js projects since it's so much more convenient. And GWT allows you to write Java code that gets compiled into Javascript, which brings us back to interest in a Java port. :)

But I agree that you're basically starting over. You could keep some of the logical structures intact, but a well-designed Java app would have a different organization than the code currently has. For example, a lot of the global game state would be better placed in other places. Conversation stacks would go to its particular conversation class, and for the most part they don't need to be public.

Java is no less universal than JavaScript, and probably more flexible.

Using Java forces you to place all functions inside a class. I'd say that in order to port to Java, it may be easier to convert the code to C++ first (since that allows you to move the functions into classes a few at a time).

Naw, just define a 'misc' class and make all the functions static members of it. Move them to proper homes as you figure them out.

...Well, sure, that could work too...

I suppose you could port to Java, but why? (Or for that matter any other language.)
The code for UQM is written is C, which is pretty universal. The game appears to be pretty much finished and feature complete, so why re-write it?

If you're going to dive that deep into the code and do that kind of work, perhaps you could make small changes to make the code more efficient or customizable. Or write some interesting mods...

In the (admittedly unlikely) event that I decided to take up the code, I'd probably convert it to C++ and try to generalize it so that mods can be created more easily. (I just prefer C++ to C, and I also like it better than Java.)

But yeah, I doubt I'll ever do that. Certainly not in the next five or ten years. Mainly because it is, as you say, pretty much finished and feature complete. Plus I'm involved in a different open source project for a game that the creator decided to release, which is barely getting started. And I'm in school, so time is hard to find.