The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Hi everyone! First post (I think) but I've been a lurker here on and off for a couple of years, ever since stumbling on UQM and loving it like ZEX loves xenoteratomorphs. (Well, maybe not quite like that.)

I've been thinking about whether it would be possible to mod UQM so that the Captain isn't necessarily male. It would involve removing any references to the Captain as 'he' in alien dialogue, altering or replacing artwork that shows a male Zelnick, etc.

The game doesn't mention that you're playing a male character until you're already a fair way into it, and I found it a bit jarring - I thought I could picture my character as whoever I wanted (like my name and ship). I've read a few posts that suggest some other players felt the same way.

(I"m ignoring the SC2 manual - I know it goes into some detail about the 'boy genius', but I doubt many people playing UQM for the first time will find and read that.)

I know slightly less than zero about programming, so I haven't tried doing this myself (yet). I've gotten as far as making a rough list of things that would need changing, but I'll wait to see what people think of the general idea before posting them...

This of course assumes that nobody else has looked into the idea and a) produced a mod already somewhere or b) found the whole thing impossible for technical reasons.

Thoughts?

Hm... This sounds to me like a resource editing job, not a programming job, so it could probably just be a UQM addon. Someone made a dialog editing tool some time ago...

(looks for aforementioned tool)

Here it is: http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4865.0 (http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=4865.0)

Good luck. :)

But how would you go about the situation with Talana then? 

Syreen are bisexual

Really? How would you know about it? I guess you're right since the problem with lack of the  Syreen males makes them "lonely".
Still wouldn't it be a little controversial? Mass Effect has gained a bad name for the same thing.

Controversial? It's nothing they didn't imply before, way back then, and things are a lot more favorable nowadays. The only awkward part is explaining why she goes for you if you haven't got any unusual - to - them equipment on board.

That whole "controversy" was just the bible-thumping morons at Fox News flailing like retards on fire.

Actually the real problem i was thinking of is Star Control 2 at it's core is a story being told to the captain's grandchildren by him. How do you work around this?

Warning, wall of text ahoy!

Thanks for the responses everyone. I've done some checking and apparently the only alien races that directly refer to the Captain as male (based on searches of the dialogue comparison page) are the Melnorme, Pkunk, Spathi/Fwiffo/Safe Ones, Umgah and Zoq-Fot-Pik. They all throw in the occasional 'he/his/him', which I might be able to snip out of the voice acting if I'm lucky... though if I did a version with no voices it'd be much easier.

There are a few other phrases that will be trickier, like the Pkunk's fortune telling about you and Talana. If anyone spots some more I've missed, let me know!  :)

onpon4: Thanks, I've noticed that dialogue editor before but will have a closer look.

JudgeYohance: Good question about the sex scene with Talana. I think it would be a matter of changing the dialogue tree so that you can refuse sex with her without affecting the story. I would probably try to use the existing response: "Hey, hands off, I'm not THAT kind of Captain!" (I was actually expecting this to let you refuse in the existing game, but she carried on regardless... hasn't anybody told Talana that 'no' doesn't mean 'yes'?  ::) )

Grand Master, Wolframm et al: I do agree Syreen are at least currently bisexual (see the end of this post for reasons*). However, I'm not worried about whether Talana wants the player - I'm more concerned about whether the player is attracted to her or not. You might be a female player who would happily jump Talana given the chance, or you might find the whole idea squicky. Or you might be a gay male player. It's just a matter of allowing the player to choose.

Also, regarding the grandchildren aspect: I actually don't think this would be too hard to change. It's only revealed as a story for the grandchildren at the end. At the start, it's all direct address: "YOU must command the Precursor ship!" and so forth.

Currently there's no voice acting on the UQM ending slideshow, so all I'd have to do is a) delete the word "Grandpa" and b) edit the images so you can't clearly see Zelnick in the frame, possibly by zooming in. (You could maybe see a hand or a shoulder, but preferably you'd never see him/her at all.)

Even having Talana appear at the end might not be a problem, since as far as I can recall, the game never actually says you get married to her. You might just be good friends  :) The 'angel' scene might be tricky though...

*Re Syreen bisexuality: I expect they are, judging by the "we make out all right [with just us females]" line. And even if they aren't under normal circumstances, many Syreen probably formed lesbian relationships due to the sheer lack of males at the current time, as Wolframm says (similar to the homosexual behaviour that often occurs among segregated populations, e.g. in prisons).

I think you can. If I'm right, that isn't so much a problem as the set of dialog options upon meeting her. Only one of them makes sense for a heterosexual woman, and it'd be nice to have more applicable options.

You could swap Talana's scenes from the game with the falsified  bits from Zarla's "Secret theater"

But you still have to work around the games ending that the Captain was telling this story to his grandkids. Otherwise it is not a bad work around.

Hey, I've discovered the insert quote button! I feel intellectual.

(By the way, I don't need to put spoilers on any of this, do I? It'd be a bit tricky to talk about modding if so... Anyway, first-time players BEWARE!)


Oh, the list that includes the Touch-O-Vision line? You're right, I'd probably need to go through every Talana interaction to be sure. (Good grief, they cut or changed an awful lot of her dialogue in the 3DO version. Forget Organon -  I never even found a Deep Child on my first playthrough because I didn't know where Syra was. Did we ever get a reasonable explanation for all the cuts?) 


Actually I thought it would be only fair to let the player romance a) Talana b) Hayes c) ZEX or d) all of the above. And then one of them would show up in the 'angel' scene at the end. That would be a lot more complicated though, so I'm not worrying about it for now. Just a wistful dream ;D

Though I would definitely change Talana's ending pic so she's properly blue. That's always bothered me.


See my previous post - I'm fairly sure you'd only need to remove the word "grandpa" in the ending, and crop out Zelnick. They're still your grandkids, but you could be their grandmother instead. I don't think the game says they're descended from you + Talana. (Actually, if you snip out "grandpa" they could just as well be random colony kids.) Need to check the ending again though... and obviously the player can't use the 3DO movie.

Anyway (still thinking aloud) what worries me is the less obvious 'implied male player' stuff that Ctrl+F is no good at finding. Like the Umgah's frankly filthy joke about your 'mate'.  I would have spat out my coffee if I ever actually drank coffee. Still can't quite believe that line actually made it into the game.

You know i have honestly never seen the 3DO movie, only the original ending. I should fix that.

Why don' you go all the way? You need to poke aroudn every part of the comm's referencing to the captain as "he". And you need to put in a choice to let the captain pass up on Talana.

So add a choice, where you pick gender first. Then have he/his or she/hers as appropriate. For Brownie points, also allow for picking the gender of love interest. For straight women or gay men, replace Talana with Talan. Find someone to redo the graphics, and presto.

Alternatively, one could make use of the fact that there already is a male counterpart to Talana in the game: Hayes. A few extra dialogue options (possibly with Hayes taking the initiative with a female Zelnick), and there he is. Since no characters need to be replaced, only the initial "Is Zelnick male or female?" question is necessary. This also means you can have both if you're so inclined.  ;)

That thought occurred to me reading this discussion, but it's not feasible if one of the constraints is to leave the code untouched.

Although I enjoy the technical brainstorming and the story adjustment ideas around this gender idea, I can't help thinking : why ? Does a book author writes his story with unspecified gender narrator so that both male and female readers can identify to him/her ? Isn't one of the greatest perks of video games the fact that you can incarnate somebody radically different from you ?

In a sense, yes. But in another sense, being a character which you can identify with more closely allows you to immerse yourself in the game more. This is particularly true with games such as SC, where it's almost implied that you are the main character.

I think the problem is that the game mostly handles the player as an AFGNCAAP (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AFGNCAAP) (the intro and manual do give some sort of indication of age, but leave almost everything else undefined), then accidentally creates a Tomato Surprise (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TomatoSurprise) for some players by revealing the player character to be male.

Edit: Aaaaand Novus just said what I say at great length below... but better. Ahem.  :-[



Novus and Lukipela: Although it would be great to have lots of new options and choices, like having the aliens refer to you as 'she' instead of 'he', it would involve not only new art but also new voice acting, new coding, etc. As Quinarbre says, I'm trying to make the smallest possible changes (so I actually have half a chance of getting them done myself).

For instance, I did think about adding a "choose your sex" option at the start, but it's not really necessary. You'd then have to "choose your sexual orientation", and so on... I think it's easier just to let you accept or decline any NPC's advances as you see fit.

I do like the idea of being able to proposition Hayes though. Again, I think the simplest change would simply be an extra dialogue option, something as simple as "When all this is over, could you and me... you know... do an activity together?" Hayes could then respond with some existing line that means (approximately) "Sure thing, Captain!"  :) I'd prefer to allow an actual 'spend the night together' scene, probably just before you depart for the Sa-Matra and almost certain doom, but that would be more complicated to do.


I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to ask that.  ;)

Warning, long-winded rant ahead!

 I don't mind games that put you in the role of a specific character, like Link or Lara Croft or whoever. Meanwhile, other games let you create your own character, which means you can imagine yourself in the role, or invent somebody else - it's your choice.

But some insist on specifying a character when they'd probably be better off leaving it to the player's imagination. Take Half-Life. It's first-person and extremely immersive, there's no cutscenes, Gordon never speaks - I'm not sure if he even grunts in pain when he's hit - and you never even see him apart from box art as far as I know. So why did Valve insist that you play a male? They could just say "you're a physicist", adjust the NPC dialogue a little, and leave the rest to the player's imagination. Same goes for Portal, where you glimpse yourself briefly at the beginning and realise you're female, which has no relevance to the rest of that excellent game. Why?

On the other hand, in a FPS like Duke Nukem 3D, the whole point is that you're playing an over-the-top parody of a male 80s action hero. You see yourself in mirrors, you crack cheesy lines, you hang out with strippers and rescue 'babes'. That game wouldn't work too well if it allowed you to choose your sex. (Though I would very much like to see a genderflipped version in which the Duke's equally rough-and-tough sister rescues helpless kidnapped beefcake   ;D )

My point is that Star Control 2 thought it was Duke Nukem but has ended up as Half-Life. (Okay, that sounded weird.)

What I mean is, back when it was released, I'd say it was pretty common to assume computer gamers into science fiction were a) male b) kids c) nerdy. Hence the "boy genius who alone can operate the Precursor computer" referred to in the SC2 manual. I'm pretty sure the player was intended to identify with Zelnick and think "hey, yeah, I'm a smart guy, I could fly that thing and save the universe too". And a male character fits well with the Known Space stories that SC2 draws on for inspiration. It probably never occurred to Fred and Paul that new players wouldn't know what the Captain's sex was - and if they didn't, they'd just assume he was a guy.

The trouble is, the boy-genius backstory isn't referred to in the game itself (except for a brief mention of the Tobermoon, I think). Modern players probably won't have a PDF of the manual lying around the first time they play. I sure didn't. And here's the thing - I think the game is better off without all that stuff about Captain Burton's crinkly eyes and Farnsworth's bumbling. (I keep picturing the professor from Futurama...) By comparison, the slideshow intro is succinct and straightforward. Ur-Quan! Factory! Ship! You go Earth now! GAME START!

So for the modern player who's not a heterosexual male, UQM pulls a bait-and-switch. It begins by saying "YOU are the hero!" You think "Oh, so I can imagine myself as whoever I want". It's only when Spathi and Zoq-Fot-Pik occasionally start referring to you as "he", and Talana glomps you, and the ending slideshow plays, that you realise "Oh fishsticks, I'm really a man."  :-\ That sort of thing can break the sense of immersion.

...(In Utwig voice) Are you still listening???  :D

Honestly, it's not a big deal (despite the above rant). I love the game to bits. It's just one of those little nagging things that actually might be fixable by someone as unskilled as me.

Of course, in the next Star Control game, I hope Fred and Paul will either let you choose your sex, or make it clear from the start that you're playing an established character.

Anyway, thanks for all the thoughts so far. I appreciate it, I really do.  ;)

Say... did the original PC version supply a default name for the captain or ship? As I recall you were prompted to enter them with no suggestions. We often had trouble deciding on something so simultaneously momentous and trivial, and I don't think we would have wasted so much time on it if there were defaults.

Nope. The 3DO version added these because entering a name without a keyboard was too much work to expect every player to do. Ironically, I'm typing this on an HTC Desire. :)