The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hello. I know that nobody need in this. But here's a crude patch that allows retreating in super-melee. It was been made for UQM0.6.2 + balance 1.28.

http://uqm.dxnet.ru/uqm-0.6.2-balance-melee_retreat.tar.gz (http://uqm.dxnet.ru/uqm-0.6.2-balance-melee_retreat.tar.gz)

Sounds interesting, but I don't really understand the installation instructions. They look like stuff to copy into a terminal, but I can't tell for sure.

I thought that almost every UQM-player knows diff-utils good :)

I can place whole source code if it's needed.. Am I should place it there?

I think we can assume that pretty much anyone who can compile UQM knows how to run patch.

Are there any restrictions on its use? It's been established that it'd become pretty degenerate if there aren't.

What you'd do is get the melee community to experiment with it. They'd soon get a feel for what kind of restrictions worked best.

Could be a really interesting enhancement

It seems to me the biggest problem with fleeing would be pulling back your ship right after defeating the other ship, preventing the other player from ever being able to choose proper counter ships and therefore always keeping the upper hand. A good solution to this would be to force retreating players to immediately select their next ship, which would prevent such an abusive strategy from working (the danger in the time it takes to retreat would handle the rest), while at the same time disallowing players from fleeing during the victory ditty (to prevent the player from bypassing the nerf).

(http://sianleuka.ath.cx/~gekko/pictures/retreat_1.png)

We had our first test game. Apparently there is something in code in this fashion: "If the player retreats 3 times successfully, he then returns to the travel mode". xaionaro is currently reading the code and trying to find it.

Anyway, it proved out to be deeper and less broken that I thought. First we were abusing it quite a lot, but then we laid down the first rule: Ships are not allowed to retreat for 1 minute after warping in. This might need a timer or something in the code. We can also explain it with something like: "The warp engine is still cooling down."

Then Xaionaro pulled something that was playing a bit on the border of this rule and retreated immediately after defeating my ship. We decided that this should be allowed, even though technically you are retreating in before 1 min has passed after the enemy ship has warped in. But, using the above logic (systems cooling down) and the "keeping upper hand in the game of rock-paper-scissors" -gameplay mechanic we decided to allow this.

I guess that first game ended with the retreat of my fleet? :)

Patch was been updated. Fixed a bug with premature end of game.

I'll put the Windows exe + all other files to my mirror once we get this rolling.

EDIT: http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/mirror.html

Version 2

My only hope is that more people playing this will result in work to get this bug (http://bugs.uqm.stack.nl/show_bug.cgi?id=1003) fixed in a stable version.

Possibly related to Vux. We just had this twice. Probably due to Vux attempting to warp in near a ship that's retreating.

EDIT: Btw, this isn't part of the balance mod. It's simply built on the balance mod as that's what people mostly play on the arena. It shouldn't be too hard to use the patch to create your vanilla version, though.

Thank you for information about bug-report. I'll carry in the changes into the patch in free time. :)

I don't get what you're talking about or who you're talking to... did someone delete his/her post?

Added a quote and italicized word.

Hm... I don't quite get it, since that bug has already been solved in the SVN and explained in the very place I linked to.

Just, we played with gekko 2 times after the first bugfix. And both of this times UQM frozen when I picked VUX.

Mathematically, probability that this is a coincidence is less than 10%

Regardless, 2 instances are not enough to indicate relation. Perhaps it was in your ship selection behaviors; it would only make sense to use VUX when the opponent tries to flee, so you can damage the fleeing ship as much as possible. Considering the nature of the bug, I doubt it's related to specific ships (in this case, the VUX).

I know :).. I just answered for your question. And as I already said, thanks for info about bug-report, we will carry in necessary changes.

onpon4, turned up, that the problem, that we with Gekko found, is really connected with VUX and doesn't connected with the bug-report.

Description:
Problem is connected with that condition, that vux can spawn only near to enemy. But there's one thing with retreating in UQM source code realization. Originally to make retreating ship not accelerate by ship-collision, it makes the mass of retreating ship in 10 times more. At the same time when ship trying to spawn, there's two additional conditions:
1.) Low gravity condition;
2.) No collision condition;
The problem was in the first condition. It detects if some element need to be check for gravity influence to spawning ship by comparing of the element's mass with the maximal possible ship mass. If the mass higher than maximal possible ship mass, then this algorithm requires to spawn not so close to the object.
And this condition is working, because of mass was been multiplied to 10, so VUX cannot spawn close to his enemy... and here's the dilemma...

I'll output updated patch in few minutes..

P.S.: I'm sorry for my english skills

Patch was been updated. Fixed a bug with vux spawning.

Patch was been updated. Added 25 seconds rule: Ship can retreat only not earlier than 25 seconds after it's spawning