The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

After some source code tweaking I managed to get this UQM rig running in real 640 x 480 mode:
 - not 320x240 scaled to 2x, but actual 640x480!
Check out the screenshots (that's modded Cedric's project6014 in case you're wondering...)
http://img22.imageshack.us/i/73978869.png/
http://img402.imageshack.us/i/54749918.png/

Basically I introduced a Resolution factor to most of the constant numbers within the code that are related to drawing stuff on screen.
Some of the status screens are still in the wrong place, but that's a small thing to fix. Bigger issue is to get the planet exploration to work well. Correcting the weapon ranges etc is a lot of work, but easy to do.

Now, pimping up all the PNGs to 640x480 would be too enormous a task (mostly because of the comm screens and anims), but it'd be cool to offer people a chance to play at least supermelee with sharper rez.

There are these threads,
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=2899.0
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=2666.0
which have some of the ships resized and redrawn in gorgeous quality.

 I was wondering did you guys finish all of the ships? Are the makers of these ship drawings still alive? I'd love to have those sprites and if possible, in every orientation with the lighting coming from the correct angle. If you read this rambling and want to participate, could you send these to me?

Then I could use those for the full size melee sprites and either resize 'em for the med and small sprites or use the current big/med sprites as med/small.

All ships are finished and present in the timewarp clone, so supermelee with graphically improved ships is already possible.
You can find a sprite pack containing all sc1+2 timewarp ships here: http://star-control.com/fan/resources.php
These have 64 angles, but I think you'll figure out which ones to choose for the 16 angles version ;).
I'm not sure everyone finds it a good idea to implement 64 firing angles into UQM, so if you do so please make it an optional extra (selectable in options, not by doing installs OOG)

Ah! That's just great!
So I'm kind of reinventing the wheel here :D

On the other hand, if I figure out a way to make the comm screen gfx appear the correct size in 640x480 without resizing the PNGs, it could be feasible to make all the other aspects of the game 640x480. Now, that would be su-weet!

Yeah, if this try ever gets finished I'll make it an optional addon, stuffing the larger gfx to Addon folder and keeping the originals in their correct place.

Nifty idea! I once tried tweaking the scaling in battle mode to render to the real screen in native resolution rather than to the internal 320x240 buffer, but that did not work well at all in practice (too many interactions between different types of graphics).

The comm screens, when you look at them from a certain perspective, are really.. abominations (Anibominatons if you will),... certain data is in the ani files, certain data is hard programmed into UQM.

If anyone steps forward with stuff from the enhanced graphics thread, I'd like to have a copy to stick on the PNF for future use as well.Anything to make modders lives easier.

And how is it that the fact that we have resource packs comes as such a surprise to everyone? You people really need to read the news posts from the biggest SC fan-site around.  :P

Hmm, I guess I'm either blind or kind of slow, but more likely both :D
You wouldn't happen to have a "hyperspace stars and interplanetary gfx in high res"-package lying around as well? ;)

I suggest redoing the interplanetary gfx entirely and procedurally generating them from the surface map.
The surface generation algorithm can be 'scaled up' aswell when you land on a planet.
I've tried to do this in an engine I'm developing...

(http://i39.tinypic.com/15i6xdk.jpg)
(http://i39.tinypic.com/azdxuc.jpg)
(http://i43.tinypic.com/2ihl45g.jpg)
(http://i41.tinypic.com/15hllqr.jpg)

It's still not perfect yet, the planets need shading, and they aren't 100% round so there must be something wrong with the algorhythm that transposes a surface map pixel to an 'intermediate' bitmap which in turn will be used to generate the planet iself,but atleast it shows you what's possible :)

Wow! That looks absolutely gorgeous! Does that engine of yours zoom like the original interplanetary i.e. does it have fixed points in space in which it zooms in/out? Or does it have some kind of smoother zooming?

That is an interesting idea, though I'm pretty sure I cannot manage such a feat with my feeble coding skills. But then again I could try to scroung the code from orbiting that generates the rotating planet, and maybe toy around with it...

While you guys are being this awesome I shall make a request: Add an option for the melee to either focus on the ships using the classical style, or to use a max zoomed out view. Those planet collisions are silly.

Hmm, 2139 near Utwig space? I wonder... :)

(actually, I even have an idea what it might be about)

btw. those graphics look awesome and awesomely promising! With the few tweaks and fixes you mentioned it might look really beautiful.

It's capable of smooth zooming or fixed zooming in 2 modes: Normal and Flattened. But how I'll do that in the engine is not decided yet.. but the technical possibilities is there.

The method of surface generation (fault formation) is well documented and already present in the SC2 source.

Adding to that (because I had to leave when I made my last post :D), as you may notice I've also implemented the SC2 colormaps and height translation files into the engine. Although SC2 uses fault formation I use a combination of fault formation and perlin noise. The reason? Perlin noise is faster to generate planets with continents, and overall in higher resolutions just looks better ;).

Anyway, generating higher resolution heightmaps shouldn't be too much of a trouble, and I think for mapping them onto a sphere the code is also already present in UQM ;).

The dates are just there for testing purposes, because the planets also turn around in realtime and I had to find some way to test that, which was not the case in SC2 by the way, earth was always at the same position whether you'd visit it in the northern hemisphere summer or in the winter ;).
And the utwig ship is the one I always use for testing, but I can select other ones just aswell ;).

^Edit button?  ;D

Anyways, are those planet icons from Sins of a Solar Empire?
They look very similar.

My god...I realize UQM is supposed to be an emulation as true to the original as we can get....but if that sort of resolution and those sprites and....*drools a little bit* I'm sorry, this is just beautiful. Keep up the good work, guys ^.^!